AFTER THE GOLDRUSH
AS a child, growing up in his native Seattle, Robin Pecknold suffered from debilitating allergies. “By the time I was 14, I couldn’t go outside for three years,” he says. “There were spring and summer allergies. I could still go out in winter and fall, but it’s like I couldn’t even have a window open the rest of the time. So I spent a lot of time indoors and read fantasy books, like The Lord Of The Rings.”
Gazing through the windows on the world in its fertile, vibrant glory, he began creating his own mental analogue for it, fed by his own imagination. “It’s the idea of something unreachable, and you amplify it,” he agrees. “So I was writing stories, and songs, just making up worlds.”
In 2020, Robin Pecknold found himself forcibly housebound once again. While locked down in his Greenwich Village apartment, he “watched what was going on, just being anxious, worried and confused. I ended up having three months to reflect and notice the world changing and be horrified – and then encouraged by so much social awareness and class consciousness.”
But Pecknold had other pressing business to attend to. Since September 2018, he’d been working on a new Fleet Foxes studio album, but now he was stuck. Initially, he had envisaged a typically ambitious project – nothing less than a celebration of life in the face of death – but progress had become blocked by lockdown and Pecknold’s own artistic tussles.
“I had a half-finished record that had no lyrics and no vocals and a lot of instruments recorded,” he says. “It was beginning to feel like an albatross. I didn’t want to finish it this year, then wait until next year to put it out. But I don’t want to abandon it.”
In June, as New Yorkers took their first cautious steps back to normality, he found release. “I just couldn’t take it any more and started going on 12-hour drives,” he says. Setting off from Greenwich Village, he drove his Toyota 4Runner in six-hour loops, heading through Upstate New York: up to Lake Minnewaksa, over the Shawangunk Ridge and into the Catskills. Lacking “any kind of lyrical perspective” prior to the beginning of lockdown in March, these journeys not only reconnected him with the
