Fleet Foxes
LABEL: Sub Pop  |||  PHOTO: David Belisle

Founding members Robin Pecknold & Skye Skjelset grew up listening to the music of their parents. Robin notes, “The Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, The Zombies, Joni Mitchell, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Love, Marvin Gaye, Bach, Crosby Stills & Nash, Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, and every other perennial ”˜60s band you’d expect to find in the record collections of baby boomers.” (One of us is named after a Steely Dan record, for Christ’s sake”¦)

In 2006, Robin & Skye began producing basement-born tunes live as Fleet Foxes. They created new songs, scrapped the old, then created more and scrapped them too, eventually finding a few that fit just about right, along with some new friends who emerged from Seattle’s musical woodwork: keyboardist Casey Wescott (Seldom), drummer Joshua Tillman, and bassist Christian Wargo (Crystal Skulls). From the Fox den, with the help of credit cards, minimum wages, tip money, friends and family, they worked, crafting their first demo, the Sun Giant EP and their debut full-length, self-titled album, with family friend (and Pecknold childhood hero) Phil Ek manning the rudder.

Robin summarizes their music: “We aim to be adventurous and true to ourselves and to enjoy our time together—the music we make is a reflection of our instincts. To me, the most enjoyable thing in the world is to sing harmony with people, so we do that a bunch. We love acoustic guitars, electric guitars, big rolling tom drums, mandolins, dulcimers, bass guitars, bass pedals, organs, pianos, kotos, and most of all harmony and melody. We’ve succeeded for ourselves if we’ve made a song where every instrument is doing something interesting and melodic. We try to draw from the traditions of folk music, pop, choral music and gospel, baroque psychedelic, sacred harp singing, West Coast music, traditional music from Ireland to Japan, and film scores, and are inspired by the music of our friends and contemporaries in the Seattle music family.”

[read longer bio here]


WEB LINKS
Fleet Foxes on Myspace
Fleet Foxes on Flickr
Fleet Foxes on Youtube
Robin Pecknold on Twitter