Crazy Like A Fox

Whatever happened to ROBIN PECKNOLD and FLEET FOXES? In Seattle, Uncut’s Stephen Deusner gatecrashes the band’s first rehearsal in five years, and gets the exclusive story on the making of their astonishing comeback album, Crack-Up: a tale of university, F Scott Fitzgerald, surfing, Zen retreats and “mental nightmares” in the studio. “There are times on the record,” admits Skyler Skjelset, “when you can hear Robin losing it…”

- Stephen Deusner

I’m all that I need,” Robin Pecknold sings, low and hushed, gently picking the first few guitar notes from the first song on Fleet Foxes’ first record in six years. Even in this grey Seattle practice room – windowless and anonymous, chock-a-block with music instruments, criss-crossed with cords, littered with empty salmon jerky packets – the moment is starkly and powerfully intimate, full of weight and portent. The five other musicians in the room become in very quiet, awaiting the beat when they all join in the song together. And then Pecknold is flattened by a train.

More accurately, by a sample of a train, which chugs along in the background of “I Am All That I Need”/“Arroyo Seco”/“Thumbprint Scar”, the six-and-a-half-minute suite that kicks off the majestic Crack-Up. The album may be the most-anticipated release of the year, a welcome return of the band who snuck West Coast folk-rock back into the mainstream and became one of the biggest indie-rock acts of the late 2000s. But today, nearly three months before the public will hear the new songs Pecknold has been working on for years, Fleet Foxes are simply trying to catch a train. Loud, industrial, and violently intrusive, it’s a gremlin in the works.