Helplessness Blues, by Fleet Foxes.
Playing catch-up here with the Fleet Foxes songs, ever since I realized they were only on like 2 and Wilco was at 4 or 5.
This is another one where I remember where I was — if not the first time I heard this song, definitely one of the first times I had this album in my ears after it came out was sitting at my desk at the job I was working in 2011 — actually, it’s the desk I was sitting at when the East Coast earthquake happened, which was only a couple months later.
Anyway, this is always one I feel deep down inside, always facing that tensions between being raised up believing I was special and bound for some sort of solo success, and as I mature(d) finding fulfillment in being a cog, working head down in service of some sort of progress.
But also, it does a good job of relaying the omnipresent threat/wish/dream to throw it all away and get ourselves a farm.
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I thought this would be a longer weekend project, but instead tried to exercise some minor degree of self-control and not layer on six more tracks until it turns to mud like that Cumberland Blues the other night (yeesh).
So it’s in a weird D6 tuning or something — the chords on the internet are wrong, but there are almost-right versions, and somehow a video that is righter, but still wrong. I didn’t go looking on Robin Pecknold’s Instagram or videos for the right answer yet, but there probably is one, and it’s not playing the D#maj7 the way I was playing it.
Added the electric and discovered my 7-year-old fancy cable is more busted than my 25+-year-old cheap cable, which should not surprise me, but still. One more vocal, then doubled it for the last bits with a little transposing for something resembling harmony.
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