Finally tackled this song! Not as easy as it looks! And it doesn’t look that easy! One of those songs that feels meaningful but isn’t really something I personally relate to, except that I’m in the Blue Ridge Mountains often enough, and there’s a dog mentioned, and that’s all it takes to set me off with a song in my head, really.
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Did the camera video + microphone audio again, but then added more guitar and vocal tracks on top of it, plus the first use of the MIDI keyboard in weeks for the bass, other keyboard noises that are probably supposed to be mandolins or whatever, and some other bits. Dropping the drum loop(s) out of the quiet parts in the edit is my favorite thing to do.
This song is one of maybe forty or fifty Fleet Foxes tunes that are completely unidentifiable by their titles, so I just start paging through their songs on the guitar chords sites until I find something I want to play. The next real step is to start googling things like “fleet foxes weird tuning” and the song title, but I didn’t go there this time, just slapping a capo on the 7th fret as instructed, and it’s pretty as heck, a flat out lullaby, so I hope you like it.
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Not on the bear deck, but on a super resonant patio with tile floors and (fake?) stone walls.
Definitely my best Fleet Foxes take so far, I think. This song popped into my head this morning and I stuck with it. All the usual confusion about how to sing and record harmonies applies. Had to check if the chords/fingering on this one was really as easy as it seemed (and I still didn’t get it perfect, but it’s alright), but there was no special weird tuning for this.
The first Fleet Foxes album is a reminder that I really don’t remember where I heard the first Fleet Foxes album, or why I bought it, but I do remember that I first really played it for the family on our first drive to the Outer Banks in 2012, and I’m particularly reminded of one of the stretches of road near the Virginia-North Carolina border that kinda overflows with expectation, because it feels like you’re getting there even though there are still hours of drive to go, especially if it’s a Saturday and you’re going all the way to Corolla, like we did the first year.
Family road trip next weekend, so I guess I’m bringing the guitar?
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.
Broke this streak when I turned in my homework late last night:
If I had been smarter, I would’ve posted a placeholder and then filled in the video a little later, but it was… a busy night.
Keeping it simple and quiet tonight, ready to rest, choosing to sing this song about just trying to honor your idols and mentors and feeling like you’re failing all along the way (while sounding fragile and exhausted, perhaps), but the second vocal saved it.
Apparently this is only the second Fleet Foxes song I’ve completed during this project, which feels low, but I have plenty of aspirations. This album was (somewhat hilariously, according to Spotify) pretty much the only thing I listened to between the moment it dropped last September and the inauguration in January. Because of that, some of the words and songs leave me a little scarred now, like how If You Need To Keep Time On Me, all the way at the other end of the term, for me is a piece of punctuation in a long drive to DC for an event, where I was stuck for what seemed like an hour making the turn from the GW Parkway onto the Key Bridge.
Riveting traffic content. [Ooooh! Adding a Traffic song to the list.]
I’ve already mentioned Fleet Foxes here. I’ll probably do more than one song, but this was a good challenge for a Saturday afternoon. I do not have Robin Pecknold’s range, and layering on more voices singing it wrong doesn’t help.
This particular song doesn’t have a particular special meaning for me — not nearly as much as, say, Helplessness Blues, or even Blue Ridge Mountains, so we might have to get to those another day. But I do love the chords and parts of this one, even if I kinda muddle the ending. (And I don’t even attempt the other two minutes of the instrumental after the lyrics wind down.)
Aside from the obvious backup singing, there’s a little electric guitar track, and then software electric piano and flute to add some more low and high bits.
