Fleet Foxes And The Winter Hymnal Of My Discontent

Nearly a dozen Fleet Foxes songs specifically reference nature in the title. There’s “Sun Giant” and “Sun It Rises” up front and three about mountains; there’s travelogue (“English House,” “Mykonos”) and water (“Drops in the River,” “Grown Ocean”) and woodland traipsing (“Meadowlarks,” “The Plains/Bitter Dancer”), but only one wades into the frigid white of the snow season. I first heard “White Winter Hymnal,” forever correctly shortlisted as the best Fleet Foxes song, stuck in a familiar scene. You know it if you’ve been there: the gross fluorescent dorm lights that refract pale green walls and make a narrow hallway look like a hospital wing. And in January 2010, Devereux Hall might as well have been one for me. I was a patient.

Most nights, if I wasn’t up watching Conan’s fuck-NBC sendoff, I was stuck in my bed trying to catch my breath. They weren’t panic attacks per se, but they were close. I hid them from my roommate as best I could, which is a very dumb thing in retrospect (he was a long-haired almost-Buddhist who has since hiked all 2,659 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail), but then, I was trapped inside my own tunnel vision. Anxiety is a spiral. Say what you will about Lena Dunham (really, say something insightful to her—she needs it), but the Girls episodes where Hannah’s OCD re-manifests itself correctly and empathetically reveal the arc anxiety can take. It’s an intermittent spray of worry, terrifying and unpredictable. I’d live an entire day in a normal routine, then my mind would fixate on one thing I did or said earlier in the day and keep me up, which left me feeling drained by the morning. The cycle repeated.

The most trivial details were shattering. Snow made me anxious, and so did some sunny days. But nothing was more panic-inducing than peering up at a black winter sky, devoid of all shapes and structures, and feeling meaningless. I’d freak out in class thinking about how, because I’ve never been able to swallow pills, I’d surely die of an otherwise treatable illness, but I was too scared to get up and leave the room. I’d just sit there, paralyzed like a surgery patient whose anesthesia didn’t take. At a friendly group dinner on campus, I twice faked a phone call just to get up and walk around because sitting still was interminable. Riding in any car was claustrophobic, even a mile east to Walmart for late-night Ben & Jerry’s. Studying in the library was OK because I’d lose myself in a book, but trying to quiet my mind for sleep afterward was usually a bust. That’s exactly when “White Winter Hymnal” helped.

I was too young and out of touch with “indie” music in 2008 when the band’s debut EP and LP—c0-named Pitchfork’s Album(s) of the Year—dropped. But in early 2010, a friend came back from winter break with their entire discography on a flash drive (including the ’06 self-titled EP that sounds more Shins than Crosby, Stills & Nash) and dumped it onto my computer like he was benevolently spilling a cup of gold in my palms. And what riches! The multipart harmonies and plucked strings and wraithlike distance of “White Winter Hymnal” accessed a deep musical foundation in me that already had a rose-gold nostalgia attached. (I first got acquainted with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and the ’70s folk thing driving around New York State with my dad, looking at colleges in 2007.) So I melted the gold and mainlined it. Repeatedly. Through shitty, tinny laptop speakers until the aforementioned roommate begged me wildly to give it a rest. But I couldn’t. I heard in “Drops in the River,” which sounds sonically like The Doors’ “The End,” the complete opposite of Jim Morrison’s post-hippie fatalism. I heard the musical manifestation of the Romantic poetry I read for class: Shelley’s skylarks and Keats’ odes and Byron’s winding trees and mountains. It all fit together, reading “Mont Blanc” with “Blue Ridge Mountains” creeping through my sickly dormitory as I gaped.

I looked back up at the night sky, which revealed lunar halos and tiny snow specks and glimmering stars, and wasn’t as afraid. I ambled down to the river at the edge of campus, “He Doesn’t Know Why” in my headphones, and walked the perimeter to slink out along a long branch and peer out at the stillness. I celebrated my campus at night, awash in orange lamplight, and during the day as it stood proud under a giant sun, golden and fair in the sky. I stopped being so goddamn ominous all the time. An odd sense of insignificance filled me, and for the first time, it didn’t freak me out. Jerry Seinfeld has said he kept space photos in the writing room of his show to evoke the same feeling. “I don’t find being insignificant depressing,” he told Judd Apatow a few years ago. “I find it uplifting.” I felt the same. How could I be afraid of all this cosmic shit when it really didn’t matter if I was or not? The river flows regardless of who fears it (or who tries to alter it). The snow still falls and occasionally piles up and makes it hard to traverse the slanted paths to class all irrespective of me. It’s extremely liberating.

The irony of all this, of course, is that “White Winter Hymnal” is dark as hell. Hidden in plain sight under the soaring harmonies and canyon-thundering percussion is a nonsensically violent scene of near-decapitation and someone named Michael bleeding out in the snow. He might be a little kid who fell and bumped his head or something much darker. We don’t know! It’s like the Bruegel the Elder artwork that graces the album’s cover, a wide-shot pastoral vista made up of tiny chaos. “I like that you can’t really take it for what it is,” band leader Robin Pecknold said of the cover at the time, “that your first impression of it is wrong.” The same is true for the song, whose official music video has 25 million fewer YouTube views than a Pentatonix cover, performed, of course, under some large deciduous trees. First impressions can be so wrong.

In no way do I want to posit that listening to Fleet Foxes somehow cured my anxiety. There is no “cure” for anxiety, though there are many successful and effective treatments, and I will admit that my occurrences of it have been rarely if ever debilitating. A reported 18 percent of the population endures anxiety, and everyone faces it and copes with it differently, some to hopeless and violent ends. I was luckier than that. I also attended a college that provided free counseling services, which I utilized around that time and which encouraged me to stay open to new experiences and ways of thinking, not just about fear, but about myself. I began writing poetry every day as a way to access and document (and in a way, elevate) what I felt. Most of it is, I can now admit, awful—wannabe Keats codswallop about the times the girl I liked left the bar before we could talk—but hey, it helped. And hearing the whoa-ohs that burst open “Ragged Wood” helped too, in ways I’ll never fully understand.

Of course, seven years later, my anxiety still emerges. Too much coffee and a stressful day at work gets me a restless mess, and the wrong hangover renders me unable to speak or face a friend. Showers often randomly become torturous life-or-death affairs. A crowded subway train, too, sends hot knives of worry into my chest. But I can listen to pretty much any pre-Helplessness Blues Fleet Foxes song and still feel that initial January awe, that sensation of waking up in the snowy woods and not being immediately afraid but ecstatic. I treasure it.

If the early Fleet Foxes stuff is wintry and springy, the Helplessness Blues album is, for me, pure summer. It’s cruising craggy I-86 along New York State’s southern tier, pounding my steering wheel along to the gypsy rhythm of “Sim Sala Bim,” getting wistful to “Grown Ocean” and finally seeing the damn band on a cool September night in Cleveland, where they skronked out a 10-minute “The Shrine/An Argument” and revealed that it’s sometimes about more than quaint winter hymnals and bucolic terrain. Helplessness Blues announced Fleet Foxes as a songwriting project, not some merry band of beards plucking their lutes in a Seattle forest. And that songwriter was Robin Pecknold, a prodigious talent with a golden voice and real worries about heartbreak and getting older and finding his place. The druid mysticism evaporated, suddenly leaving a relatable 25-year-old in out in front on the stage.

Helplessness Blues is, upon first listen, jarring because of how central Robin’s experience is, referencing his parents specifically and Carl Sagan obliquely and having a few solo acoustic moments in the spotlight. “Someone You’d Admire” and “Blue Spotted Tail” are simply not songs we’d have expected on a Fleet Foxes album, and that made them important. It made sense to learn he penned some of them on the road alone opening for Joanna Newsom abroad. The existence of a breakup song that references “trash on the sidewalk” seemed more cosmopolitan than what I’d associated Fleet Foxes, as an entity, with. That entity would lose a key member in 2012: Josh Tillman, who spread his wings equally wide shortly after, then even wider three years later. Robin popped up on Late Night in 2013 to sing a Pearl Jam song with a guy from Grizzly Bear (random but great) and announced he’d enrolled at Columbia University. And then…nothing, save for some sporadic teases of new music on Instagram.

Which brings me to the matter of a new Fleet Foxes record, a matter that seems imminent as we inch into 2017. I’m excited! Especially since the earlier they release it—“it” theoretically being an album called Ylajali—the sooner I can juxtapose where I was seven years ago with where I am now using their music as the metric. For a time, I really thought there would never be another Fleet Foxes record, and I’d mostly made my peace with that. It should be noted that I thought the same about Bon Iver, and look what happened this year. But my main worry about potential new Fleet Foxes material comes from my reaction to that Bon Iver album: I didn’t love it, I don’t listen to it often, and I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how to love through a pure lens of earnestness and discovery. Of course, there’s no such thing as a “pure lens.” In 2010 and 2011, I was just a young kid who couldn’t see much beyond my own experience. I still can’t, really, which actually makes me feel good about this new material—warbly and potentially foghorn-heavy and devoid of “banjo and mando” as it might very well be. We’re all chasing our own shit. Robin’s chasing his “’06 wide eyed nonchalance” at Electric Lady Studios. I’m chasing my ’10 reverie.

At this point, one new fully complete Fleet Foxes song could blow me open. The teases are like watching Frank Ocean tend to his black-and-white woodworking—all pleasant distractions that make me beg for a finished puzzle. (Blonde ended up a messy masterpiece, after all, and “White Ferrari” is unparalleled.) Robin Pecknold is not Frank Ocean. I’ve never met Frank Ocean, but I met Robin at a Kevin Morby show at the Bowery Ballroom in 2015, and he was exceptionally warm and gregarious. If he releases a solo album along with a new Fleet Foxes record as he’s suggested, I may have to start going to church again.

“Come down from the mountain, you have been gone too long,” he sings after the whoa-ohs recede on “Ragged Wood.” I’ve been thinking about that lately, about my snow-blanketed campus and about the pallor of my old dorm and the people who lived there whom I don’t know anymore, whom I used to listen to Fleet Foxes with on dorm carpets and in winterized Chevrolets. Winter can feel so long. But on its brightest blue sunlit days, it’s like a revelation.