Fleet Foxes – “Helplessness Blues”

When it comes to pastoral indie-folk, it sometimes feels like the genre has overplayed its hand.  Acoustic guitars, lumberjack cologne — we get it, alright?  Everyone wants to be the next Simon & Garfunkel, and by 2019, we’re a little bit leery every time a group of neckbeards comes stumbling out of the woods.  But not only are Fleet Foxes the exception to that rule, they’re also arguably the band that set the standard for folk music during the 2010’s.  Strictly from an aesthetic standpoint, no other group has as successfully captured that rich, earthy, rural vibe.  In other words, this is the art that all those other bands aspire for.

Fleet Foxes’ discography has been the model of consistency (three LP’s spaced out over nine years, each one critically acclaimed), so selecting a definitive standout track is a difficult undertaking.  2017’s Crack-Up flourished thanks to increased piano/classical elements, and a three-part epic like “Third of May / Ōdaigahara” would have been just as fitting here.  However, the simple beauty of “Helplessness Blues” represents this band better.  To most fans, their 2011 offering Helplessness Blues was the band in peak form, with the title track serving as its heartfelt mantra.  The song exists as little more than a surging wave of acoustic guitars, accompanied by frontman Robin Pecknold’s thoughtful ruminations which are sung with the urgency of a man who can’t see what’s waiting for him around the corner: “And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me / But I don’t, I don’t know what that will be…I’ll get back to you someday soon, you will see.”

It’d later come to surface (around the time of Crack-Up) that Pecknold was suffering from severe social anxiety, unsure of what to do with himself or the success of the band.  In hindsight it’s clearer (“If I know only one thing, it’s that everything that I see, of the world outside is so inconceivable often I barely can speak“), but for the better part of the six years between Helplessness Blues and its 2017 successor, Pecknold felt compelled to put the band on hold and enroll in twentieth century art and literature at Columbia University. By diving back into academia, he effectively removed himself from the source of his anxiety, allowing him to re-assess his own goals in life and eventually come back with a fresh perspective and newfound artistic vision.

What makes “Helplessness Blues” such a special track is that it captures that moment of conflict; that very real struggle that so many young adults are faced with coming out of high school or college.  The weight of your entire future stares you down, and it can be very easy to feel like you have to have everything figured out, immediately.  “Helplessness Blues” offers reassurance and guidance, suggesting that you take a deep breath and think about all of your options.  It’s fine not to know all of the answers, and it’s perfectly acceptable to say I’ll get back to you soon as you retreat for a while.  After all, it worked out quite well for Pecknold.

Has an identity crisis ever been so eloquently expressed, or so logically dealt with?

Read more from this decade at my homepage for Sowing’s Songs of the Decade.

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