FLEET FOXES’ FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN
Words: Louisa Wright
What would you do in Paris? Climb the Eiffel Tower? Visit the Louvre? Eat croissants? Wear A beret? Man, that’s so cliché! Why don’t you try something a little different, take a leaf out of Fleet Foxes’ Casey Wescott book and do nothing. It’s all the rage these days. So if you’re planning a little European adventure in the coming months and find yourself stuck for things to do, give us a call (please note we’re currently in the process of obtaining a new direct line for said chats, so… yeah, be patient and stuff). But seriously, here at SPOOK we love a good ol’ chat, especially if it’s about something as exciting as Fleet Foxes’ latest album. But we’re not just about the music, we like to talk about a whole range of things. Anything from Seattle’s lack of sunshine to meditation methods, and of course the upcoming Falls Festival sneaks in there.
SPOOK: Hi Casey
Casey: Hey, how’s it going?
SPOOK: I’m good thank-you, how are you?
Casey: I’m doing great, just doing fantastic. I’m just trying to get as much sleep as I can in my downtime between shows and yeah, just doing good.
SPOOK: You’re in Paris at the moment. What are you doing over there?
Casey: Eating Coq au Vin, walking around, drinking coffee and wine and sitting, and doing nothing. Honestly, just kind of absolutely nothing, which is a bit bizarre because generally, like when I talk to my family or somebody, they’ll say “Where are you now?” And I’ll say “Oh, I’m in Sienna,” or, “I’m in Paris,” or something and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, you’re in Rome you have to see the Vatican,” or you have to see this or that, and for me that is the last thing I want to do, to look at a building or look at a painting in a museum. For some reason none of those things cross my mind even though in Seattle or when I’m at home you don’t have the opportunities for that sort of thing, so maybe I just don’t know how to make the most of my life. But for some reason I like being still, because stillness is precious to me when you’re touring.
SPOOK: You’re heading to Australia for Falls Festival?
Casey: Yeah, I’m really excited. I’m going to go back home to Seattle and celebrate Kwanzaa and Christmas and Hanukah, you know, when I go home for a week and a half or so and then we’re all going to play some shows in Australia and New Zealand and Japan and I’m really excited to go back. It’s great down there.
SPOOK: You played Falls a few years ago. What was it that made you want to come back?
Casey: Yeah, well that was a great experience. For me there’s an element you see, in Seattle you read about sunlight but you’ve never experienced it in the wild, it’s just this theoretical construct and so when you actually go and it’s rainy or hopefully snowy, but it probably won’t even snow because of global warming or whatever the hell, but it’s like you take a plane and it’s rainy and then you go out and it’s just so hot and there’s sunshine and you’re getting Vitamin D from all the sunlight and your body’s reacting to it and the thing is that Seattleites, we take it for granted. Josh the drummer lives in Los Angeles and I went down to visit him, literally I got so fed up with the rain that I just decided to take a road trip to visit Josh. This was like last summer and I helped him record on his record and things but I could not imagine what it’s like having sun every day down there. I mean, you have a reason to get up in the morning, there’s something that pulls you out of bed and I’m attracted to that. Mainly because it’s just so foreign to me and sometimes it makes me sad because I wonder what my life would have been like. Maybe if I’d grown up in sunlight I’d be much more likely to go to museums when I’m in Rome or look at architecture when I’m in France or different things like that, but maybe it’s just my rainy day identity that makes me like doing absolutely nothing.
SPOOK: You should move to Australia. It’s sunny all the time. Kinda. Sometimes.
Casey: That’s what I read.
SPOOK: Did you feel pressured when making Helplessness Blues after the success of your debut album?
Casey: Well, to put it in a different way, the pressure that we felt making the first record was enormous. The amount of psychological pressure that we put upon ourselves was extremely arguably healthy, arguably not. At the time all of us, even when we were making the first record, we had day jobs, some of us were living with our parents, and we all had that sort of stuff. But regardless of that the desire to make something musically satisfying for us and to make a record, an album, and to make an album that satisfied all of the criteria that we had took a long time, and in fact it took the same amount of time as Helplessness Blues took, and so, to be honest, that critical pressure element is just inherent in what we do, independent of success, and so when all the dust has settled and we’re playing open mikes in karaoke houses in a couple of years it’s going to be the same sort of pressure that we put on ourselves. So success isn’t a parameter that’s factored in other than it helps provide more resources to execute some of our ideas, but the same neuroses and paranoia, and all that stuff, we’ve been paranoid and neurotic since we started playing in 2005/2006, so that’s just kind of how we roll.
SPOOK: How does the sound on Helplessness Blues differ from the first album?
Casey: The sound? God, I couldn’t tell you. But I can tell you that I am very different as a person from when I made the first record and when I made the second record and I think the other guys are too. Although I don’t even know how I’ve changed since then necessarily but I do know that I feel somewhat different. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. But sonically, the reason why our record sounds different from other records is really incidental to a lot of banal details, like where did you record it? What type of guitar strings are you using? Do you have a proficient technician to work on your amplifier? What piano are you playing? And stuff like that. And all those things have an effect on the sound of the record but as far as the choices going into the record, all of that is sort of on a subconscious level when you’re making a record. I actually assumed that going in, I didn’t need to worry about needing to sound different or even reactionary to the first record because I knew that we were all different individuals from then and had different things that we were interested in musically and such and such. And so I think for us the guiding principle was just to not have any guiding principles, and when you make a record it’s such a long process, kind of arduous, you know what you’re getting into and you know the scope of it and you can kind of rely on the process itself to identify the course that it should go in as opposed to like, “Because I have a strong sense of self identity I’m going to make dramatic aesthetic changes in my life and make a record very differently.” I don’t even know that I could make a record like that. Maybe it’s just because I don’t know myself well enough. That’s my garbled response to your very simple question (laughs).
SPOOK: The album uses some crazy instruments. What were the influences for the album?
Casey: You know, honestly, it’s interesting. It’s weird because a lot of times Robin would send me a song and I’d just meditate it. And whenever you get a song, whenever Robin gives me a song, there’s this sort of process of like, “Oh shit, I’m a fucking failure, I’m going to fucking ruin this song with anything that I fucking do. Maybe my contribution is to not contribute to this song because I’ll fuck it up.” But you know, after a while you just spend so much time thinking about it and then you finally start putting yourself to work on it and then you try a ton of things that don’t work and a lot of times I would just kind of meditate. What things strike me about this particular section or this bit of the song? Whether it’s the musical structures or different things and then I would try to find instruments that would work best for that song. For instance there’s this one song ‘Try an Argument’ that had this melody that I wanted to re-contextualise, and it’s a nice beautiful melody but I wanted to take out some of that beauty and add some strangeness and there’s this Hawaiian instrument called the tremolo, which is kind of like a zipper 344 instrument that’s like a slide guitar and I would just try different melodies on different instruments.
SPOOK: What’s coming up for Fleet Foxes in the new year?
Casey: Nothing is written. Nothing. I have no idea, I mean, it’s tough to say what the future holds. You never know, it’s uncertain. To be honest, I don’t like to talk about that stuff specifically when we’re still on tour and stuff like that, it’s always a difficult thing to talk about. None of us like those sorts of details anyway, we’d rather talk about what your favourite juice is or I don’t know, more mundane questions I guess. Yeah, it’s tough to say, I mean I’d like to make another record but who knows when that’ll happen, I mean there might be a new president by that time or the world might end before we make a new record, I mean it’s 2012, a lot of crazy stuff’s happening, global warming as I was saying, you know, so another financial crisis could send us back into the dark ages, who knows. But yeah, nothing’s written with us.
Fleet Foxes – December / January 2011 tour
Friday 6th January – Palais, Melbourne – SOLD OUT
Tuesday 10th January – Tivoli, Brisbane – NEW SHOW!
Wednesday 11th January – Tivoli, Brisbane – SOLD OUT
Also appearing at:
Falls Festival Victoria: 28 Dec – 1 Jan – www.fallsfestival.com
Falls Festival Tasmania: 29 Dec – 1 Jan – www.fallsfestival.com
Sydney Opera House: 2 – 3 January – www.sydneyoperahouse.com
Southbound: 7 – 8 Jan – www.southboundfestival.com.au
Helplessness Blues is out now through Inertia / Sub Pop
