Fleet Foxes announced the release of their newest album Shore on September 21st, just one day before it was released. Recorded across different cities, states, and countries, the record is the final product of demos teased as far back as 2018, alongside some pandemic-inspired songwriting by producer and lead Robin Pecknold.
By luck, a recording session in France brought the band together with vocalist Uwade Akhere, who makes her presence felt with appearances on “Can I Believe You” and two other tracks on the album.
“She was able to join us there because she was studying at Oxford at the time,” says Pecknold. “That was the big great thing that happened in France.”
Shifting to Los Angeles, Pecknold spent a couple months in Woody Jackson’s Electro-Vox Studio, playing on equipment that was once used by legends like Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys.
“This was a bucket list album for me in a lot of ways, because it was all these studios I’d wanted to work at, all these musicians that I’d always wanted to collaborate with,” says Pecknold. “And so I was just going for it in a way, where I was like, ‘Who knows what the future holds, let me just go for it this time and not hold anything back.’”
When COVID-19 came to the US in March, Pecknold returned to Manhattan to quarantine. Still without any lyrics written for the album, he found lockdown to be surprisingly beneficial for his approach.
“It was this three-month forced reflection period, and I came to understand that I didn’t really have lyrics because the mindset I was in, of just trying to keep up,” says Pecknold. “I could make music and write melodies but you’re not doing a lot of reflecting. I wasn’t really thinking about anything, I was just doing.”
Their first release on Anti-Records, Fleet Foxes’ Shore is out now. Hear the full conversation and Home Studio Session above.
