The Seattle-based Indie-folk band Fleet Foxes first roared out the gate in 2008 with their self-titled debut—largely on the back of “White Winter Hymnal,” the rare 21st century song to become a genuinely new Christmas holiday standard, one that has already been covered far and wide by the likes of Penatonix, Kim Wilde, and Phish (even if, like “Jingle Bells,” the track contains zero actual references to Christmas). The album’s release was especially well-timed, because it came out right on the cusp of the vinyl record renaissance, which their whole Neil-Young-meets-The-Beach-Boys vibe seemed custom built for. Indeed, the album’s entire feel-good sound was of the moment: It was the late-2000s, the George W. Bush years were finally ending, our first black president was barn-storming to victory, and Indie-rockers were ready to start cheering up again.
Fleet Foxes followed up their debut with the equally popular (if not quite equally acclaimed) Helplessness Blues in 2011, right at the height of the Lumberjack-aesthetic in hipsterdom, and the mainstreaming of similar throw-back bands like Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers. Fleet Foxes once again seemed a band custom built for the moment, and well positioned to keep growing in popularity themselves.
But then they quietly disappeared entirely. No new LPs, EPs, live recordings, bootlegs, or even one-off singles appeared for over a half-decade. They didn’t tour or perform live for years. Band leader Robin Pecknold ran off to get an English degree at Columbia. Their drummer quit and promptly reinvented himself as Father John Misty, releasing three much more caustic records before Fleet Foxes were ever heard from again. When the band finally dropped their third album Crack Up in the Summer of 2017, the larger landscape—politically, pop culturally, environmentally, even spiritually—had shifted radically in the intervening six years.
Yet so, intriguingly, had Fleet Foxes.
Rather than reproduce the warm melodies, simple guitar arrangements, and lush harmonies of their first two LPs, Crack Up featured abrupt key signature shifts, unresolved chord progressions, multiple movements per song, heavy studio effects, and cryptic lyrics. (As one reviewer noted, when Pecknold sings “I Should See Memphis” on the second-to-last track, it’s unclear if he means the one in Tennessee or ancient Egypt.) They had hinted at this new direction on “The Shrine/The Argument” from Helplessness Blues, but now committed to it whole-hog on Crack Up. If Fleet Foxes’ first album was closer in feel to “California Girls”-era Beach Boys, Crack Up was very much their SMiLE. This was discordant music for discordant times. They were once again a band custom built for the moment.
A possible reason for why Fleet Foxes had disappeared for a half-decade is indicated by the album title itself: Crack Up. It is a direct allusion to the F. Scott Fitzgerald essay of the same name, first published in Esquire magazine in 1935, only 5 years before Fitzgerald’s own premature death at 44 (I guess Pecknold’s English degree came in handy after all). It was an era when Fitzgerald believed his literary career was in irreversible decline, when The Great Gatsby was merely an obscure old commercial failure he had once written, when he felt himself “only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent,” and when he—despite knowing full well how unhealthy it was—felt an irrepressible urge to isolate himself from everyone around him. He had cracked up under the pressures of even modest celebrity, and was frustrated by his inability to fully realize his youthful potential. It wasn’t hard to conclude that Robin Pecknold had suffered a similar crack up after Helplessness Blues, and for all the same reasons (when that sample of a high school choir singing “White Winter Hymnal” appears at the end of “I Am All That I Need/Arroyo Seco/Thumprint Scar”, it reads less like sarcasm than as the band brooding over how much of their youthful promise had been lost).
Fitzgerald’s essay is perhaps most famous for the line: “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Less well known is the sentence that immediately follows it: “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” That is, the two specific opposing ideas that Fitzgerald is trying to hold in his mind at the same time are: 1) things are hopeless, and 2) we must still strive to make things better. (James Baldwin, incidentally, arrived at a similar conclusion in his most famous essay, 1955’s Notes of a Native Son.) One can easily imagine how Pecknold, in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, felt similarly.
Yet this is not a political album—at least, not overtly. Yes, the political is always personal and the personal is always political; and yes, the album’s own liner notes mention that track 6, “If You Need To, Keep Time on Me,” was recorded on January 20, 2017 (“How could it all fall in one day?” he sings); but just as Fitzgerald is largely addressing not the global Great Depression in 1935 but only his personal one, so is Pecknold singing not about a national crackup, but a private one.
But that is perhaps why I find myself revisiting Crack Up more often than their still-more-popular debut nowadays (and Helplessness Blues hardly at all). The super-majority of us never come anywhere close to achieving our full divine potential in this life, do we. Even when we sincerely try to (and boy is that not a given), we have deadlines and commitments, kids to feed, endless emergencies endlessly side-tracking us, depression, anxiety, too little time in the day and too many pressing concerns vying for our attention. Our brains have an estimated 2,500 terabytes of storage space, yet we don’t even know where we put our keys half the time—let alone how to use our minds to full capacity in the vanishingly-brief life-span allotted us. It’s enough to make anyone crack up! Maybe everyone does. (It would explain a lot.)
Even those ultra-few blessed souls who do achieve any sort of genuine stardom in this life still find so many of their greatest achievements become dust and ashes: How many pop stars are still listened to thirty, fifty, a hundred years later? (Show me Rolling Stone’s or Pitchfork’s Top 100 songs of the 1920s, for example.) How many movies have already disintegrated and disappeared, how many famous actors forgotten? How many Nobel Prize winners can you name? How many famous athletes can you name from before, say, your grandparents’ generation? How many great novels, epics, and poems have been lost to us, or only get read by specialists nowadays? (For that matter, how many other Great Gatsbys never get rediscovered?) How many captains of industry disappear from memory the moment they pass way–or are at best remembered indifferently? (Does anyone even know or care how Rockefeller or Carnegie or Howard Hughes made their fortunes anymore)? How many prime ministers and presidents (including Church presidents!) never get to fully implement their agendas—or if they do, see it promptly dismantled by their successors? (How quickly will we return to calling ourselves “Mormons” once Russell M. Nelson passes on?) How many websites have already gone defunct? How many bloody wars don’t even have a Wikipedia page? How many soldiers died in vain to gratify the vain ambition of some now-unremembered General? How many mighty empires have fallen? How many nations have, Nephite-and-Jaredite-like, been utterly erased from history? How many dead apostles still get quoted? How many dead scholars still get cited? How many great scientists have seen their best work superseded—or have felt to say, like Einstein at the atom bomb, “If I had known it would come to this, I would have just become a clock maker”?
Hell, how many of us, even if we rightly eschew the vanity of human fame, have succeeded at simply becoming a decent human being: honest, generous, compassionate, non-judgmental, loving our neighbor, loving our enemy, fair, just, merciful, kind? How many of us have ever sincerely tried?
Romans 3:26 reads “for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God”. Relatedly, Hugh Nibley once said in Zeal Without Knowledge that “Sin is waste. It is doing one thing when you should be doing other and better things for which you have the capacity. Hence, there are no innocent, idle thoughts. That is why even the righteous must repent, constantly and progressively, since all fall short of their capacity and calling.” In other words, even our failure to fulfill our potential is a sin—which means we have all sinned indeed, everyone last one of us, without exception. We are all the parable of the unprofitable servant.
Fleet Foxes, by the way, have only released one other studio album since Crack Up: 2020’s Shore, a peaceful and pleasant yet ultimately forgettable product of the pandemic lockdowns. Fleet Foxes was once again a band custom built for the moment, but it was perhaps a little too on the nose this time. Robin Pecknold had recorded Shore as basically a solo album—partly of necessity, but also because, like Fitzgerald of old, he had been increasingly isolating himself anyways. He only recently announced that Fleet Foxes will start recording their fifth album this Fall–but then, he made similar promises all throughout the six long years before Crack Up, too. The hunger and urgency of their first two LPs is long gone. Pecknold has apparently settled quite comfortably into his crack up state, and I’m split as to whether I should lament or celebrate that.
Because these crack ups are necessary for understanding the need for the Atonement, you see; we need the promise of eternal life to reassure us that our eternal potential will not go to waste after all. It’s also why we all need to crack up: it’s the only way we can humble ourselves and see ourselves as nothing, even “less than the dust of the earth”, and to feel like Isaiah that “I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain”.
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, we must simultaneously acknowledge that we are hopeless, yet always strive to be better—because it by grace we are saved, after all we can do. That is, cracking up is the only way we can repent, come forward with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, and be saved.