Robin Pecknold's Rebirth

The chaos and loss of 2020 helped him make a creative breakthrough with Fleet Foxes

- SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON

IN THE SPRING OF 2020, as the coro-navirus pandemic tore through New York City at terrifying speed, Robin Pecknold stayed home in his rented one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. “I wasn’t being creative at all,” says the Fleet Foxes singer-songwriter, 34. “There were some dark weeks where I would end up waking up at 7 or 8 p.m. and stay up until noon. The world just seemed like it was more sane at night.”

On top of everything else — “the stress that we’ve all been going through, just by being alive in 2020,” as he puts it — he had an album to worry about. He’d spent the previous fall and winter recording instrumental tracks for a new Fleet Foxes project, but the songs were half-finished at best, with no lyrics or vocals, and no sure ideas for what to do next. “It was this extra albatross,” he says. “It was unclear if I would just abandon it, or if it was going to come out in 2022, or what.”

That feeling lasted through March, April, and May. Then, in June, Peck nold had a breakthrough. Heading north for long loops through the Catskills in his Toyota 4Runner, he found himself pulling over to the side of the road to jot down lyrics. “I put 6,000 miles on my car in three weeks,” he says.

The songs that came into focus on those drives became Shore, the fourth Fleet Foxes album — a gorgeous folk-rock song cycle about life, death, and art, full of mourning and glimmers of relief on the other side. Track for track, it’s the most immediately rewarding Fleet Foxes record since their 2008 debut.

Pecknold began writing shortly after the tour for 2017’s