Fleet Foxes’ liner notes explain why music is so important
Music is one of the things I’m most passionate about in life. I played piano as a kid, but for one reason or another, it never really stuck; maybe I got bored, maybe I just hated my teacher, or maybe I just never really enjoyed playing.
When I got older, I tried picking it up again, thinking that if I wrote my own music, it’d be more fun. It was, but I found that I wasn’t particularly skilled at writing my own music. So I was left as a music lover instead of a player.
I‘ve read a lot of people write about their love and passion for music. Some talk about it’s meditative qualities, others about how a sad or happy song makes you feel less alone in the moments when you yourself are sad or happy. But I never really related to those answers. For me, music wasn’t just escapism for me or an imaginary friend to turn to when I’m down. It was a story of my life.
When I got older and grew accustomed to being “just a music lover,” I started following the hipster trend of keeping a record collection. I rarely put records on these days, but the honor of displaying the music I loved proudly in my record crate (now a box) was the true reason behind it. It was the ideal collection for me; a collection of moments and feelings that nothing else had ever quite captured.
Anyway, one of the first records I bought was a Fleet Foxes album. There was a leaflet in there that I’ve been meaning to hang on my wall for years now, but never have. Anyway, as I titled the article, it’s by far the most meaningful thing I’ve ever read about music:
“My first memory has always been of me and my mom on a cold grey day down at some beach in Washington, along the Puget Sound somewhere near Seattle. I would be around two or three years old and we’re with a friend of mine from the neighborhood and his mom, walking around among the driftwood looking for crabs. Even now, I can remember the smell and temperature of the air, the feeling of the sand and the swaying tall grass. I can even remember looking over at my friend and how his face looked when he smiled back at me. Another memory that I’ll sometimes recall as my first memory is dressing up in the dead of winter as Jack London, with tennis rackets on my feet and wearing my dad’s hiking pack, in the middle of summer after seeing Disney’s (terrible) version of White Fang. Or there’s the memory of stealing my neighbor’s big wheel and riding it halfway down the block before getting caught and having to turn around defeated, or of wearing a fireman’s outfit while washing my parent’s car, or eating an orange popsicle from the ice cream truck.
These are and have always been some of my most distinct and persistent memories of childhood, so it came as a disappointment to me when one day as a teenager, I opened up a photo album and found pictures of each and every one of those memories. I didn’t have a single memory that didn’t belong to or somehow grow from pictures my parents had taken of me when I was growing up. Even the scenes I remember so clearly in my head are from the same angles as those photographs, and I don’t really know what to make of it. I’m going to guess that I’d seen all these photographs at some point, forgotten they were just photographs, and over time made them into my most tangible memories. That’s scary to me in a way.
This leads me to something weird about the power that music has, it’s transportive ability. Any time I hear a song or record that meant a lot to me at a certain moment or I was listening to at a distinct time, I’m instantly taken back to that place in full detail. Whenever I hear “Feel Flows” by the Beach Boys, I’m taken straight to the back of my parents’ car on the way to my grandparents’ place, fourteen with Surf’s Up in my walkman and the Cascade Mountains going by in the window. Any song off Radiohead’s Kid A brings back the sounds and atmosphere of the airport near Seattle, from when we were on the way to Colorado for a wedding and Kid A was the only record I brought or wanted to bring. “Crayon Angles” by Judee Sill is the whole winter of last year, and Brian Wilson’s solo version of Surf’s Up will take me back to driving my parents’ car around town alone at the age of 16 with the windows down at night.
I can ascribe exact memories to songs by The Microphones, Joni Mitchell, Built To Spill, Dungen, Harry Nilsson, and so many others, and it’s a form of recall that I can actually trust. There’s no visual element to complicate things, no chance of a planted memory that wasn’t actually supposed to be there and that is reassuring to me. Maybe I should be concerned that I’m alone in almost all these memories, but I guess I was just a private kid and music was a private experience for me. I can even remember the certain kind of darkness my room would have when I was in there alone listening to records. I can read a good book cover to cover and never once forget I’m sitting in the middle of four slabs of drywall on a spring mattress in Seattle-same with movies and TV and anything else. I can listen to music and instantly be anywhere that song is trying to take me. Music activates a certain mental freedom in a way that nothing else can, and that is so empowering. You can call it escapism if you like, but I see it as connecting to a deeper human feeling than found in the day-to-day world.
Thank you for listening to our band. we’ve made some mistakes and we’ll continue to do so, but we are happy to be making songs and would love the opportunity to continue to grow and change as the years pass by. It took us a long eight months of recording ourselves at home, recording piecemeal in studios, scrapping dozens of songs and starting over, and borrowing money and rooms from friends and family to make this record and its accompanying EP and we hope you enjoy it. Music is a weird and cosmic thing, its own strange religion for nonbelievers, and what a joy it is to make, in any form. Also, don’t trust your photographs.
Music is a weird and cosmic thing, it’s own strange religion for nonbelievers, and what a joy it is to make, in any form.
Also, don’t trust your photographs.”
-Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes
TL;DR: Music transports you back to memories or to new places way more than a photograph ever could.
