Fleet Foxes walked into a rented house outside Seattle in February 2009 with a plan and walked out with nothing they could use. The sessions were scrapped, costing the band $60,000 of their own money. Robin Pecknold, the band's principal songwriter, decided the new songs were too close to the debut. Too familiar. The timeline was blown, and the follow-up to one of the most warmly received indie folk records of 2008 was back at zero. What came after that write-off is Helplessness Blues, released May 3, 2011, and it is a substantially more interesting record than one made without that kind of pressure would have been.
The self-titled debut had arrived almost fully formed: reverb-heavy harmonies, jangly guitars, a sound so cohesive it felt less like a debut than a statement of aesthetic. That kind of reception is its own trap. Pecknold returned to his native Seattle to begin sketching out its successor, but the creative block was real. The band's touring schedule through the end of 2009 compounded the problem, and Tillman's own solo commitments further complicated the scheduling. By the time sessions finally resumed in earnest, more than a year had passed since the first attempt collapsed.
The band that showed up for those resumed sessions was a different one. Helplessness Blues is the first Fleet Foxes studio album to feature bass guitarist Christian Wargo and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Henderson. Henderson's contribution alone shifts the record's center of gravity. He plays upright bass and woodwind throughout, and his presence opened up an orchestral low end that the debut never had. Casey Wescott, meanwhile, brought what the credits describe as a small museum's worth of keyboard instruments: piano, pump organ, marxophone, musical box, moog synthesizer, zither, Tibetan singing bowls, harmonium, harpsichord, mellotron. The marxophone, a fretted chord zither last fashionable in the early twentieth century, tells you something about where Pecknold's head was. Recording began in April 2010 at Dreamland Recording in New York and continued off and on through November of that same year at Bear Creek in Woodinville, Washington, and at Reciprocal Recording and Avast in Seattle. The album was recorded and mixed by Phil Ek and co-produced by Fleet Foxes and Ek.
The title track, released as the lead single on January 31, 2011, sets the album's central question early. Pecknold described the prevailing theme at the time as "the struggle between who you are and who you want to be or who you want to end up, and how sometimes you are the only thing getting in the way of that." That's a more complicated kind of self-examination than anything on the debut, and the music earns it. The jazz coda to "The Shrine / An Argument" shows off the band's expansive ears, while the faintly eastern lilt on songs like "Bedouin Dress" and "The Plains / Bitter Dancer" keeps their template fresh. "Play" and "Blue Spotted Tail" sit quietly in the middle of the record's thirteen tracks and do the kind of work that only patient albums can afford: they slow things down just enough that the closing "Grown Ocean" lands with real weight.
All of this was happening with a drummer who was already mentally somewhere else. Helplessness Blues is the only Fleet Foxes album to feature drummer and backing vocalist Josh Tillman, who left the band in 2012 to pursue his solo career under the name Father John Misty. Pecknold has called the recording and touring process dysfunctional and traumatic, owing to the tensions between him and Tillman, who was devising a solo career and departure from the band. Tillman's drums and harmonies are all over the record anyway, and the friction between two strong creative personalities working through a difficult album is audible, if not in any obvious way. The record's thirteen tracks, from the opening "Montezuma" through the closing "Grown Ocean," hold a kind of sustained unease beneath their surface beauty. That quality is inseparable from the circumstances.
The album received universal acclaim from critics and was nominated for Best Folk Album at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards, peaking at number four on the Billboard 200, the band's highest chart position to date. The numbers are fine, but they don't quite capture what the record did for a generation of listeners who were ready to take folk music seriously again without giving up the idea that it could be strange. The marxophone, the Tibetan singing bowls, the upright bass threading through "Someone You'd Admire," the free-jazz disintegration at the end of "The Shrine / An Argument": none of it would have happened if the first attempt had worked. The $60,000 the band spent on those scrapped 2009 sessions bought something that money rarely does in a recording studio, which is the permission to start over and mean it.
