Weekly Neil: Take My Hand, Not My Picture

Neil Young, Pearl Jam, Fleet Foxes, and dealing with fame

The waiting drove me mad
You’re finally here and I’m a mess

Robin Pecknold seems to age in reverse. Pull up a photo of the Fleet Foxes frontman from 2008, the year of his band’s debut album, and you’ll see long, unbrushed hair, a thick flannel shirt, and a fuzzy beard. He looks 30. He was 22. A few years later, during the Helplessness Blues era, Pecknold had explicitly introduced more of himself into his songwriting — “Pallid animals in the snow-tipped pines I find / Hatching from the seed of your thin mind all night” evolved into “If I had an orchard, I’d work ‘til I’m sore.” And he finally looked his 25 years, finding a bit more boyishness in a messy mop-top and a well-loved army-green shacket.

I don’t bring this up to linger on a musician’s appearance. I mention it to give the full context of seeing a 27-year-old Pecknold stop by Late Night With Jimmy Fallon one October evening in 2013. His hair was very short. His beard, close-cropped. And he wore a white t-shirt tucked into slacks like Paul fucking Newman in 1967. It fit, because the song he performed was not his own but Pearl Jam’s “Corduroy,” a meditation on how fame irrevocably changes every relationship you have, including to what you wear. When Eddie Vedder sang it, he was furious. In his rendition, Pecknold seems content, clear-eyed, and deliberate.

“They can buy but can’t put on my clothes,” he sings, and later, “Absolutely nothing’s changed. Take my hand, not my picture.”

Fleet Foxes had found success in the late 2000s and early 2010s with a pleasant, literate, and often catchy type of folk music steeped in the historical. Pecknold, who wrote the songs, seemed to be cosplaying at the very beginning, hiding himself behind signifiers that reflected the style (autumnal clothing and hippie hair) just as he decorated his lyrics with earthy images and borderline medieval sensibilities (an album cover by Pieter Bruegel the Elder). Both the Sun Giant EP and the Fleet Foxes album begin with songs about the sun immediately followed by songs centering naturalistic reminders of death (raindrops in a river, blood spilling in snow). “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” is followed by “Meadowlarks” and the “Blue Ridge Mountains.” You get the picture.

The most famous of these early compositions, “White Winter Hymnal,” became a favorite of glee clubs for its impressive and fun harmony vocal arrangement and mysterious, violent lyrics. It’s the kind of tune that doesn’t sound out of place on a Christmas album. It also fits snugly alongside music from artists who sprung up in the post-Mumford & Sons boom of that era, when “indie folk” got flattened into a monolithic bran pancake. Fleet Foxes were always artier than those acts. But by 2011, Pecknold had taken a different tack. He got more introspective. “So now I am older than my mother and father when they had their daughter,” he sings to begin Helplessness Blues. “Now what does that say about me?” A Best Folk Album Grammy nod followed.

By the time he appeared on Late Night, Pecknold had moved to New York City to study at Columbia. He was a college student now, and Fleet Foxes were seemingly taking some time off. This meant a lot to me, someone who effectively made indie folk his entire musical persona from 2010-2012. To have Pecknold pop up announced on NBC and play a banger of a PJ song was big, and to preserve its alt-rock blueprint but make it a little artier and squarer (with help from Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen) was exhilarating. And to see Pecknold look the way I looked at that time in my life, give or take some patchy stubble, was utterly life-affirming. “Corduroy,” I knew from my nominal Pearl Jam fandom, was a loaded choice, too, conveying plenty because the song says so much in its lyrics already.

The story goes like this. Eddie Vedder wore a corduroy jacket during a performance in the early ‘90s, and like most things he did around that time — in the band’s commercial behemoth period, when their only real commercial peers were Nirvana — it became fashionable. The piece of fabric Vedder had bought for $12 became a commodity, as tends to happen. He saw it in a shop going for $650 because it was the Eddie Vedder corduroy jacket. (It might have been a vest.) This disgusted him, so he fired up the band for some bloodletting. “Corduroy” is about fame, with the jacket a kind of synecdoche. Vedder sings the song to his own success: “I don’t wanna take what you can give. I would rather starve than eat your bread.”

For my money, it’s probably the best Pearl Jam song. “Corduroy” was released in 1994 on the band’s third album, Vitalogy. That same year, the band played the song at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit in California, along with a Daniel Johnston cover. In January 1995, Pearl Jam members entered the studio with Neil to make Mirror Ball, which includes one of his best-ever songs, “I’m The Ocean.” When I talked to Dylan England from Del Paxton about that one last year, he summed it perfectly: “It’s like a big epic. I almost was like, oh shit, this is just kind of — everything, which is why it was cool. It’s kinda uncool. A big rock song that ends with him chanting, ‘I’m the ocean.’ I guess I could go either way on that.”

Me too. Another big rock song that ends with a literal message that feels readymade for big arena chanting? “Can’t buy what I want because it’s free,” go some of the final lyrics in “Corduroy.”

The way Pecknold punctuates his take on the tune really grabbed me then, in 2013, and it grabs me now sitting here watching it again as a lo-res YouTube rip. After the Big Rock declaration against consumerism and commodification, drummer Neal Morgan and guitarist Daniel Rossen both drop off, leaving him gentle and alone to strum and sing the final verse:

Why ain’t it supposed to be just fun?
Oh, to live and die, let it be done
I figure I'll be damned
All alone like I began

And then, on the final word, the cacophony begins. Octopus percussion. Atonal, vaguely minor-key strumming from Pecknold. Rossen’s pinching Telecaster. It lasts for 18 seconds before resuming the song’s scripted outro. Most importantly, it rules — and it satisfies my recent inclination toward the noisy. But it also acts as an announcement. This is not Pearl Jam’s version. This is not Fleet Foxes, though the band had dabbled in free jazz-indebted experimentation on the great song “The Shrine / An Argument” and gotten freaky with it in live performances in 2011 and 2012. This is Robin Pecknold, intrepid frontiersman of new sounds. It proved true. The Fleet Foxes album that followed, 2017’s Crack-Up, remains a bit of a puzzle to me, impossibly ornate and still somewhat impenetrable despite sounding pretty and very much its own complete musical world. It was as much a repudiation of what had come before in the Fleet Foxes realm as the mini noise jam he broke out on Late Night. (2020’s Shore was, fittingly, a return to form with all the mature wisdom he’d gleaned.)

But you know what I come back to? It’s not Pecknold covering Neil’s “Comes A Time” with My Morning Jacket, though that’s good, too. (Or “Expecting To Fly,” which Jim James did with Fleet Foxes and is also good.) It’s also not even Pecknold reportedly saying that Neil “doesn’t seem to have any enemies” in 2009, though that strikes me as both completely probable and quite implausible, given how he follows his own impulses with abandon. (The full quote is below:)

Pitchfork: Is there any music you've been listening to that you think could be shaping the music you're writing?

Robin Pecknold: The biggest thing to me — and I mean this in a totally approach-based way — is Neil Young.

There's less of a Neil Young feeling than on the first album. But we were asked to do his [Bridge School] benefit down at Mountain View [California], and the experience of being around his crew and being an observer into his world for a few days was this crazy and inspiring experience. He seems like such a wonderful person, and it seems like he just did it the right way. He doesn't seem to have any enemies, and he just does what he wants and looks after the people in his circle.

You would meet person after person who did such and such job on the tours, and everyone had stories. There were dudes that that had stories from 1971, and everyone had nothing but good things to say.

The thing I come back to is Pecknold’s white shirt on Late Night. He’d left his ripped flannel — something Neil knows a thing or two about — behind. But professional photos reveal the tiny imperfections of Pecknold’s shirt. Some wear around the collar and the sleeves. The kind of simple thing that could go for a lot in a store window because a rock star wears it. It likely didn’t happen in Pecknold’s case. These days, he’s likely to be found wearing a small beanie, too. He sported one back in the pastoral Fleet Foxes days but ditched it for a while during his growth years. It seems like he’s rediscovered it.

After all this time, he’s grown into it. “All the things that others want for me,” he sang, way back then. “Can't buy what I want because it's free.”

As a bonus, listen to this recording of Robin Pecknold apparently covering Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” in 2007 that someone has preserved nearly 20 years later. Thank you kind soul.

“Expecting To Fly,” written by Neil Young and originally released as a Buffalo Springfield song, from Buffalo Springfield Again (1967)