"Seattle is getting expensive," says Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes' lead singer and songwriter, opening the front door to a small wooden house painted Teletubby purple. There are tulips in the front yard and a few tufts of grass in the roof tiles currently being watered by a shower of rain. "Like, I had to move out of my apartment in Capitol Hill - which is, like, the cool neighbourhood, it's where all the venues were and my job was - because my rent went up from $450 a month to $600 and it was tiny. So I moved into my girlfriend's place."
This is not Seattle's hippy quarter, he says; his girlfriend's place is an exception, it's more a "dogs-and-babies place with a lot of organic toy stores area. But this year I'm going to be on tour so much it's just good to have time with my girl."
Fleet Foxes have just got home from a US tour and, I was told, were pretty burned out. Not a long tour by US rock standards - just two or three months, including the South by Southwest festival-conference, where they got buzz-band status and accolades from the press. (Mojo magazine hailed them as "America's next great band".) Nor can they blame their age for being so fried. It's more that they're new to this. As 22-year-old Pecknold, when pondering something I've asked, says: "I've never been interviewed until a couple of months ago." It's not been that many weeks since they signed a record deal - with Seattle indie label Sub Pop in the US and, in the UK, former Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde's Bella Union. Their self-titled debut album, which they recorded late last year, paying for the sessions on Pecknold's credit card, doesn't come out till June, preceded by a self-made EP, Sun Giant, last month. Both were made at home.
You quickly gather that home and community are a big deal to Pecknold. Though Seattle's population has expanded greatly since the 1990s - more from the impact of Starbucks and Microsoft than the city's other successful export, grunge - Pecknold makes it sound like a small town, with a close-knit musical community, where everyone knows each other and are often as not in multiple bands. Two of Fleet Foxes, Casey Wescott and Christian Wargo, have their own group, the mellow, electronic Crystal Skulls. And newest member Joshua Tillman is also a solo singer-songwriter.
There's a very strong sense of family, too. Robin's sister Aja, 29, a music journalist, also works as a facilitator for the band, and his brother Sean, 27, a film-maker, is shooting their first video. Their father Greg, who in the 60s played in Seattle soul-garage band the Fathom, bought each of his kids an identical guitar for Christmas one year and taught Robin some chords. Robin in turn taught his high school friend, Skye Skjelset, "who took off way beyond me, he's awesome". Skjelset duly became Pecknold's musical companion as they stumbled towards their calling.
There are, apparently, a lot of people of Nordic stock in Seattle. Pecknold and Skjelset are two of them. Pecknold, who looks as much Norwegian fisherman as neo-hippy with his beard, woolly hat and sleeveless jacket, relates how he, Aja and Sean took a trip to Norway last year and visited the island of Hidra, where there was a village named after his mother's side of the family, Valaas. "But when we got there it had been torn down to build vacation condos for all these German people who want to live there. The Hidra that my mum remembers was just sheep." The rest of the country, he says, laughing, "looked just like Seattle". His childhood, he says, was "like, rad. My mum was a school teacher - she worked on a commune in Israel once - and my dad used to build guitars and boats. My brother's five years older than I am and my sister seven years, but we would hang out and were like as good of buddies as you'd allow yourself to be as a kid when there's that age difference."
And then the family moved, with his mother's job, to a "boring" town east of the city, and his brother and sister both left to go to college. "So I was almost like an only child, which was kind of weird, and I wasn't really making new friends at school, until I met Skye," who by Pecknold's description sounds a lot like himself - "soft-spoken and kind of deep". Pecknold gives a shy laugh. "I was, like, the fat kid on my own, reading Lord of the Rings, and that was when I started playing music and went into the guitar."
The first song he learned to play was The Times They Are A-Changin' - partly because it was simple, mostly because it was Bob Dylan, whom Pecknold describes as "an obsession. He was such a comfort to me. Those were the only records I would listen to late at night or doing homework."
One of the teachers at his junior high school - "the greatest guy and really into Yes and ELO" - let Pecknold and Skjelset hang out in the science room during their lunch break, where the pair would talk music and practice guitar. Pecknold says they took it seriously from the outset. "We always thought of it as a band. We'd say, 'Let's have band practice now,' although it was just us two sitting around watching movies or whatever, or I'd say, 'Let's record music this week.'" They recorded just about everything they wrote. Pecknold listened back to their old tapes recently and says that "if music is a language, they sound like a toddler making up their own words".
Over time, as they grew tired of the limitations of their group being just the two of them, it turned into a full band. When Pecknold was 18 he left home and got a job in a Capitol Hill restaurant called Bimbo's, staffed almost entirely by Seattle musicians. Says Pecknold, "John Atkins from 764-Hero worked there, and for a kid growing up in Seattle, if I could just talk to John Atkins it was mind-blowing." It also made it very easy to find people to play in the band that now had a name: Pineapple. Only it was also the name of a 70s US punk band who sent them a cease-and-desist email. "I'm like, 'You can take it, we're not really using it anyway.' " Pecknold renamed the band Fleet Foxes.
"I just love the word 'fleet' as an adjective," he shrugs, "and I love England. So much English music is just so great - Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Steeleye Span, they're so good, I can't get enough of them. I read online that the girl in that band, Maddy Prior, works at some Wellness centre and gives classes." He beams. "You can pay to have a class with Maddy Prior!"
Fleet Foxes' heady sound leans heavily on the records of the late 60s and early 70s - you can hear the English folk revival groups he has mentioned, the American artists who were turning towards folk and gospel, such as Karen Dalton, and harmony rock from both sides of the Atlantic (the Beach Boys, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Association, the Zombies and Fleetwood Mac) - but it is as filtered through the brains of a generation raised on computers. On the band's MySpace page they describe their music as "baroque pop, music from fantasy movies, Motown, block harmonies, hymns, a couple moments approaching shaggy rock stuff, but mostly rather tempered and restrained. Not much of a rock band."
Harmonies play an enormous part in Fleet Foxes' music - four, sometimes five, male voices, sometimes churchy and a capella, other times woven into the music alongside the other instruments (which include banjo, piano, mandolin, autoharp, cello and guzheng, an oversized Chinese zither). It is oddly timeless - the sound of an imagined, perfected America that never existed - without ever sounding dated. It shares with REM's Murmur the sense of having emerged fully formed from the backwoods, without ever sounding like the Georgia band.
Leafing through the stack of vinyl albums beneath the turntable, I spot LPs by Van Dyke Parks, Procol Harum, Karen Dalton, Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, as well as Renaissance harp music - all music that came out long before Pecknold was born. His tastes, he says, were informed partly by his parents' record collection but more so by stuff he discovered on Napster. A bootleg of the then unfinished Beach Boys' album Smile, for instance, that "just blew my mind. For me it was Bob Dylan and then after that Brian Wilson."
For Pecknold, the best part of being in a band is "singing with people. It's so super fun we would just want to incorporate it more. It's ..." he searches for the word, "human. There's a certain sense of togetherness. Because a guitar is, like, your hands and your brain, but four people singing is just as close as you can get musically, because you're all standing next to each other and you're all just an interval away. It just reminds me," he smiles warmly, "of family."
· Fleet Foxes tour the UK from June 9 to June 18. Their album Fleet Foxes is released on June 2, and the Sun Giant EP is out now, both on Bella Union
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