Best of Rock

”˜Do you mind if I smoke?” On a drizzly March afternoon, Pecknold is cruising through Seattle in his white Subaru Outback, its floor carpeted with cough-drop wrappers and empty cigarette packs, a krautrock comp burbling on the stereo. He’s been trying to quit lately, but between finishing the record and prepping for a tour, it’s just too stressful right now. He lights an American Spirit and rolls down the window.

Technically, the car belongs to his mom. His parents ”“ who met on a flight to Alaska in the Seventies, where they were both going to work at a fish cannery ”“ live just a few minutes from here, not too far from where Pecknold was raised, in Kirkland. He hangs out with them a lot. A former boat-builder and amateur luthier, his dad has even been custom-fashioning him some guitars. In fact, when it comes to Fleet Foxes, the whole family pitches in: Pecknold’s sister, Aja, is the band’s manager, and his artist brother, Sean, directs its videos.

Right now Pecknold is on his way to Jive Time, one of his favourite used-record stores. Records are basically the only thing he spends money on these days: On a trip to London in February, he dropped $3,000. We pass the group’s old studio, the same place Nirvana recorded Bleach. Pecknold mostly missed the whole grunge thing ”“ he was five when Nevermind came out. His earliest musical memory is dressing up like a cowboy and rocking out to the Oklahoma! soundtrack. (A friend of his brother’s nicknamed him “Showtunes.”) The first album he bought was Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple, and he grew up obsessing over Radiohead and the Strokes. He also loved “miserable bastards” like Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, though sometimes he wonders if maybe they fucked him up a little. “It’s such a crappy message to send to a kid,” he says wryly. “Smoking, manic-depressive cranks: Those are my idols.”

By the time he was 14, Pecknold had basically withdrawn from school to do music full-time. (He finished his diploma through a community-college programme.) He and Skjelset started playing together, and one by one the rest of the dudes came into the fold. Fleet Foxes released their first album in 2008, a collection of honeyed tunes about mountains and trees that surprised everyone by selling 200,000 copies. During the whirlwind that followed, Wargo remembers “mind-blowing” stuff like dinners at Neil Young’s house and private time with Brian Wilson’s piano.

But Pecknold kind of resisted. “For me,” he says, “coming from the perspective that the more something has sold, the worse it is ”“ one of those snobby indie asshole guys ”“ I was like, ”˜Why is this happening? Does that mean our music is bad?’” He eventually grew more OK with success, but he still shuns attention, and he is the last person to trumpet his band’s accomplishments. Asked if he’s heard of any famous fans, the best he can come up with is Lance Armstrong, Zach Galifianakis and “the guy in Rush. Oh, and David Crosby said he’d heard of us. I actually really wish we could use that for the album sticker: ”˜David Crosby: “I’ve heard of them.”’”

After the record store, Pecknold ducks into a coffee shop for an espresso. We’re in Fremont, a self-consciously quirky neighbourhood full of artisanal bike shops and giant statues of Lenin and trolls. Places like this get on Pecknold’s nerves. He has low tolerance for whimsy, and “lifestyle branding” irks him. He doesn’t like going to shows because it’s too much standing. He doesn’t have hobbies (“I have trouble with recreation”) and thinks the Space Needle kind of sucks. At one point during our walk, we come across some Canada geese waddling along. “Water rats,” he says. “People round them up and shoot them.”

This is a side of him you don’t find in their music: a cranky, funny one. His inspired coinages ”“ “Slaughternalia” (aka Thanksgiving ”“ he’s vegan); “merriweather,” his candidate to replace “hipster” (“Look at merriweather over there”); “totebag” (an annoyingly liberal version of a douchebag ”“ think NPR pledge drives) ”“ belong in a dictionary.

The subtextual punch line, of course, is that Pecknold is kind of a totebag himself. One of his first jobs was at a food co-op, and you can catch him streaming NPR podcasts while reading The New Yorker on his iPad. But he’s nothing if not self-aware. He jokes about his band’s rep as “limp-dick beard-os” and calls their genre “fauxlk.” At the same time, he says, the whole hippie-bro-longhaired-beardo caricature can sometimes get out of hand. “It is a little annoying,” he says. “You can be an intellectual longhaired beardo, you know ”“ that exists. Or a winking longhaired beardo.”

There’s plenty of stuff he’s excited about. He likes hiking, train travel, road trips. Someday he’d like to go back to school to study music or modern art. (“There’s only so much you can do with Wikipedia.”) Most of all he’d like to find some cheap land somewhere, a few dozen acres in New Mexico or Arizona, and build himself a little house. Nothing fancy (“no home theatre”), with lots of natural light. “It’d be cool to do it sustainably,” he says. “Not to be too up my own ass.”

Pecknold sometimes worries that he’s not cut out for the music business. So far he and the band have been staunchly opposed to licensing their songs for commercials or TV, turning down American Express and Grey’s Anatomy. Recently they were approached about doing an ad for the Nissan Leaf, the first 100 per cent electric car: “If ever there was a guilt-free commercial,” he says, “that would be it. But I’m still sort of like, ”˜Mehhhhhh.’ Ads are just always kind of dumb ”“ like people driving RAV4s and kayaking.” They did sell out once, however: “We did a World Wildlife Fund ad in Australia. We got, like, $500.” Talk about totebaggy! Pecknold laughs. “Totally.”