Melissa Harris-Perry: The Takeaway is back. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We've got a new project featuring musicians walking us through their work in their own words.

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Melissa: Now for many of us, the right song can clarify a feeling or even illuminate an answer, but it can also be a way of defamiliarizing, of questioning.

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First sight of the first good morning since you've been out of town

Robin Pecknold: When you're making songs or anything like that, it's trying to shift perception. At the end of the day, what you're trying to do is make a pair of glasses through which to see reality. I am Robin Pecknold. I'm the singer-songwriter in a band called Fleet Foxes.

Melissa: Many of the questions that inspired Robin's songs are collected in a new book. Wading and Waist-High Water: The lyrics of Fleet Foxes spans their entire catalog of 13 years and includes notes on creative inspirations and approaches. Robin Pecknold spoke with us about the book and gave us a window into his songwriting process, starting with the band's latest album, Shore.

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Can I believe you?

Can I believe you?

Can I ever know your mind?

Robin: It was 2020 lockdown summertime, and I would just go on these really, really long drives in the Catskills. People like Tom Petty talk about this, sometimes writing lyrics while driving. One part of your brain is distracted by staying on the road and that lets another part of your brain put a lyric together.

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Due west at a blind day's end, flying pavement underfoot

Robin: As opposed to maybe a more conversational lyricist, I've always wanted the melody and the vowel sounds and the words to work together invisibly, somewhat like a painting where you don't see the brush strokes.

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Penniless and tired with your hair grown long

I was looking at you there and your face looked wrong

Memory is a fickle siren song

I didn't understand

Robin: Over the years I've learned that the best way for me to write lyrics is to be singing them at the same time. The beginning of that process, I'm just finding melodies and singing gibberish. This is true for many songwriters. Paul McCartney's great example of yesterday starting as Scrambled eggs. There's a similar rhythm to both of those phrases. Over time it does seem like certain phrases stick or words develop or a way a melody might arc requires a certain vowel sound.

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On the other ocean

On the other ocean

On the other ocean

Robin: My favorite lyric growing up was, "Just sometimes I feel very sad. I just wasn't made for these times," from the Beach Boys. He's just repeating this emphatically while there's this like really prismatic and lush and yearning sound world underneath the vocal.

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So do

You think the smoke, it won't enfold you?

Or there'll be someone waiting for you?

Robin: That's what makes music so powerful, is that as a lyricist you're at a huge advantage. You can buttress your words with music and add so much context and meaning and power.

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Sunlight over me no matter what I do

Apples in the summer are golden sweet

Robin: Creatively. I'm most excited when the song I'm working on seems to be posing an interesting question when it embodies some combination of elements or con seats that hasn't been attempted in exactly that way before.

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Robin: There are very few Fleet foxes songs that follow a typical verse, chorus, bridge structure. With a song like The Shrine/An Argument, it was wanting to take that to an extreme at the time. Finding a way to make a seven-minute song that could include a free jazz clarinet solo and a rousing minor key rock climax.

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In the ocean washing off my name from your throat

In the morning, in the morning

Robin: To me, a song is good if it is asking interesting questions and a song is done when those questions are no longer confusing the song's maker.

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What good is it to sing helplessness blues, why should I wait for anyone else?And I know, I know you will keep me on the shelf

I'll come back to you someday

Robin: Can I be so emotionally direct that it's actually uncomfortable? Can the song be half rousing and half dreamlike?

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Robin: A song like Helplessness Blues, I think I was 24 writing that, existential and unclear of my place in the world and a very emotionally vulnerable song. I think because it's that open, it's especially meaningful to people who are maybe going through a similar feeling of being lost in those early 2010s years as the millennials were finding their way. [laughs]

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If I had an orchard, I'd work 'til I'm sore

Robin: It's interesting because I'm a little more comfortable writing a song like Sunblind now and just being like, "Don't we love John Prine and Bill Withers, and isn't music wonderful?"

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For Richard Swift

For John and Bill

For every gift lifted far before its will

Judee and Smith

For Berman too

Robin: On the Last Sweet Fox's album am Shore, I was really wanting to make songs that were just four other people and that I wanted to be an elegy or an ode to all the musicians I've loved who maybe left us too soon. I wanted to be foregrounding those names and instead of trying to hide one's influences, try to celebrate them. It was like one final thank you.

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I'm gonna swim for a week in

Warm American Water with dear friends

Swimming high on a lea in an Eden

Robin: I started Fleet Foxes when I was 16, [laughs] 20 years ago. There's a song on the first EP where the image of the shore comes up, standing on the shore and speaking to the ocean, receiving silence.

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On the shore, speak to the ocean and receive silence

Robin: Then, the last Sweet Foxe's album was called Shore and it ends with the song called Shore.

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I needed shade

Sand on my feet

Robin: I was imagining the record as a safe harbor after a couple of albums that were quite wild. It was striking to think about the adventure and the journey of making music over the last 13 years and how it kicked off with that song Drops in the River, left shore, and then returned to shore.

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Afraid of the empty but too safe on the shore

Robin: With the book, it's like the work of the last 13 years and figuring out where to set sail to next.

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And 'fore I forget me, I want to record

While I see it all

Melissa: The Takeaway is back, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We're hearing from a musician taking us through his work in his own words.

Robin: I am Robin Pecknold, I'm the singer-songwriter in a band called Fleet Foxes.

Melissa: Robin recently released a book of lyrics and notes on his songwriting process and he sat down with Takeaway producer Mary Steffenhagen for a look back at the past 13 years of Fleet Foxes.

Mary Steffenhagen: I'm going to go back in your catalog a bit in time. There are a couple of songs that are named for places or about places and they've taken on a life of their own.

Robin: I think for a song like Blue Ridge Mountains, the context for that is that I have a really great family and a really close relationship with my siblings, one of whom is my brother Sean. We still do go on trips together, just the two of us. We had just traveled through Ireland and Norway visiting some family heritage sites and Blue Ridge Mountains wasn't a place we'd ever been, but it was about, "Let's take a trip like this. Let's get away." I've obviously since been, but it was like an invitation to a trip to my brother.

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My brother, where do you intend to go tonight?

I heard that you missed your connecting flight

To the Blue Ridge Mountains, over near Tennessee

Robin: A song like Mykonos, similarly, I was 21 imagining these exotic locations. Making this album and in a practice space in my parent's basement, imagining someone trying to escape their troubles and ending up on some Greek island that I have still never been to.

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The door slammed loud and rose up a cloud of dust on us

Footsteps follow, down through the hollow sound, torn up

And you will go to Mykonos

With a vision of a gentle coast

And a sun to maybe dissipate

Shadows of the mess you made

Robin: Growing up in Seattle, wanting to be a musician and having it be this perfectly unique music town because it wasn't New York, it wasn't LA, but it had its own musical world and labels and venues and people moving there at that time to play music. I couldn't imagine anything else.

Mary: Who were some of the musicians that you looked up to when you were starting out and growing up?

Robin: The musicians I looked up to growing up in Seattle were people like Phil Elverum from The Microphones or the artists on K Records, or Kill Rock Stars, or sub-pop bands like Modest Mouse and Built to Spill. I used my paper route money to buy used grunge CDs when I was six. That was the ecosystem. I just loved that music so much.

Mary: I want to dig a little bit more into the music side and you've talked about this in the footnotes, this idea of building a sonic world. Can you talk a little bit about building those worlds and maybe what you're trying to capture or portray?

Robin: There's so many things that are interesting, at a given time about making a song. You could be really interested in a certain production technique, a specific instrument and the way it sounds or a certain structural idea about how you're putting a song together. A certain harmonic idea, or a certain combination of instruments. I think when you're making songs or anything like that, it's trying to shift perception. At the end of the day, what you're trying to do is make a pair of glasses through which to see reality. I feel like my idea of the world is pretty much informed by the way I feel and the way things look,, how real things look when I'm listening to certain albums that have meant so much to me over the years.

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Mary: I guess I'm curious what you think about these lyrics, the way that they start out for you and then evolve into something that does hold so much meaning for the listener. How does that feel or maybe how do you think about that, as you continue to write?

Robin: It's funny looking back on these songs now with some time and some distance and as the culture has moved. This publisher Tin House, they were so sweet to come up with this idea of doing a lyric book. I love the idea of getting to write annotations and notes on, add context with the songs and explain certain words or phrases that maybe aren't clear and just have a clear record of what the lyrics actually are because sometimes people have funny interpretations where they think the lyrics are. There is, in a sense, reading lyrics on the page isn't the same as reading poetry.

It's a bit maybe a bit more like reading a screenplay for a movie because you have some of the plot, but you don't have the characters or the inflection or the sets or the editing and all the stuff that in an album as well as in a film that adds so much to what's on the page. What's ultimately powerful is the combination of elements, the song in concert with the melody and the delivery with the lyric. That's what makes music so powerful, is that as a lyricist you're at a huge advantage, that you can buttress your words with music and add so much context and meaning and power.

Mary: In that vein of retrospection, how do you think you've evolved?

Robin: I'm 36 now, I was 22 when the first record came out. 22 is pretty young, and I think we had to learn on the fly about how to rise to the opportunities and challenges that were being presented. I feel like I still have a ton of music to make and music that I'm excited to make. I'm also glad that I'm not 22 and that I am still able to work and work with new artists and explore new ideas that I still have that privilege.

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Melissa: That was Robin Pecknold, singer-songwriter of Fleet Foxes. His book Wading in Waist-High Water: The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes is out now.

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