Classics: Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

Have you ever had an album or song become imbued with the memory or spirit of a place or time in your life?  Clint Black told me all about it being funny how a melody can bring back a memory, and then Eric Church stole that thought recently to sing that its funny how a melody sounds like a memory.  (I mean, come on.  They make thesauruses just for that exact circumstance.  You had to say "melody" and "memory?")  I have a few albums like that in my life.

The Fleet Foxes are a Seattle band who created a lush, harmony-filled sound that brings old-English-y baroque-ness together with southern California 70's folk rock.  This whole 2008 album feels like historical fiction for the ears, twisting lovely harmonies up, around, and through beautifully picked guitar arrangements.  I don't think there is a single bad tune on the album.

"White Winter Hymnal."  The title, sound, instrumentation - it sounds like something the Appalachians would have sung to their kids at bedtime to warn about the evil Bluecoat northerners who killed pappy during the war of northern aggression.  But it makes me want to sing along as I drive the Pacific Coast Highway.  So I did.

The wife and I took a trip where we landed in San Francisco to spend a night before renting a car and driving up the coast to go to Gold Beach, Oregon for a few days.  I brought along 4 or 5 CDs in a small case, and this one ended up in the player for the majority of the trip.  For me, these songs are now soaked in my memories of the craggy, misty California coast, the dank, dark, quiet redwood forests, and the cold water of the Rogue River.  I think Ragged Wood is my favorite one:

That experience took an otherwise really good album to become a superlative one that I go back to all the time to enjoy that blissful feeling from the trip.  Such a beautiful area of the world and this music takes me back there.  If you haven't already heard this one, get out there and give it a listen.