There’s plenty to like about Fleet Foxes’ 2008 debut album, but I think the best thing about it is the cover art.
At first glance it looks like your standard 16th-century peasant scene, but the closer you look, the weirder it gets. In the foreground on the right, there’s a walking egg. On the left, there’s a guy hanging out a second-floor window peeing on a flag. At the top, way in the background, there’s an unfortunate man running through a field with his bum on fire.
It’s an Easter-Egg hunt of eccentricity. A “Where’s Waldo” of weirdness. And it’s the work of Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Bruegel was a fan of proverbs, and in this particular work, called Netherlandish Proverbs, he portrayed representations of well over a hundred sayings and figures of speech. So the guy who’s peeing out the window is the literal representation of the Dutch turn of phrase describing a person who is wasting their time on something futile: “To be pissing against the moon.”
The poor guy with the flaming rear-end is two sayings in one: “To run like one’s backside is on fire,” and my personal favourite, “He who eats fire, craps sparks.” This second one is a beauty, the Dutch version of the more familiar (but far less vivid) saying, “If you play with fire you’re gonna get burned.”
Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold has said that they chose the painting precisely because it’s so weird. Because there’s a lot to look at, and because what seems innocuous at first gets stranger the longer you stare.
And somehow, of all the songs on the album, I think this one is the best soundtrack for the image.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The big reverb on the vocals makes it sound lonely.
2. The recording is nicely balanced, with one guitar panned left, one right, and the vocals in the centre.
3. At 2:30, the left and right guitars abruptly disappear, and we’re left with just one guitar straight down the middle. Not sure why they would do this. Maybe there’s a Dutch proverb that goes something like, “He who double-tracks a guitar for a whole song loses his indie cred.”
Recommended listening activity:
Looking through your photos to see if there’s anything interesting in the background.