Since I bought Fleet Foxes’ self titled album in 2008 I have been looking for a copy of the lp insert somewhere on the internet to post on this blog. As far as I know its not out there, which is a real shame because it is truly a nice piece of writing. So I have taken the liberty of transcribing it to the web myself. The musings of Robin Pecknold written under his pseudonym Warren Gamaliel Bancroft Winnipeg Harding really rang true with me. He puts into words what I have often pondered and thought about; that Music can be a medium/vehicle through which communion with a deep intangible aspect of human nature is made possible.
“My first memory has always been of me and my mom on a cold grey day down at some beach in Washington, along the Puget Sound somewhere near Seattle. I would be around two or three years old and we’re with a friend of mine from the neighborhood and his mom, walking around among the driftwood looking for crabs. Even now, I can remember the smell and temperature of the air, the feeling of the sand and the swaying tall grass. I can even remember looking over at my friend and how his face looked when he smiled back at me. Another memory that I’ll sometimes recall as my first memory is dressing up in the dead of winter as Jack London, with tennis rackets on my feet and wearing my dad’s hiking pack, in the middle of summer after seeing Disney’s (terrible) version of White Fang. Or there’s the memory of stealing my neighbor’s big wheel and riding it halfway down the block before getting caught and having to turn around defeated, or of wearing a fireman’s outfit while washing my parents’ car, or eating an orange popsicle from the ice cream truck.
These are and have always been some of my most distinct and persistent memories of childhood, so it came as a disappointment to me when, one day as a teenager, I opened up a photo album and found pictures of each and every one of those memories. I didn’t have a single memory that didn’t belong to or somehow grow from pictures my parents had taken of me when I was growing up. Even the scenes I remember so clearly in my head are from the same angles as those photographs and I don’t really know what to make of it. I’m going to guess that I’d seen all these photographs at some point, forgotten they were just photographs, and over time made them into my most tangible memories. That’s scary to me in a way.
This leads me to something weird about the power that music has, its transportive ability. Any time I hear a song or record that meant a lot to me at a certain moment or I was listening to at a distinct time, I’m instantly taken back to that place in full detail. Whenever I hear “Feel Flows” by the Beach Boys, I’m taken straight to the back of my parents car on the way to my grandparent’s place, fourteen with Surfs Up in my walkman and the Cascade Mountains going by in the window. Any song off Radiohead’s Kid A brings back the sounds and atmosphere of the airport near Seattle, from when we were on the way to Colorado for a wedding and Kid A was the only record I brought or wanted to bring. “Crayon Angels” by Judee Sill is the whole winter of last year, and Brian Wilson’s solo version of Surfs Up will take me back to driving my parents’ car around town alone at the age of 16 with the windows down at night.
I can ascribe exact memories to songs by the Michrophones, Joni Mitchell, Built to Spill, Dungen, Harry Nilsson, and so many others, and it’s a form of recall that I can actually trust. There’s no visual element to complicate things, no chance of a planted memory that wasn’t actually supposed to be there and that is reassuring to me. Maybe I should be concerned that I’m alone in almost all these memories, but I guess I was just a private kid and music was a private experience for me. I can even remember the certain kind of darkness my room would have when I was in there alone listening to records. I can read a good book cover to cover and never once forget I’m sitting in the middle of four slabs of drywall on a spring mattress in Seattle- same with movies and TV and anything else. I can listen to music and instantly be anywhere that song is trying to take me. Music activates a certain mental freedom in a way nothing else can. And thats empowering. You can call it escapism if you like, but I see it as connecting to a deeper human feeling than found in the day-to-day world…
Music is a weird cosmic thing, its own strange religion for nonbelievers, and what a joy it is to make, in any form. Don’t trust your photographs.”
Warren Gamaliel Bancroft Winnipeg Harding Chicago, Illinois April 6th, 2008
