How Fleet Foxes helped First Aid Kit break in America
By the late 2000s, Swedish indie folk duo First Aid Kit was already well known in their native country. Sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg had already released their first EP, Drunken Trees, by April of 2008. But that collection of songs didn’t exactly make a massive impact in America. To break through, the sisters had to take on some of America’s favourite sons: indie folk icons Fleet Foxes.
Fleet Foxes themselves were still upstarts in 2008. Having formed just two years prior, 2008 saw Fleet Foxes release the EP Sun Giant and their self-titled debut studio album. The fourth track on their debut was ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’, and First Aid Kit decided that they were going to cover it on the then-nascent video-sharing site YouTube.
Today, that very same video is still available, currently sitting at a cool six million views as of the start of 2023. Fleet Foxes leader Robin Pecknold shared the cover on the band’s website, gaining First Aid Kit a new audience of American indie folk fans.
“We wrote to them on MySpace saying, ‘Hey, we did a cover of your song,'” Klara explained to Under the Radar in 2010. “We just thought someone who was visiting their MySpace might see it. We didn’t think that the actual band might see it. That was not in our heads. Then, the day after, they wrote back to us, and they were so positive.”
Although it helped establish them stateside, the sisters were apprehensive about being so associated with a cover. “I don’t want them to think we were not making music and then did the Fleet Foxes cover and were like, ‘Oh, we can make music,'” Klara explained to Under the Radar in 2010. “We’ve always been doing our own songs, and that has been the main thing.”
Although it was the song that broke them in America, First Aid Kit wasn’t eager to build their career off of a cover. The duo have only played ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’ 12 times live, with most of the performances coming in 2010. Over the last decade, the pair have only played the song live five times.
That might be a disappointment to fans who found out about the band from the cover, but by this point, First Aid Kit has established their own unique sound and identity. With five studio albums, including 2022’s Palomino, the Söderbergs don’t need to rely on covers as much anymore.
Check out the original video of First Aid Kit covering ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’ down below.
