Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold on Arthur Russell: He’s the best example of a musician “feeding their soul”
There are certain artists who seem to welcome you into their world. Sometimes that world is a weird new universe like the vast expanse that David Bowie opened for his legion of fans; sometimes, like in Fleet Foxes‘ case, its a warming wooded pasture, and other times an artist feels like they’re welcoming you into their bedroom as a voyeur of introspective exorcism. In all cases, this knack adds a captivating lure that makes music just feel a little more personal.
For Robin Pecknold, there is one outsider star who enamours you with that fly-on-the-wall feel more than most, and it inspires him by illuminating what being a musician is all about at its spiritual core. “A musician should just be making music, like playing music every day,” he told Ameoba. “If it’s feeding their soul, well, that’s what you’re doing every day, you’re playing music.”
He continued: “It’s not always about the end product; it’s not always about the capital A album or the hit song. It’s just a personal thing”.
This approach is not just the idealistic view of a ne’er-do-well with a rent-free loft conversion either, it is a liberating look at the arts that imbues the eventual finished products with an air of sincerity, refinement and creativity. However, there is one musician who lent to this soul-growing lifestyle so much that his brilliant music was barely known as a result: Arthur Russell. “He’s the best example of that that I can think of,” Pecknold proclaims.
Russell was originally a cellist who went from studying Indian music to playing alongside Allen Ginsberg poetry recitals before moving to New York to work with the likes of David Byrne and Peter Zummo, then inventing disco cello and playing various club nights to forming his own Sleeping Bag label and on and on, all while humbly crafting his own folky home recordings and secretly writing some of the greatest confessional music ever to decidedly not grace the radio.
When he died of AIDS on April 4th, 1992, aged 40, the Village Voice obituary on the cult star beautifully declared: “His songs were so personal that it seems as though he simply vanished into his music.” Thus, it seems fitting that his revival almost seems to have rained down from the ether, as the water cycle of his honest work at home graces the new generation of songwriters with their own would-be hero.
Speaking about the song collection Iowa Dream, Pecknold continued: “He has just so much music that he recorded over the course of his life – that’s demos, home recordings and lost songs. Everyone of these that comes out there is always three or four just classic songs. It’s always shocking that they have gone unreleased this long or under-evaluated or under-appreciated.”
