‘White Winter Hymnal’: the “meaningless” song that launched Fleet Foxes
2008 was a baffling time for indie rock. I should know, I was there. The post-punk revival had already curdled into sour-smelling landfill indie. The garage-rock revival had burned out since Jack White started dressing as a matador and playing the marimba. Record labels were Homer and Bart Simpson, desperately chasing their prized suckling pig of a commercially and critically successful guitar band. “It’s just a little Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong, it’s still good! It’s still good!” So, with all that in mind, how did Fleet Foxes become such a big deal the same year?
The signs were already there that the times they were a-changin’. The debut albums by Crystal Castles, Foals and Vampire Weekend all dropped within the first three months of the year, with the records inevitably indebted to indie rock tropes that progress them in some way, leading to careers still going strong over a decade and a half later. Even bands that’ll make millennials of a certain age spontaneously throw up snakebite and black out of sheer nostalgia, like Does It Offend You, Yeah? and Hadouken!, released projects that year that at least had the temerity to be interestingly bad.
At the time, however, they were all cult concerns. Foals and Vampire Weekend are arena concerns today, but they were about as popular as you can expect bands writing songs about maths and grammar, respectively. It’s telling that one of the bands that broke out into the mainstream weren’t an achingly hip, angular guitar band but a beardy bunch of harmonising folk-rockers with an intensely catchy hoedown a little over two minutes long. The band were Fleet Foxes, and the song was ‘White Winter Hymnal’.
At a time when everyone was trying to push forward, Robin Pecknold’s men lovingly looked back and created one of the most iconic sounds of the era. Their blissful harmonies, ringing guitars and classic songwriting were a bracing breath of fresh, cold air when everyone else was trying to sound more urban than ever. Of course, when you’ve got a song like that, you’d assume there was some deep, dark meaning to it, right?
Bon Iver’s ‘Skinny Love’ had come out a year previously and it was born from Justin Vernon’s heartbroken retreat to a Wisconsin hunting cabin. What pit of despair was Pecknold drawing from for this? None whatsoever!
As Pecknold told Daytrotter, the song is “lyrically fairly meaningless” before adding: “We thought it would be nice to start [the record] with a simple jam that’s focussed on singing – on the record, it starts with a tongue-in-cheek harmony thing that we hoped would make people laugh or something, but I think it just confuses them. This is my favourite song to play live, though singing it live is sometimes difficult because the lyrics are so vague. Weird how that works!”
Typically, the band’s signature song just came from fooling around with some delicious harmonies and a tried-and-true chord structure. Combine that with some impressionistic lyrics about a wintertime scene, and you’ve got a recipe that doesn’t just define Fleet Foxes’ career but arguably that of Mumford and Sons, Noah And The Whale, and the whole 2000s folk-rock boom in a nutshell. Not bad for a vocal warmup!
