It is ironic that a genre we call "Americana" was largely influenced and cultivated by a group that was 4/5 Canadian. The Band remains one of the paragons of Americana music and took it to new levels of popularity and reverence throughout their career, but perhaps most clearly with their sophomore album, 1969's self-titled The Band. Thirty-nine years later, another group would release a self-titled album that left a similarly significant impact on the genre of Americana, that being the debut album from Fleet Foxes, 2008's Fleet Foxes.
Perhaps this seems a vague connection. However, if Americana is a genre built upon adapting old musical traditions for new generations, there are few clearer delineations. First, we must better understand what exactly this vague phantom of "Americana" is in a practical sense. Americana promoter Pete Knapp describes it as "an amalgam of American music formed by the confluence of the shared and varied traditions that make up the musical ethos of the United States, specifically those sounds that are merged from folk, gospel, blues, country, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and other external influences."
Americana expands upon the idea of folk music, which is built on a tradition of covers, and persists through passing down not just songs, but the ideas behind them and encouraging future musicians to embrace these stories and tell them in new ways, incorporating all of these different influences. Listening to the debut album from Fleet Foxes, that rich Americana tradition rings through in every note, giving it a pure quality that also distinguishes The Band's self-titled album. Perhaps more potently, there are a great deal of the same themes present in both albums, embodying that Americana tradition of passing down stories and telling them in new musical ways.
Starting from the very beginning, these albums share mysterious covers imbued with unknown stories. The Band features a picture of the group staring intently into the camera, their eyes and dark demeanor seemingly full of memories. The cover of Fleet Foxes is a 1559 painting from Pieter Bruegel, "Netherlandish Proverbs." Much like the Elliott Landy photo gracing the cover of The Band, the Bruegel painting leaves one unable to look away. There is so much to understand, so many stories going on at once, embodying Americana in a strangely direct sense. Frontman Robin Pecknold spoke to this in a 2009 interview, saying:
When you first see that painting it's very bucolic, but when you look closer there's all this really strange stuff going on, like dudes defecating coins into the river and people on fire, people carving a live sheep, this weird dude who looks like a tree root sitting around with a dog. There's all this really weird stuff going on. I liked that the first impression is that it's just pretty, but then you realize that the scene is this weird chaos. I like that you can't really take it for what it is, that your first impression of it is wrong.
However, once the albums begin, those similarities become even more profound.
On their surfaces, the albums both take a distinctly Americana approach of seamlessly blending upbeat, folksy songs with startlingly introspective ones. Songs such as "Rag Mama Rag" and "White Winter Hymnal" parallel each other well- both terribly fun songs that feel like they easily could be folk songs of another time and place, passed down through many generations. But in equally natural spades, each album also turns to deeply introspective tracks like "Whispering Pines" or "Meadowlarks." Yet, in each case, the shifts in tone feel entirely natural, perhaps because both records leave the listener coming away as if somehow they have heard a whole story, as if they have gone along with the musicians on some sort of long journey alongside characters like "Jawbone" and "Oliver James." It can be hard to pin down the story fully, but it is there, further adding to the deeply Americana feel of both albums and their indelible influence on the genre. While they are telling all these stories in the songs, they create a larger story that also serves the same narrative purpose within Americana.
Thematically, several parallels add to the folk imagery of the albums. They draw inspiration from the geography of America, telling stories that are deeply tied to the land, and thus survive to keep telling. Fleet Foxes contributes the striking "Blue Ridge Mountains," a song that somehow takes a listener there in the moment, even if they have never been there themselves. Similarly, The Band boasts one of the group's most enduring songs, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." A tale of the last days of the South during the Civil War, it is pure Americana in every single sense and again evokes a time and place so specific that it immediately takes the listener there, so vividly that it engulfs them and all their senses. It is not an obvious similarity, but once you make the connection, they become incredibly paralleled tales, even down to their full instrumentation and laments for a missing brother- all while both arguably being the crown jewel of their respective albums.
Folk imagery of contentment and peaceful contemplation abounds in songs like "Rockin' Chair" and "Ragged Wood," but the other pervasive conceit that haunts around the edges of both albums is the theme of leaving and returning. That The Band and Fleet Foxes have an almost direct parallel in this regard is remarkable, but yet again proves their connection and the deeper roots they share in the canon of Americana. "The Unfaithful Servant" and "Your Protector" are equally haunting tracks centering around the idea of leaving a home or returning to one. "The Unfaithful Servant" is a lament for a servant being cast from the home, crooned in an unforgettably affecting manner by bassist Rick Danko. "Your Protector" is more ambiguous in its meaning (I don't claim to know, but I personally like the interpretation of the narrator being some sort of freedom fighter coming from beyond the grave to a love in a dream shared in a comment here), but Robin Pecknold sings "your protector's coming home" with an unsettlingly ethereal quality in the chorus, providing a contrasting yet equally haunting image of someone returning to a place of some significance rather than leaving it. So much of Americana and its stories centers around a journey. Here, The Band starts the tale at the beginning while Fleet Foxes leaves us at the very end. Yet, they take a startlingly similar musical approach to telling those stories, suggesting they are two sides of the same coin and perhaps, in the great and cosmic scheme of Americana canon and tradition, a prologue and epilogue of the same story.
Finally, in a parallel that is maybe as startlingly clear in hindsight as the connection between "The Unfaithful Servant" and "Your Protector," "Whispering Pines" and "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song" are devastatingly interwoven cries of isolation. "Whispering Pines," a hauntingly autobiographical song sang unforgettably by Richard Manuel, depicts a narrator who is totally alone, whether physically or spiritually, and is just barely holding onto hope that a lost love will return. Also using a forest as a metaphor for loneliness, "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song" depicts a narrator equally isolated, looking in on life from the outside and floating around the edges of it like a ghost. At one point, Robin Pecknold laments, "they do not know you anymore," and one cannot help but wonder if the narrator is referring to himself, as he does at the end, closing the song with the haunting remark, "I don't know what I have done, I'm turning myself into a demon." Toward the end of "Whispering Pines," Manuel makes a similarly cryptic and haunting statement that he is "standing by the well/wishing for the rains/reaching for the clouds/for nothing else remains."
"Tiger Mountain Peasant Song" is perhaps one of the tracks most emblematic of Americana tradition on Fleet Foxes. It so perfectly interprets the themes of loneliness and despair presented so purely and affectingly in "Whispering Pines" and tells the story in a new way, one that reflects that influence and everything else along the way. It is a haunting similarity, but one that establishes the connection between these two albums and asserts their significance in the Americana canon.
The unique and fascinating part about Americana is that it is so steeped in tradition that an album from 2008 can trace its roots back through the years to perhaps the most significant album in the genre from nearly four decades earlier. Fleet Foxes is widely regarded as one of the best debut albums of all time, high praise also bestowed on The Band's 1968 debut Music From Big Pink. That is just one of the many deeper connections between these two artists, the proverbial Father and Son of Americana (if The Band is not also somehow the Holy Spirit). The parallels between their self-titled albums are profound and serve as a true testament to the Americana tradition. They are beautiful and haunting reflections on ordinary people trying to live the best lives they can, affecting and unforgettable stories of the trials and triumphs along that journey. Perhaps the most significant similarity is their self-titled nature. They did not need to call it anything else but The Band or Fleet Foxes. Their identities are so intrinsic to the concept of Americana that it already tells you all you need to know about the storytellers and the stories they are about to pass on to you.