#helplessness blues
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Aesthetic Moodboards // “The Plains / Bitter Dancer” by Fleet Foxes
I should have known one day you would come. All of us walk so blind in the sun.
#this is for my lord huron girlies who love fleet foxes or who need to discover them#heavily inspired by pale rider and the like#the plains#bitter dancer#the plains / bitter dancer#fleet foxes#songs#song moodboards#moodboards#aesthetics#my moodboards#my edits#music#helplessness blues#western#westerncore#deathcore#death#pale rider
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Helplessness Blues - Fleet Foxes (2011)
Artists : Sean Pecknold & Chris Alderson
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Happy second day of fall!
#welcome fall i love u#if you were a lady I surely would kiss you#helplessness blues#fleet foxes#em doodles
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"oh man, what i used to be,
oh man, oh my, oh me"
montezuma, fleet foxes
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“Sunlight over me, no matter what I do.”
This week on what G’s watching - what G’s listening to.
This is exciting!
Gang, I told you content is how I apparently digest my feelings, and a big ol’ part of that is music. Always has been, my dad has this crazy extensive collection of albums. When I was a kid he always had something on in the car, or playing from the old stereo in our living room. One of my favorite memories is listening to the Beatles’ White Album with him on long afternoons. He’d let me dance around on his feet, and we’d sing every single one, I was the eight year old who knew the entire thing by heart.
Music is a core fucking memory for me, it’s my dad in a nutshell. I remember one year for Christmas, he gave me a bunch of burned cd’s - all of the Beatles broken up by time period, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, a set of discs that included the top songs broken out by month between 1964 and 1968, six in total. The tracks, he told me eventually, perfectly encapsulated the way those different seasons felt to him - The March/April disc really feels like springtime.
If you knew my dad, you’d know that the effort he put into it was much more than his usual Christmas attempts, which were: my mother buying the gifts and then writing his name on the tag.
So the point is: music can be an incredible thing and it’s a large part of who I am. I could write an entire post about all of that (and one about the Beatles, and one about Paul McCartney specifically, and one about Adele, and one about Bo Burham…see, I’m nuanced) but I won’t. Right now, at least.
Because I want to talk about Fleet Foxes. Specifically, Helplessness Blues.
This album came into my life at a weird time, I’d moved to a new city and was working my first ever real tech job and I was living with my sister, trying to figure my shit out. Which involved coworker-turned-friend drama because at the time I was absolutely not the best person, and it was very early 20’s of me. You know, when everything feels frenetic and you aren’t sure what the fuck you’re supposed to be doing with your life, so you’re just…doing random things, all the things.
Which made me extremely susceptible to the creeping kind of darkness infused with hope the album has. I have a penchant for indie folk bands. I can’t help it. I fucking love guitar and thrumming drums with violins and shit. It just feels real to me. Authentic. Organic.
So it’s no wonder Fleet Foxes pulled me. I had a couple of their other songs on random playlists but had never attempted to listen to their first release. And then one day I was getting my oil changed, sitting in the waiting room and I read a review of Helplessness Blues in a magazine, probably Rolling Stone. I immediately bought it, which wasn’t really like me at the time - I was deep into stitching together random lists on my ipod, pulling tracks from all over the place, but I felt like I had to. Thankfully.
I don’t know what it is about this album, but it’s the perfect mix of mauldin, shiny, twisted, uneasy, exciting, overwhelming. It feels like there’s a story to it, it’s cohesive and purposeful, but I couldn’t tell you what the narrative actually is. And that’s probably the point. It’s whatever the story is to you, and man this album for me is angst and questioning and accepting. It’s become one of those perfect albums you can listen to, never skipping a track, because they’re always a little different depending on the mood you’re in.
And right now, I'm in a weird mood. I’m lost in my life again, and angst sounds about right, so I put the album on this afternoon after I’d finished my unemployment application and tried to harass the pharmacy for my husband, did some laundry, some dishes, random life things. I decided all I wanted to do with my Friday was chill the fuck out, blast Helplessness Blues through my airpods, and just, be with myself, and something familiar. Inside my own brain, but with something comforting, lulling me in the background.
I wanted to wrap myself up in something, and this was the perfect choice. Apparently one of my coping mechanisms is to just put some music on and let it overwhelm me, turning the volume up as high as I can tolerate, and singing along as needed at the top of my lungs. It’s honestly therapeutic.
That’s what Helplessness Blues is good for. Because it’s quite a production. You can get lost in the story and it’ll morph into whatever you need at the time. Today it’s a squirming sense of unease, but also triumph. It’s so good.
I could probably talk about all of the tracks, I’m not going to lie, but that sounds exhausting; they’re still lulling my brain right now and I don’t feel like I could pick out each one well enough, they flow together too well.
However, The Shrine / The Argument is fucking ambitious. It’s so many different things all at once and it’s almost confusing as one song but eventually it’s really, really not. It’s weird and it ends with a horrible cacophony but then delivers really soft and agonizing violins. It has some of my favorite lyrics from the entire album:
In the morning waking up to terrible sunlight / All diffuse like skin abuse the sun is half its size
When you talk you hardly even look in my eyes
In the doorway holding every letter that I wrote / In the driveway pulling away putting on your coat
In the ocean washing off my name from your throat
Because, who hasn’t felt like that? It’s a really specific loss. How else can you say something like that?
This is clearly getting away from me, but that’s okay. This is what I wanted to do today. I don’t do this very often, Helplessness Blues isn’t in my regular rotation, because it deserves to be listened to and I don’t always have that kind of time. I’m thankful that I do today though, I’m almost through my second rotation, and it's helping. I’m updating the story that it is, for me. Next time I listen to it, it’ll remind me of this stupid thing I’m going through and all that I am right now, a little bit.
For example: listening to Blue Spotted Tail was very Crowley and Aziraphale today. That’s apparently where I am, so now it’s part of the story.
Why in the night sky are the lights hung? Why is the earth movin’ around the sun? Floating in the vacuum with no purpose not a one…
Poor little Antony J.
Why is life made only for to end? Why do I do all this waiting then? Why this frightened part of me that's fated to pretend?
So. If you need to feel ways about things (we all do, now and again, right) this album will do it for you. And this is a terrible love letter to it, but just…trust me.
youtube
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“What’s my name? What’s my station? Oh just tell me what I should do. I don’t need to be kind to the armies of night who would do such injustice to you, or bow down and be grateful and say ‘sure, take all that you see’ to the men who move only in dimly lit halls and determine my future for me.”
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Fleet Foxes songs as Reductress headlines, part 2
#fleet foxes#robin pecknold#fleet foxes as reductress headlines#reductress headlines#helplessness blues
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fleet foxes sing about two things and they are apples and people named cassius
#fleet foxes#the shrine/an argument#helplessness blues#cassius.-#-naiads cassadies#i should see memphis
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Next up on the Kindly Stopped for Me playlist (drumroll please...)
The song that represents Chapter 19 is...
"Helplessness Blues" by Fleet Foxes (2011)
The chapter will explore both justice and redemption, and will feature a deep dive into a character we haven't spent a lot of time with yet :)
Relevant Lyrics:
"I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes
Unique in each way you'd conceive
And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery
Serving something beyond me"
"I don't need to be kind to the armies of night
That would do such injustice to you
Or bow down and be grateful and say
'Sure, take all that you see'
To the men who move only in dimly lit halls and determine my future for me"
"If I know only one thing, it's that everything that I see
Of the world outside is so inconceivable
Often, I barely can speak
Yeah, I'm tongue-tied and dizzy
And I can't keep it to myself
What good is it to sing helplessness blues?
Why should I wait for anyone else?
And I know, I know you will keep me on the shelf
I'll come back to you someday soon myself"
Full Playlist | Read KSFM on AO3
#wip sneak peek#wip playlist#current wip#ksfm mayhem with me#helplessness blues#fleet foxes#redemption arc
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#i literaly cant with their lyrics#they just drop kick me into the sun every time#fleet foxes#helplessness blues
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Hand made this fleet foxes patch
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Can we talk about the visual aesthetic and reference of the sun in art/history/literature? That Louis XIV referred to himself as the Sun King, built Versailles, and how it reflects that. Or how the line Tolkien wrote, “Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn!” In which Galadriel talks about her power if she was given the ring. Not to mention songs such as Sunlight by Hozier feeling like waking up being both benevolent and powerful, and the bridge in Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes feeling like a weight being lifted from your shoulders while walking through the woods at golden hour in the Summer. I just appreciate that.
#writing#classic literature#literature#music#art#history#architecture#beauty#nature#louis xiv#hozier#fleet foxes#lord of the rings#galadriel#helplessness blues#wasteland baby#summer#golden hour#versailles#I just love how all these things elicit visuals basked in gold#I know the tolkein line is meant to describe how the ring corrupts but it is still so beautiful#Just like thinking about it#It is simultaneously so warm and terrifying#please describe the color gold and the sun to me in writing#I love it#so comforting#🌻
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Song of the Day 04/21/2024
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