{"id":6861,"date":"2025-11-21T16:40:50","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T16:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/fleet-foxes-elliott-smith-cover\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T16:40:50","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T16:40:50","slug":"fleet-foxes-elliott-smith-cover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/fleet-foxes-elliott-smith-cover\/","title":{"rendered":"Fleet Foxes Come Full Circle With Elliott Smith Cover"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<figure><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.spin.com\/files\/2022\/02\/fleet_foxes_-_photo_credit_shervin_lainez_9_720.jpg\" width=\"720\" height=\"566\" alt=\"Fleet Foxes\"><figcaption>Fleet Foxes&#8217; Robin Pecknold (photo: Shervin Lainez).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Fleet Foxes\u2019 Robin Pecknold once lost a high school talent show after performing an Elliott Smith cover, but audiences are sure to be more accepting of his lovely, just-released take on the late singer\/songwriter\u2019s \u201cAngel in the Snow,\u201d which can be found on the soundtrack to the Amazon MGM holiday movie\u00a0<em>Oh. What. Fun<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/11\/oh-what-fun-soundtrack\/\">As previously reported<\/a>, Gwen Stefani, Wilco\u2019s Jeff Tweedy, St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten and the bird and the bee all contributed exclusive tracks to the album. Directed by Michael Showalter,\u00a0<em>Oh. What. Fun.<\/em>\u00a0stars Michelle Pfeiffer as a family matriarch accidentally separated from her family during the holidays. The cast includes Felicity Jones, Chlo\u00eb Grace Moretz, Denis Leary, Dominic Sessa, Danielle Brooks, Devery Jacobs, Havana Rose Liu, Maude Apatow, Jason Schwartzman, Eva Longoria and Joan Chen.<\/p>\n<p>More from Spin:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/11\/mj-lenderman-role-model-austin-city-limits\/\">MJ Lenderman, Role Model Visit \u2018Austin City Limits\u2019<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/11\/30-years-later-the-ghost-of-tom-joad-reminds-us-that-theres-still-work-to-be-done\/\">30 Years Later, \u2018The Ghost of Tom Joad\u2019 Reminds Us That There\u2019s Still Work to Be Done\u00a0<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<li>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2025\/11\/let-it-be-replaced-again\/\">Let It Be Replaced (Again)<\/a>\n\t\t<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In early 2000s Seattle, Pecknold\u2019s cover of Smith\u2019s \u201cPitseleh\u201d didn\u2019t stand a chance amid high school competition such as \u201cthe Britney Spears dancers.\u201d As he recalls to SPIN, \u201cthe judges were the teachers and they didn\u2019t get it, so the next year I went back and did \u2018After the Gold Rush.\u2019 That time, I won. Eventually, I was going to community college to finish high school, but I chimed back in at graduation in 2004 with all these handouts that said \u2018RIP Elliott.\u2019 The yearbook that year had a plastic sleeve that you could slip paper in front of, so me and my friends had that little tribute to him.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<lite-youtube videoid=\"7tiL5jSz1RY\" style=\"bottom: 0; height: 100%; left: 0; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; width: 100%; max-width:100%;\"><\/lite-youtube>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p>Smith\u2019s music continues to cast a long shadow for Pecknold, who was inspired to pick up a guitar in the first place thanks to his \u201cweird tunings and different chord shapes. If the Beach Boys were an example of what you can do with chamber orchestration, then Joni Mitchell and Elliott were what you can do with just a couple guitars and some interesting progressions and songwriting skill. When I was a teenager, I would try and make Elliott ripoff songs that really missed the point. It\u2019s just so singular. It stopped being something I even tried to integrate that much into what I was doing. It was the kind of thing where you love it so much that you leave it alone, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Pecknold acknowledges the bittersweet quality of \u201cAngel in the Snow,\u201d but says \u201cit has a tenderness to it that\u2019s in a lot of his music. It doesn\u2019t have the kind of empty darkness of some of that later stuff.\u201d As for his approach to covering the song, he admits, \u201cI\u2019m very literal with covers. I treat them more like sheet music than something to be drastically reinterpreted. I\u2019m just historical reenactment-coded to some degree (<em>laughs<\/em>). It\u2019s really fun to dive into stuff like that, especially when there are slightly more involved parts to be executing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Asked why he thinks sensitive singer\/songwriters like Smith and Jeff Buckley still resonate with new generations of listeners, Pecknold observes, \u201cI used to take for granted the \u201890s-ness of Elliott and Jeff Buckley a little bit,\u00a0because it was just the sea in which they were swimming. I was\u00a0drawn to the \u201860s-ness of both artists. Jeff Buckley had Nina Simone\u2019s delivery, and Elliott had those Beatles-esque chord progressions. I don\u2019t think I was clocking their nostalgia in real time when it was happening. A lot of Phoebe Bridgers-style music feels Elliott-inspired in a way that is reintroducing some of his ideas, mentality or approach to a younger audience. He\u2019s one where you\u2019re like, man, what would he have been doing if he was still around? God. It\u2019s such a shame, but he left an incredible body of work for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spin.com\/2021\/07\/the-greatest-rock-stars-of-all-time\/?utm_source=yahoo&amp;utm_medium=bottomlink&amp;utm_campaign=yahoolink\">click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fleet Foxes&#8217; Robin Pecknold (photo: Shervin Lainez). Fleet Foxes\u2019 Robin Pecknold once lost a high school talent show after performing an Elliott Smith cover, but audiences are sure to be&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3712,4420,6,24,4515],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elliott-smith","category-fleet-foxes","category-news","category-pushly","category-robin-pecknold"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6861\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}