Fleet Foxes

At the tail-end of their European tour, folk-pop sextet Fleet Foxes find themselves in Paris. Keyboardist Casey Wescott takes a moment or two for a chat with FL, dropping a little ‘Fresh Prince’ down the line to get things underway. “I’m just chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool,” he declares, before reflecting more seriously upon the city’s current climate. “They’re having some difficulties with the euro. [David] Cameron backed out of a treaty… so there’s still some uncertainty around that. But other than that, things seem pretty normal on the ground!”

Fleet Foxes’ critically-acclaimed Helplessness Blues – the follow-up to their equally lauded self-titled debut – has sent the Seattle outfit round the world once again. As Wescott explains, the opportunity to tour the album has proven enormously rewarding: “One of the things that I found most interesting was playing [the record] for people that have never seen us before, period. We just played Poland and Croatia recently and cities that we’ve never been to. It’s a really strange thing playing countries where bands don’t usually play. There’s something about supply that affects people’s perceived value of anything – it could be art or performance – and in some of those countries, the supply of bands playing is so low that the enthusiasm is so different from anywhere else.”

“As far as playing this record, it’s been interesting: we basically conceived it and finished it in a vacuum and nobody heard it,” Wescott reveals. “It’s been a real joy and I think that the songs have actually evolved since we finished recording them as a result of playing them, because you get to know the songs so much more when you’re playing them every night and you start to react to them and change things up differently. I think they’ve gotten a little bit more dynamic and potentially more progressive depending on perspective and stuff. But it’s been really great to play it for people.”

Fleet Foxes return to Australia this month to play Falls Festival and a string of sold-out sideshows, their tour arguably one of the most anticipated of the summer. The precise scale of the fervour, however, has eluded Wescott thus far: “I have absolutely no awareness of the support that exists or doesn’t exist in Australia. You could absolutely be telling me sweet nothings right now and I’d believe it, because I don’t have any way of knowing, actually! I kind of stay wilfully ignorant on that aspect of it, I wasn’t even aware that our record was for sale there! That’s truly how, like, out-to-lunch I actually am as an individual and as a human being.”