You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Fleet Foxes formed in Seattle, Washington in 2006.
In 2011, they put out their second record, which was nominated for a Grammy.
Then, the band went on hiatus.
The lead singer and songwriter, Robin Pecknold, moved to New York to go to Columbia University.
After six years, in 2017, the band returned with their third album, Crack Up.
And in this episode, Robin breaks down a song from that record called Mayor Castapa.
My name is Robin Pecknold.
I'm a singer-songwriter in Fleet Foxes.
I started writing this song December of 2015.
I was getting ready to go on tour opening for Joanna Newsom.
She asked me to do some dates opening for her solo.
I was a student at the time, and I was doing undergraduate in English literature.
I was kind of deciding if I should do that tour,
if I should keep doing school, and I was a very hard person to say no to,
so I skipped out on my finals and just started writing a bunch of songs, and this was one of them.
I was listening to Oli Farkatore.
He's a guitarist from Mali, and he would do these cool drones where the...