Swim Songs - Fleet Foxes - Shore

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Fleet Foxes ‘Shore’ is a hydrous work from its title and cover art through to its frequent references to rain, waves and water. Liquid lines run from the opening track ‘Wading in waist-high water’ to the closing ‘Shore’ (‘Taking me in, When a wave runs me through, As a shore I ever seem to sail to’). On 'For a Week or Two', Robin Pecknold sings ‘Water stands, Waves just pass through it, Like something moves through you’ while 'I'm Not My Season' imagines helping a friend in distress as rescuing them from the water ‘can you catch a thrown line, Tied around neat’. Driving along the “Going-to-the-Sun Road" (an actual road that skirts the lakes of Glacier National Park in Montana) prompts ‘the thought of flight for water whiter’.

Pecknold plunges into the water on 'Sunblind' - 'I'm gonna swim for a week in Warm American Water with dear friends, Swimming high on a lee in an Eden'. This is a song of remembrance for dead musical heroes including David Berman of Silver Jews, whose American Water album is referenced here.

Plenty of water too in the film released to go with the album, showing lots of soothing nature around Washington state - a counterpoint to the dangerous and pivotal political times mentioned on 'Maestranza': 'These last days, Con-men controlled my fate... Now that a light is on, Now that the water runs, And the heartless are nearly gone, No time to get it wrong'.

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