100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #13 Fleet Foxes – Mykonos

Released: 2009

Never a man to take a backward step, Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra once posed the question to an audience in Texas: “If you’re no different from your parents, then what are you rebelling against? You’re just fitting in.”

Whilst punk had youth in it’s jet stream this seemed like a valid thing to ask, but there are vectors of the arts and culture decades later which have since become profoundly cyclical, as witnessed for example by the seeming immortality of acts like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Why for instance were teenagers like Jack White, growing up in late twentieth century urban Detroit, obsessing over Delta Blues? Similarly, why was the rosy cheeked Robin Pecknold, living in Seattle, using his iPod to play music by Fairport Convention, Neil Young and Bob Dylan?

Fleet Foxes, the band Pecknold formed with his also folk devotee friend Skyler Skjelset, offered their listeners Anglophile pastoralism, which in it’s own way when surrounded by rap, nu-metal and EDM, was for them a means of pushing back against the tide. Mykonos was this honeyed sound of bygone Albion done to perfection, it’s starkly beautiful harmonies made to float on an eddying breeze, a ghost song from phantom times. Your parents might like it. But you could always explain that it was the sound of those who didn’t want to fit in.