Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues

A couple years ago, I noticed that Innisfree is mentioned in a couple songs on Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues.  I'd wondered if it was related to Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," but until recently, I'd never really looked into it.  In doing so, I found some other interesting things too.

I should note that I took the lyrics from the gatefold of the vinyl version:

However, they're not exactly what's on the album itself.  There are some differences between what's written and what's sung, and some of the line breaks occur in weird places.  The songs on the album are also in a different order than that in the gatefold, but that might be just because of the space the lyrics require when written out.

"Bedouin Dress"

At "return" in the line "Everything I took I’d soon return," more instruments come in, and the dynamics increase, as if to reflect the returning.  Similarly, once the next line starts ("Just to be at Innisfree again") there's a harmony vocal that continues throughout the rest of the song.

In the gatefold, the second half of the last verse is rendered as:

Gleaming white, just as I recalled
Old as I get,
I would never forget it at all.

 Standardized and following what's actually on the album, it's more like:

Gleaming white, just as I recall
Old as I get, I would never forget it at all
Gleaming white, just as I recall
Old as I get, I could never forget it at all

The printed lyrics have only "I would never forget it," but on the album, there's also "I could never forget it."

This is the first track on the album that mentions Innisfree, but there's not that much in common between this and Yeats' poem.  Both narrators want to go to Innisfree (Yeats' poem starts with "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree," and here there's "Everything I took I’d soon return / Just to be at Innisfree again"), and both are looking for peace (there's "And I shall have some peace there..." in Yeats, and "Everything I took I’d soon return / Just to be at Innisfree again" from "Bedouin Dress" seems to hint at the same feeling).

"Sim Sala Bim"

When the "Then the earth shook..." verse starts, violin tremolos begin, providing a sense of trembling.

I think it's fairly obvious, but the couplet at the end ("Remember when you had me cut your hair? / Call me 'Delilah' then I wouldn’t care") is an allusion to Samson and Delilah in Judges 16.

"The Plains/Bitter Dancer"

The second verse starts and ends with the line "You took a room and you settled in."  While the next verse does the same thing (with "I should have known one day you would come"), repeating the line with "you settled in" emphasizes the certainty of the settling in.  It implies that the "you" will be there for a rather long time.

At the end, the line "At arm's length I will hold you there, there" is repeated, but it's not present in the gatefold lyrics, which actually mirrors the sentiment pretty well.  There's a cautiousness in holding someone "at arm's length," just as there is in not including those lyrics in the gatefold.

"Helplessness Blues"

There's an interesting feature here with doubles.  The song starts with the lines "I was raised up believin’ I was somehow unique / Like a snowflake, distinct among snowflakes / Unique in each way you’d conceive," and there's one voice and one guitar.  But after the lines "I’d rather be / A functioning cog in some great machinery / Serving something beyond me," a second voice, a second guitar, and harmonium come in (during the line "But I don’t, I don’t know what that will be").

Later, there's the opposite effect:  at the "know" in "If I know only one thing," the second guitar drops out.  There are still two voices, but now there's only one guitar and one harmonium, so there's an exclusivity to match the "one thing" in the lyric.

For both, the strumming pattern of the guitar(s) matches the number.  If there's only one guitar, the strums are all (or at least mostly) downward, but if there are two, the strums are upward and downward.

"Lorelei"

To some degree, the repeated "you" in the line "You, you were like glue" gives a sense of the adhesiveness of glue.  It's almost as if the word stuck to itself when it was put into the song.

The parallelism in the line "Call out to nobody, call out to me" equates "nobody" with "me," which is the same idea in "I was like trash on the sidewalk" and "I was old news to you."

The "Old news, old news to you then" line is interesting in that - through its repetitions - it itself becomes old news.  Furthermore, there's a sort of motif in the melody to which it's sung:

(click the image to enlarge it)
(I'm fairly confident in this notation, although I might have the key wrong)

For the first three words ("Old news, old..."), each word lasts one measure and is comprised of two eighth notes and a half note.  The first eighth note and the half note are the same pitch, and the second eighth note is one step above the other two notes (sometimes a half-step, sometimes a whole-step).  For the last "news," there are two quarter notes (continuing downward like the rest of the phrase) instead of a half note.

Almost every "Old news, old news" section has this melody, so there's the repetition of the phrase as a whole, and there's the repetition of that three-note motif within the phrase.  The only one that doesn't have this melody is the one that's after the line "Fell for the ruse with you then."  Instead, it becomes:

That line ("Fell for the ruse...") has its place in the narrative of the song, but it also affects the "Old news..." section that follows it.  The melody itself "fell for the ruse," was deceived, and changed.

"Someone You'd Admire"

Like the second voice in "Helplessness Blues," a second voice comes in for the line "I walk with others."

The phrase "gnash their teeth" seems to be a Biblical reference.  It's actually in a few places in Matthew where Jesus explains some parables, but Matthew 13:41-42 is probably the most easily quotable:  "The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace.  In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

The strumming pattern emphasizes "Claw" and "gnash" in the line "Claw at my skin and gnash their teeth and shout."  They both occur on the first beat of the bar, and that first beat is a quarter note where the other beats are eighth notes, so that first beat (and the impact of those words) stands out:

(click the image to enlarge it)

I should note that my notation is accurate only as far as the guitar strumming, not the tonality.  I used B notes just because they're in the middle of the staff.

"The Shrine/An Argument"

I think the first pair of lines in these verses are really long, rhyming "dawn" with "gone" and "shrine" with "fine."  In the gatefold lyrics though, there are some really interesting line breaks that seem to have some extra meaning.

The gatefold renders a section from the first verse as:

Underneath were all these pennies
Fallen from the hands of
Children they were there and
Then were gone.

The line breaks occur at places of separation: the pennies from the hands, and the children's being there and being gone.  The second verse, as renders in the gatefold lyrics, has something similar:

But that day, you know, I left
My money and I thought of you only

Here, there's the separation of the speaker/singer from his money.

There's a weird metrical strain in the line "In the driveway, pulling away, putting on your coat."  I don't understand meter enough to be able to diagram or illustrate this, but the "away" is stressed on the first syllable instead of the second.  The resulting strain seems to betray the speaker/singer's frisson.

In the line "In the ocean washin’ off my name from your throat," there's a similar sound in the "c" of "ocean" and the "sh" of "washin'."  Purely poetically, this is just consonance, but it also suggests scouring or scraping something clean, which is more explicitly present in the "washin'" itself.

There are two features here that seem to connect this song with "Helplessness Blues."  First, there's "I left my money, and I thought of you only, all that copper glowin’ fine."  It's kind of ambiguous whether the "copper glowin' fine" is a literal description of the money or a figurative description of "you" (that is, the person's hair).  If it's the second, it's similar to "Gold hair in the sunlight" in "Helplessness Blues."  Second, both mention apples.  There's the line "Green apples hang from my tree" near the end of "The Shrine/An Argument," and "Helplessness Blues" has a number of lines beginning with "If I had an orchard...."  In looking through the album's lyrics, I noticed quite a lot of similar descriptions in various songs.  I'm still not sure what to make of some of the others, but this one seemed to be one of the most connected, which is why I'm mentioning it.

This is the second song on the album that mentions Innisfree, and there's more that would seem to connect this to Yeats' poem than there is in "Bedouin Dress," but still not enough to say that it was intentional.  Both use a lot of natural imagery, but there's only one that they have in common.  The last few lines of "The Shrine/An Argument" are:

And if I just stay a while here, starin' at the sea
And the waves break ever closer, ever near to me
I will lay down in the sand and let the ocean lead
Carry me to Innisfree like pollen on the breeze

There are image of water (the sea, the waves, and the ocean), which is somewhat similar to the tenth line of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" - "I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore."

Between this and "Bedouin Dress," there really isn't anything that specifically references Yeats' poem.  If anything, Innisfree is used just in the same general sense of a peaceful, natural place.

"Grown Ocean"

It doesn't really make a difference to the meaning of the line, but "Kept like jewelry kept with devotion" could be parsed in two different ways.  As it is in the gatefold rendering, because there's no comma, "kept with devotion" is modifying the "jewelry."  With a comma, both "kept like jewelry" and "kept with devotion" modify the "children grown on the edge of the ocean" from the previous line.

This song ends with:

Wide-eyed walker, don’t betray me
I will wake one day, don’t delay me
Wide-eyed leaver, always going

The "wide-eyed walker" appears earlier on the album in "Battery Kinzie":

Wide-eyed walker
Do not wander
Do not wander through the dawn

Like the features that seem to tie together "Helplessness Blues" and "The Shrine/An Argument," this was one of the stronger inter-song connections I found on the album.