Fleet Foxes Hymn -by Alyson Camus

For half of the song it is all about pure vocal harmonies, may be reminiscent of a Jackson Browne or better, a Crosby Stills and Nash’s song (that must be the group singing effect) and this ascending music bursts into a bigger and moving sound with violent strumming folk guitars, only to break into a calmer and more serene plateau reached after a long ascension …

The first part of the song has this let’s-forget-about-the-collapsing-world feeling, ‘It’s that every thing that I see/Of the world outside is so inconceivable/Often I barely can speak’,… leading to a let’s-cultivate-our-own-garden, à La Voltaire, ‘If I had an orchard/I’d work till I’m sore’ during the second part.
But there is a little more than just this simple dichotomy… there is also some mystery apparently.

Fleet Foxes have said that their music does not have a religious thrust but carries some similarities with the genre (Gospel comes to mind of course), and you should expect some reactions from people who bring their own expectations with this kind of religious-sounding music. And it is not lyrics like these ones: ‘I’d say I’d rather be/A functioning cog in some great machinery/Serving something beyond me’ that are going to discourage them!

In a 2008 interview with the BBC, frontman Robin Pecknold said it is not necessarily the religious connotations he responds to when he listens to religious music, but rather the feelings conveyed within that specific style:
‘More of what I’m responding to in that music is just some genuine feeling that the person is obviously having, and that might be their desire for a connection to this God or whatever, but that doesn’t need to be the goal, it’s just the emotions coming through.’

In that same interview, he explains that, like religion, music has the ability to be mysterious and bring some transcendence to our lives, even if it is indescribable:

‘All music to me is mysterious and transcendent. No matter what. You can’t really describe what music is really or why it affects you in a certain way.’
‘It’s just as much of a God figure in some way, that mysterious unreachable thing.’

It’s probably impossible to avoid the religious comparison when you do that kind of stuff, does this mean we obligatorily have to bring transcendence in the picture? I don’t want to ruin it for everyone but it is well documented how music brings pleasure, but I’m not sure scientists would say it is that mysterious: it’s measurable with a scan, it activates the same regions than anything else that brings us pleasure, it works the same way than food, sex and drugs.

It’s true that we may get the impression to experience some out-of-this-world reality when we listen to beautiful music, but we feel and perceive everything that leads to that impression using our carnal body, the ‘spiritual’ is in fact very anchored in the flesh.
And Oliver Sacks, that renowned neurologist who has extensively written about music says it better than anybody:

‘I intensely dislike any reference to supernaturalism, but I think there can be profound mystical feelings which do not have to call on fictitious agencies like angels and demons and deities. The whole natural world is bathed in wonder and beauty and mystery. The feeling of the holy, the sacred, the wonderful, the mystical, can be divorced from anything theological, and is conveyed very powerfully in music.’