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 Herway.

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 Kstapa.

My name is Robin Pecknold. I'm the 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 said, you know, it's a very hard person to say no to, so I skipped out on my finals.

And I just started writing a bunch of songs, and this was one of them. I was listening to Olly Farkatory.

He's a guitarist from Olly, and you do these cool drones where the second was always ringing.

Since I started writing songs when I was 15, I've always been interested in alternate tunings, or people that would find new chords, or unique sounding voice scenes on the guitar.

But I'd never kind of made up my own tunings. And so for this song, I was like, okay, I should do this. And Olly Farkatory. Some of his songs have a tune in, where the E string, the low E is tuned up to like a G.

And if you play the lowest string, and the second lowest string, if it's G and A, there's this ringing second.

So I got that from Olly Farkatory. Then I tuned the highest three strings to FAC.

So that's like an F triad. So then the chord on the guitar was GAD FAC.

So I had these two kind of segments of the six strings on the guitar, and then to separate them, you know, more I started playing a triplet on the FAC.

And then kind of a four pattern on the GAD.

And that took a long time to kind of get the rhythm.

And so the chord changes then, or just modulating that shape up and down the fretboard.

The changes in this song, where any other song I've done, when they hit, I still have some weird physiological reaction to them.

Just something about the way they move makes some sign-apps bloom, you know, or whatever.

I always try and chase that, and writing a chord progression, setting up an expectation, and then subverting it.

Something about the third modulation, the image I had in my mind from that was just like sailing.

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