“Very tumultuous and up and down, and at times confusing and terrifying and uplifting and hopeful.”
That’s director and visual artist Sean Pecknold recalling what the last year and some change has been like for him. But he could just as easily be describing the soul-stirring music video he made for “Featherweight,” the newest single from indie folk band Fleet Foxes’ latest album Shore. (The video, made in partnership with Dropbox, is the tenth Sean’s created as the band’s sole visual collaborator.)
Using a multiplane camera and stop-motion animation, the video follows a young hawk “looking for a new home, looking for a feeling of renewal and safe harbor.” Nursing a broken wing in a world that feels trapped in state of perma-dusk makes his search much more difficult. We see him set course only to fall to the earth soon after, a plume of dust rising up from his body as he hits the ground. After a year plus of living in a COVID-induced limbo, it’s easy to see yourself in the hawk’s staccato flight pattern.
“Kind of every emotion you can feel in a lifetime I feel like we’ve felt, or at least I’ve felt, in the last year and a half,” Sean says. “I was reflecting on that a lot [while] making the video and putting feelings of both isolation and fear and anxiety and hoping for an end in sight or a burst of light on the horizon of darkness, and weaving those thoughts and feelings into the video where I could.”
“Yes, I… I echo that,” says Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes’ singer-songwriter frontman and Sean’s brother. In all the emotions and the “forced stillness” of 2020, Robin took the “opportunity to do a mental inventory” of himself while also dropping a surprise album in Shore.
“When the lockdown started hitting, a lot of the songs were pretty far along and a lot of the music and some of the lyrics were written,” Robin explains. “Even though I had bits and pieces of the music from before, the song and a lot of melodies and all the lyrics [for ‘Featherweight’] really came together in August 2020. It was the one that was the most deeply inside of lockdown.”
The song structurally and lyrically reflects the duality of its title and that time without feeling like an artifact of COVID. “I wanted the music to have this kind of weightlessness, like there was a weight [that] had been lifted,” Robin explains. “And the guitars are all kind of feathery and floating around, but there’s this kind of grounding drum element.”
Sean found inspiration in those elements when it was time to dream up the video’s concept. After more than a decade of working together on Fleet Foxes’ videos—and a lifetime as brothers—getting the green light from Robin was a given. He had already been working on concept art with Toronto-based artist Sean Lewis for a feature-length animated film. (Lewis had also created one of the band’s first T-shirt designs in 2008—”a guy’s face with snakes, kind of a Medusa illustration,” Sean recalls with a smile.)
“I was like, ‘We have to do what we’ve been doing for the concept art as [an] animation,” he explains. “The art work was so textural and beautiful, that I really wanted to make it move.”