PHILLIPS BACKYARD FESTIVAL SERIES
Featuring: Fleet Foxes, Peach Pit, Jesse Roper, Allen Stone, The Blue Stones, Ruby Waters, and more
Where: Phillips Brewing & Malting Co., 2010 Government St.
When: Friday, Aug. 11 through Sunday, Aug. 13
Tickets: $80-$115 daily ($235 for a weekend pass) from showpass.com
Information: phillipsbackyard.com
Fleet Foxes performed in Los Angeles at the Belasco Theatre a few months ago, surrounded by hundreds of flowers decorating the stage.
The performance will have them well-prepared for their set in Victoria this weekend, where flowers are in full bloom and thousands of fans will be gathered for the band’s headlining appearance Sunday to close out the three-day Phillips Backyard Festival Series.
The booking was a masterful one by organizers Stephen Franke and Morgan Brooker, who co-produce the second-year event for the Government Street brewery. Fleet Foxes hasn’t performed in Victoria since 2008, and its most recent Vancouver performance was in 2022 at the 3,000-seat Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
“Fleet Foxes are one of those iconic bands that have helped inspire a generation of artists,” Franke said. “It’s rare to find them in smaller markets and this marks their first performance in Victoria since 2008 when they were just getting their start. This is definitely a show not to be missed.”
The two-time Grammy Award nominees will be joined this week by Jesse Roper (who headlines Friday) and Peach Pit (Saturday), two of the highlights expected at Reverb, the second and final installment of the concert series. The unique outdoor event opened in July with Tilt, a well-attended weekend of activity featuring Anderson .Paak, Lord Huron, Bahamas, and Snotty Nose Rez Kids, among others.
“Going into the 2023 festival season, we wanted to reinvent the Phillips space, not by starting over but by growing the space and bringing in some top tier talent,” Franke said.
Reverb offers three stylistic options this weekend. Friday is for rock fans, with performances by Roper, The Blue Stones, Crown Lands, Little Destroyer, and Acres of Lions. Saturday leans into indie rock and soul territory, with Peach Pit — a popular Vancouver group whose touring line-up features Victoria multi-instrumentalist Dougal Bain McLean — joined by Allen Stone, Ruby Waters, The Bankes Brothers, and Babe Corner.
Folkies are expected en masse for Sunday, which pairs Fleet Foxes with Hollow Coves, Jon and Roy, Steph Strings, and Cold Fame.
Anticipation has been mounting for Fleet Foxes, in particular, as Seattle-born singer-guitarist Robin Pecknold, 37, is often acknowledged as one of the top songwriters of his generation. In 2021, the band released Wading in Waist-High Water: The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes, a book containing Pecknold’s complete lyrics from 55 songs across four albums.
The band (which also includes guitarist Skyler Skjelset, keyboardist Casey Wescott, bassist Christian Wargo, and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Henderson) doesn’t have brand new music to promote — its last album, Shore, arrived in 2020 — but its North American tour has been acclaimed by critics. Pecknold, who is not available for interviews on the band’s current run, said in a statement earlier this year that Fleet Foxes is playing some of its best shows ever at the moment.
The band’s studio output is where the majority of acclaim attached to Fleet Foxes is centred. Fleet Foxes’ first two albums sold more than two million copies worldwide, according to reports. The band’s self-titled debut, in 2008, was named album of the year by Billboard, Pitchfork, and Mojo, while the higher profile of the two, 2011’s Helplessness Blues, peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard sales charts, the band’s highest position to date.
Around the same time, Pecknold was living in Portland, Oregon. Due to the mounting pressure, he disbanded Fleet Foxes in 2013 and enrolled at Columbia University in New York. “I was studying constantly, and when I wasn’t, I was exercising,” he said of that period, during an interview with The New York Times in 2017.
“I went down this weird, masochistic path. I never again in my life want to have an experience that isolating.”
The band eventually re-formed in 2016 and in 2017 released the album Crack-Up. On the recording, Pecknold is credited with playing acoustic, electric, and classical guitar, dreadnought, bass, piano, synthesizer, harpsichord, autoharp, marimba, organ, mellotron, and percussion, in addition to singing. Musically, he’s prodigiously talented.
But as a songwriter, however, he’s often placed among elite company.
“Like the writing of the band’s stylistic forebears — [Bob] Dylan, [Leonard] Cohen, [Neil] Young — the lyrics of the Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold are suffused with a yearning to return to a long-vanished, and perhaps entirely fictional, pastoral way of life,” The New Yorker wrote in 2022.
In his afterword to Wading in Waist-High Water: The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes, Pecknold burst the literary allusions many critics have placed upon his songs. “I don’t really identify as a lyricist, or even as a writer,” he wrote.
“I do make time most every day to sit down, sing into a microphone, and seek out song ideas, but I never sit down to write lyrics. I only ever ‘write’ words while actively singing … [it] goes on like this, order arising from chaos, until there’s a finished lyric that reveals some emotional truth I didn’t at first intend to share, and often don’t consciously understand. Maybe this is how the process works for real writers, too, but it never feels like writing to me. It feels more like discovering something.”
