more fleet foxes — “winter white hymnal”

I was following the pack
all swallowed in their coats
with scarves of red tied ’round their throats
to keep their little heads
from fallin’ in the snow
And I turned ’round and there you go
And, Michael, you would fall
and turn the white snow red as strawberries
in the summertime

The video to this song — embedded below — is simply gorgeous. Genius. Please watch it; you won’t be sorry. The song itself is haunting. The lyrics are beautiful and …. grim; they make you shiver a bit, don’t they? Sean Pecknold, brother to Fleet Foxes lead singer Robin Pecknold, directed the video and created the claymation here. I love how he didn’t try to interpret those lyrics literally. I mean, who would really want to see whatever happened to poor Michael?

A side note: That’s one of the things that both annoys me and cracks me up when YouTubers try to make their own videos to famous songs. How freakin’ literal they are. Such slaves to the lyrics. They’ll take a song like, oh, say, Dan Fogelberg’s Run For The Roses and do this:

And it’s a run (someone running)
for the roses (bouquet of roses)
as fast as you can (a can)
Your fate is delivered (mailman with envelope that says “fate”)
your moment’s at hand (uhm … a hand)

Stop it, YouTubers! Stop it now. I do not want to play Charades with you.

Pecknold, thankfully, knows better. Understands how to interpret the emotion, the feeling, the mood, of the song. Here, he visually interprets what the song is doing musically. The tune itself, just the music, is basically a round. Pecknold takes the circular pattern of a musical round and creates a circular video. Life itself, turning back the wheel of time, not being able to control that, life inexorably coming ’round to itself again. The circle. The circle. Ah, it makes me cry. And the emotion in the faces of his little clay characters. They are clay and yet, I feel what they are feeling. I get chills at the 40-second mark. Watch the old man turning the crank of time, how he gets younger, how they all get younger. The eagle setting his prey back on the branch. Time giving a second chance. Then watch, as the old man loses control of the crank of time — that moment! Just the lighting in this video is a little visual miracle. And the man in the red jacket at the end, rediscovering his beard, his face as he strokes it, the turn of his head … ah, there it is again … the implied sigh …. the second chance is gone.

A breathtaking piece.