Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold once lost a high school talent show after performing an Elliott Smith cover, but audiences are sure to be more accepting of his lovely, just-released take on the late singer/songwriter’s “Angel in the Snow,” which can be found on the soundtrack to the Amazon MGM holiday movie Oh. What. Fun.
As previously reported, Gwen Stefani, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten and the bird and the bee all contributed exclusive tracks to the album. Directed by Michael Showalter, Oh. What. Fun. stars Michelle Pfeiffer as a family matriarch accidentally separated from her family during the holidays. The cast includes Felicity Jones, Chloë Grace Moretz, Denis Leary, Dominic Sessa, Danielle Brooks, Devery Jacobs, Havana Rose Liu, Maude Apatow, Jason Schwartzman, Eva Longoria and Joan Chen.
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In early 2000s Seattle, Pecknold’s cover of Smith’s “Pitseleh” didn’t stand a chance amid high school competition such as “the Britney Spears dancers.” As he recalls to SPIN, “the judges were the teachers and they didn’t get it, so the next year I went back and did ‘After the Gold Rush.’ That time, I won. Eventually, I was going to community college to finish high school, but I chimed back in at graduation in 2004 with all these handouts that said ‘RIP Elliott.’ The yearbook that year had a plastic sleeve that you could slip paper in front of, so me and my friends had that little tribute to him.”
Smith’s music continues to cast a long shadow for Pecknold, who was inspired to pick up a guitar in the first place thanks to his “weird tunings and different chord shapes. If the Beach Boys were an example of what you can do with chamber orchestration, then Joni Mitchell and Elliott were what you can do with just a couple guitars and some interesting progressions and songwriting skill. When I was a teenager, I would try and make Elliott ripoff songs that really missed the point. It’s just so singular. It stopped being something I even tried to integrate that much into what I was doing. It was the kind of thing where you love it so much that you leave it alone, you know?”
Pecknold acknowledges the bittersweet quality of “Angel in the Snow,” but says “it has a tenderness to it that’s in a lot of his music. It doesn’t have the kind of empty darkness of some of that later stuff.” As for his approach to covering the song, he admits, “I’m very literal with covers. I treat them more like sheet music than something to be drastically reinterpreted. I’m just historical reenactment-coded to some degree (laughs). It’s really fun to dive into stuff like that, especially when there are slightly more involved parts to be executing.”
Asked why he thinks sensitive singer/songwriters like Smith and Jeff Buckley still resonate with new generations of listeners, Pecknold observes, “I used to take for granted the ‘90s-ness of Elliott and Jeff Buckley a little bit, because it was just the sea in which they were swimming. I was drawn to the ‘60s-ness of both artists. Jeff Buckley had Nina Simone’s delivery, and Elliott had those Beatles-esque chord progressions. I don’t think I was clocking their nostalgia in real time when it was happening. A lot of Phoebe Bridgers-style music feels Elliott-inspired in a way that is reintroducing some of his ideas, mentality or approach to a younger audience. He’s one where you’re like, man, what would he have been doing if he was still around? God. It’s such a shame, but he left an incredible body of work for sure.”
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