Wading In Waist-High Water
Album: Shore (2020)
Songfacts®:
Fleet Foxes open their Shore album with this song about the joy of human connection. Frontman Robin Pecknold told Uncut magazine that he had planned on starting the record with "Sunblind," but after he wrote "Wading In Waist-High Water" in the summer of 2020, he thought, "This is great, it's like you're waking up at six or seven in the morning. It has some nice intro energy, like (Fairport Convention's) 'Come All Ye.'"
Pecknold had a melody and the lyrics, but when he tried to sing it, his attempts to pitch his voice up an octave to match the mourning-type tone of the music made him sound strange. So Pecknold recruited Uwade Akhare, a student at his alma mater, Columbia University, to handle vocals.
"A friend of mine sent me a video of her singing the Fleet Foxes song 'Mykonos,'" Pecknold explained. "I thought, that voice, the texture's perfect, the ease of it is perfect, that's exactly the voice that should be singing this one thing I'd written that I was a little confused by."
Akhere also recorded vocals for the album's title track and for "Can I Believe You."
Pecknold recorded Shore between September 2019 and September 2020 without the other Fleet Foxes members. He also produced the record himself.
Pecknold had described Fleet Foxes' previous album, Crack-Up, to Pitchfork as beginning in "pure conflicted solitude" and ending in a "bright clearing." This celebration of a coming together links up with how Crack-Up ends.
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