Maestranza

Named for the ancient bullring in Seville, this song carries its geography in its DNA — the acoustic guitar figure at its center has the modal, circling quality of Andalusian flamenco filtered through a Northern European sensibility, and the effect is of something both foreign and deeply familiar. Pecknold's voice enters with great restraint, the melody moving slowly through phrases that feel older than the recording, as though the song is unearthing itself rather than being written. The arrangement is sparse to the point of austerity — the guitar and voice do nearly everything, with only the faintest textural additions hovering at the edges — which forces each note to carry more weight than it would in a fuller production. The emotional register is elegiac without being mournful, a kind of tender attention to something passing or already passed. It belongs to that small category of songs that feel like they were not composed so much as remembered from somewhere prior to the composer. Within Fleet Foxes' catalog it serves as a kind of doorway — brief, concentrated, charged with implication. The song suits the late evening of a long trip somewhere unfamiliar, when exhaustion and beauty arrive at the same moment and you cannot tell them apart.