Your Original Mind

Usually when I talk about a song on here, I have a whole thesis or narrative about it: the twists of its harmony, the provenance of its sound, the winding path that led me to its pleasures, the interplay of its form and lyrics.

With Fleet Foxes' surging, impassioned "He Doesn't Know Why," an indelible tune from their stunning 2008 debut album, I'm a bit at a loss to explain its unique power. It has a shanty-like simplicity and a shape like an arrow: a straight line through four identical verses, then a sharp-angled snag on a full-stop chorus (with only slight embellishments: a cloud chorale and an odd piano tag). It is not quite a march, but it does have an implacable forward stomp that pulls us along. I think this has to do with two key elements. The first is its relentless quarter-note pulse, which kicks in with three-part vocal cluster chords:

When it enters, the verse melody—over guitar, piano, and bass parts marking out even quarter notes of accompaniment—traces an unsyncopated line that comes to rest every other measure on three firm quarter notes: Below, note "hair grown long," "face looked wrong," and "siren's song." The rhyme scheme emphasizes the pattern (or vice versa):

As with the chorus of Sharon Van Etten's "A Crime," or, say, the Leadbelly version of "John Hardy," the use of a series of quarter notes stands out as either plaintive or assertive, or both.

The second way the songs pulls us forward is its harmony, which maintains an inherent tension for much of its running time. Its home key is D-flat but as you can see above, it only glancingly lands there, in measure 5, and then only to build up in an irresistible stepwise climb up to an A-flat—the V chord that craves a return to the I. But except for a brief reiteration of the opening chorale between verses 2 and 3, this resolution to D-flat is expertly withheld, building suspense precipitously to the dramatic touchdown of the chorus. Here the band comes to a full stop and Robin Pecknold, the lead singer, blasts out the song's highest note and holds it for four uninterrupted beats, punctuated only by a full-band one-two punch on a pair of eighth notes (in red below):

Those notes are repeated over a G-flat chord and a similarly hollowed-out backup, then this entire two-line chorus reruns as the band's pulse eases back in, along with some complementary choral harmonies and one tiny but important lyrical change of the last verb: from "do" to "say." The song seems to conclude with a return of the opening chord-cluster chorale and a clean landing on a D-flat —but then, after what sounds like a casual verbal exchange in the studio and a short pause, a rolling piano section with an entirely different feel and the home key of G-flat finishes the track, in what feels like a wink or curtsy after the song's high drama.

Admittedly the content of that drama is a bit hard to nail down precisely, but the intensity of its feeling is unmistakable. Our singer seems to be struggling mightily to make sense of the behavior of a beloved friend or family member who has returned after years of having apparently gone AWOL as a kind of vagrant, and who doesn't seem to be forthcoming about the lost time: "You don't say a single word of the last two years." The song's insistent repeated verses seem to push that frustration up the same hill with a Sisyphean determination, whereas the chorus feels like a moment of resignation—of letting the rock tumble down into a cloud of dust, and hoping for some kind of peace in not knowing.

That would also fairly describe my grip on how this tune works its magic. It's almost like the title is talking about the reason for my affinity for the song: I truly don't know why.