Robin Pecknold and Casey Wescott from Fleet Foxes recently dropped into the BBC to chat with Lauren Laverne on her Radio 6 Music show. Smack-bang in the middle of a huge tour (which includes dates at Falls Fest) following the release of their brilliant album Crack-Up earlier in the year, the band are well and truly at the top of their game.
Listen to Fleet Foxes’ nail a stirring cover of a Nina Simone track, which was also sampled by Kanye West on The Life of Pablo.
Throughout the interview they performed two tracks, If You Need To, Keep Time on Me from Crack-Up, plus a stirring cover of Do What You Gotta Do, originally written by Jimmy Webb and performed by Nina Simone on her 1968 record ’Nuff Said!
Talking about the track, Pecknold explained: “I just love what she did to the melody. I love her melodic phrasing.”
Listen to the cover here. If You Need To, Keep Time on Me starts around the 4:30 mark, and the Do What You Gotta Do cover is at 13:00.
The track is a bit of a deep cut from Simone’s catalogue, however you might recognise it from a sample used on the Kanye West tune Famous, from Life of Pablo. The songs appears at 0:36, sung by Rhianna, and at 8:33 and throughout, where the original is sampled.
