Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold Wants MySpace to 'Mercy-Kill' Their Profile

A lot of people are sick of MySpace but perhaps no one more so than Fleet Foxes' lead singer Robin Pecknold.

Earlier this month, the indie rocker expressed his frustrations with the website in a string of tweets. "The myspace show thing is seriously f---ed. People add us to shows and we can't delete it but shows up on our page. Your site does harm," he typed.

That was soon followed by: "Can someone on the inside PLEASE mercy-kill our myspace page. We aren't opening for Take That. Jesus."

"It's just so frustrating that they won't delete our page," Pecknold, whose band will release 'Helplessness Blues' next week, tells Spinner. "It's been months and it's just sad because I used to use MySpace to check out bands all the time and now it's completely useless."


Pecknold credits the site's slump to a lack of innovation, adding that "it's sad that they ended up totally s----ing the bed. But nothing can be done at this point.

"It just stayed the same and as older people got more used to using the Internet, MySpace had nothing to offer them. Everyone's mom has a Facebook page but my mom never had a MySpace page. It's like they didn't account for the changing demographics of the Internet."



Alternatives have surfaced as of late, with Bandcamp and Soundcloud moving to the forefront of music/social networking sites, giving Pecknold a glimmer of hope outside the realms of MySpace.

"It seems like there's less abrasive places where people are putting music now," says Pecknold. "Maybe Facebook will get their music page together, because their music page is still kind of weird."

One networking tool Pecknold does give the thumbs up to is Twitter. The singer admits to starting a Twitter account for selfish reasons in the midst of mixing their upcoming record. "It had just been such a long time in the cave and I just needed somebody to talk to so I signed up for a fake friend called Twitter," says Pecknold.

"I just needed to talk at something. I think that everybody's a more complex person than just what they express through their music, and it's an interesting way to get another view of an artist.

"Your avenues of expression are either your record that comes out once every few years or your interviews, which sometimes are fine but sometimes you get misquoted. That's how people hear about you. For me, as a guy in that situation, Twitter doesn't give a f--- because you get to talk to people on another level."