photos from robin pecknold & throw me the statue at neumo’s on saturday.

Saturday night marked the grand finale of Vera Project‘s seventh annual “A Drink for the Kids” fundraiser. Throw Me the Statue mixed-in plenty of sneak peeks of their forthcoming album Creaturesque as encouragement to visit a real live record store and talk to a real person about music next month, related stories about being mistaken for nineteen-year-olds at a basketball court, challenged attendees to rack up massive bar tabs (for the kids, of course, and also a free t-shirt), and generally poured on the usual charm offensive.
Robin Pecknold, performing sometimes solo, and other times with Fleet Foxes bandmates and pals J. Tillman and Skye Skjelset treated an adoring crowd (one woman, in particular, couldn’t contain herself from shouting her elation at the band’s return to ‘the hill’ between almost every song break) to a mix of old time spirituals, Fleet Foxes standbys, and plenty of covers. By now, his take on Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two Headed Boy” (surprisingly good, and only a few forgotten lyrics) and the Magnetic Fields’s “the Book of Love” must surely be making the rounds on the internets by now (a quick search turns up audio [peenko] from taper Jackson Barnes [megaupload]; others have extracted that mp3 for you [p'fork]); a half-hearted attempt at Belle & Sebastian’s “Stars of Track and Field”, on the other hand, was wisely halted soon enough to fade into much-deserved obscurity; and a request-filled encore concluded with Fleetwood Mac with a bit of help from his sister.
Though he professed that this wasn’t really his event — he doesn’t drink and has no love for children — he drew a large fundraising crowd, with the only crime being that fans may have been too transfixed with the happenings onstage to slip away to order more drinks from the bar.