It’s been said that there’s nothing duller than listening to someone else describe their dreams, but from the first heraldic strums of Grown Ocean, the closer on Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues, Robin Pecknold’s dream holds your attention.

“I’m as old as the mountains, still as starlight reflected in fountains”, he sings, as the band provides its signature rising-sun harmonies. The point isn’t the imagery of the dream, but the joy and wonder it instills in him, so his epiphanic lack of presumption and cynicism is, even more than the music, a nod to the band’s 1960s folk-rock forebears. And Fleet Foxes translate that lyrical exuberance into a lively, celebratory arrangement: Skyler Skjelset’s guitar darts playfully around the melodic lines, Josh Tillman plays a heartbeat tattoo on the bass drum, and flute trills announce a rousing finale.

It’s also worth noting that the complexity and beauty of this finale herald in the first note of Crack-Up, six years after this song closed out Helplessness Blues—Robin has stated that this last note connects directly to the first note of “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar”, the first song off of Crack-Up.