Songfacts®:

• In 2017, Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold had an accident while surfing in California. The rope attaching his leg to his surfboard snapped, and he lost the board. This was in deep water, far from shore, and as he swam back he got caught in a current. It took Pecknold 15 minutes to swim back to the beach as he got constantly pummeled by waves. The singer was so happy to make it back to shore.
  
  This song, inspired by the incident, is the final (and title) track of Fleet Foxes' fourth album. Pecknold considers it the record's epilogue in the same way the opening track, "Wading In Waist-High Water," is a prologue.
  
  "I really thought about the album as imagining you're standing on the shore looking at the ocean and you're reckoning with if you should stay on shore or go back to sea - the shore being this comforting place and full of memories and the sea being this dangerous, empty place where we can't live because it's this expanse of death or something," he told EW. "This song is expressing gratitude towards my family and friends and heroes for everything that they've given me as a person. And then back in the water, the music goes to this really wild place where the syllables of every word are pulling apart from each other. There's chaos beneath the sea and then you rise back up and you're floating on calm water."
• Pecknold names two of his musical heroes.
  
  I remember Prine I remember you
  After word of Berman I remember Pfeiffer burning
  
  Country folk singer John Prine died on April 7, 2020 after contracting COVID. David Berman, the frontman of Silver Jews, committed suicide on August 7, 2019, and three weeks later a wildfire swept through California's Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. Pecknold also namechecks Berman in another of Shore's tracks, "Sunblind."
• Fleet Foxes released Shore to wide acclaim on September 22, 2020. It was the band's fourth consecutive Top 10 album in the UK; Uncut magazine ranked it their second-best album of 2020 and BBC Radio 6 Music placed it at #3 on their list.