In 1936, the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a trilogy of essays for the magazine Esquire called The Crack-Up.

Within it, Fitzgerald parsed the hell of having his fame triumph over his mental health.

To be cracked, at the very least, is to recognize one’s misfortunes at the altar of renown.

“Now a man can crack in many ways — can crack in the head, in which case the power of decision is taken from you by others; or in the body, when one can but submit to the white hospital world; or in the nerves,” he wrote.

Robin Pecknold, the frontman of Fleet Foxes, may have had a good understanding of his nerves and how they were compromised when his band was catapulted into modest, but nonetheless uncomfortable stardom.

And so he named the band’s third album Crack-Up — recorded after a turbulent six years of absence and Pecknold’s stint at Columbia University.

From its 2008 EP Sun Giant all the way to 2011’s Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes is a band that has never bitten more than it could chew.

The band’s unbridled harmonies are always checked by clinical precision — guitar swirls, locked voices, piano glides.

It is pleasant folk music, somewhat earning them the “coffee shop musicians” designation, but what Fleet Foxes’ music has always hinted at is the band’s vigour for grandeur.

However, couched in conventional melodies, some of their songs can stretch to eight hypnotizing minutes (“The Shrine / An Argument”) or just sound really busy within a short time (“Lorelai”).

It is this vision of grandeur that makes the proggy Crack-Up an album distinct for its ardent refusal to keep things short.

On Jan. 4, 2017, the band performed live in Singapore at the Esplanade Theatre as part of a world tour in support of the album.

Fleet Foxes’ music has always translated well on headphones — it crackles with its incremental details.

It feels oddly insular and wide-eyed at the same time. In search of the same melodies, I expected the theatre to withhold this closed-off restlessness. Thankfully, it did not. The interlocking of these harmonies remained intact and mesmerizing throughout.

With a setlist that was more or less equally spread between the band’s four releases, the concert didn’t feel like it was a wholesale fan-service. The songs murmur and crash — often times into the next ones.

The openers from Crack-Up, “I Am That All I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar” and “Cassius, -,” sounded absolutely inviting.

But the harmonies did not just count on the voices — they were there in the array of guitars, horns, cello and ever-impressive percussion.

The more familiar songs — “White Winter Hymnal,” “Ragged Wood,” “Mykonos,” “Battery Kinzie,” — were not given a different treatment from their respective records, but given their respective placements within the setlist, they gave off a more lively aura.

Crack-Up is not an easy record to sit through. It scores the highest points in the execution of its micro-details: the segues, the abrupt additions of instruments.

On stage, many songs from the album wasted zero time holding the audience’s full attention. It was surprising to hear how well they made sense when sequenced with the fan-favorites — in that, it was both jarring and perfectly suited at the same time.

Pecknold sang some of these fan-favorites alone; “Tiger Mountain Pleasant Song” and the encores “Montezuma,” in which he bungled some of the lyrics, and “Oliver James.”

Even when he was the only person manning the stage, you could see how far Fleet Foxes has come from its bearded days.

And so when the final encore, “Helplessness Blues,” hit, it could not help but signal a future for Fleet Foxes in which restlessness and focused intensity will always be reliable virtues.

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