Getting To Know Foxing

Foxing

Chicago – When Foxing formed three years ago, the St. Louis band went in knowing they wouldn’t be around forever and neither would their music. But as historians look back on documents to understand our past, perhaps the quintet’s music will go on to be appreciated by music lovers for years to come, long after they’ve gone. Whatever the case, the fact is Foxing is here now, and if their superb debut album The Albatross – re-released on Triple Crown Records – is any indication of what’s to come from the emotional quintet during their run, we’re happy to say we caught them while they were in their prime.

Best New Bands talked with frontman Conor Murphy (vocals, trumpet, & piano), drummer Jon Hellwig, and guitarists Ricky Sampson and Eric Hudson before their Chicago show at The Bottom Lounge. (Bassist Josh Coll was feeling a little under the weather.) We talked about their debut album, making music videos, and their favorite films.

“Rory” is so heart wrenching. What inspired this number?

Murphy: That one was originally just a piano part that I wrote out for practice. We had a practice one day. We were just out of ideas entirely. For the most part, I don’t write the first thing we start a song off with, but we were just so totally out of ideas for the day, that we just went with something that I was playing, and then that was the chord structure for “Rory.” That day, while we were playing, I wrote out almost all the lyrics. Josh came in and added lyrics, and we took some out. But yeah, it was pretty much like the vocal part and the piano part stayed the same, but it’s gone through crazy different changes musically, especially when Eric came into the band. We just changed it a whole lot. Musically it’s been so scatterbrained over the course of writing it. Now it just is what it is.

 The video for “Rory” is amazing. Who came up with the concept? And seeing as some of you were film students, did you take part in the making of it?

Murphy: From the get-go, for the “Rory” video, we really didn’t have any money to shoot it, so we borrowed gear from my college and just shot it all ourselves. We cast people through connections we have with our professors, like to have kids in the video… The boy in the video is actually Eric’s little brother. Yeah, for that one we didn’t have any money to do it, so we just had to do it ourselves. We ended up liking it so much that we did the second one ourselves, as well, but with more support from Triple Crown.

It looks professionally done! And the video for “The Medic” is also visually strong. I especially love when the roses come up from the sheets!

Murphy: Thank you very much! Yeah, we pretty much put it upon ourselves to shoot that one with as little money as possible, while still pulling it off. So to do that, we had to do a lot of things. Like, Eric was clipping thorns off roses for like three hours.

How did you make the roses grow?

Hudson: That’s a secret!

Will you have to kill me if you tell me? (laughs)

Murphy: We actually did a time lapse over the course of three months, where we set a camera there and just… (everyone laughs) No but honestly, it was one of these really cool things that happened. We didn’t know how we were gonna do it, but we had an idea of how we would do it. We ended up pulling it off. We are so, so proud of it, that I never want to tell anyone how we did it. (laughs)

After releasing The Albatross on Count Your Lucky Stars Records, you signed with Triple Crown Records and re-released the LP. I take it you guys are also working on a new LP with Triple Crown?

Hellwig: Yeah, after this touring cycle is done at the end of the year, we’re taking time off to do some recording. We’re actually planning on locking ourselves away fro a month. We have a few songs done. Well not done, but kind of planned out. We’re going to re-work those, as well as writing what will hopefully be the rest of the next album. We’re gonna get that out as quick as we can. But for us, “as quick as we can” might be a little longer as expected. (laughs)

A lot of journalists have categorized you as emo, but I find it hard to lump you guys into a particular category or genre. What type of music or genres do you lean towards?

Hudson: I don’t know. I mean, I’m going to say what I feel like everyone says about this. It’s hard for me to really identify with genres of music because I don’t really view music in that sense. I guess you have to classify it as something because when you’re describing something to someone else may not know your music or the music you’re talking about, in general, you have to classify it some way, but I don’t know. The idea of genres kind of becomes weird when people create a culture around it. For example, if said like an emo band, that has a culture around it, or like a death metal band, that has a culture around it. I mean, really how people want to identify our band, is fine with us. It’s just we don’t necessarily fit into those cultures. We’re just kind of bouncing around.

Genres aside, are there any bands that inspire you?

Hudson: Honestly, pretty much any classic rock band. The idea of reviving rock and rock seems great right now. So that’s what I’m into.

Sampson: Right now I’m really into the porches scene from New York right now, bands like Crying, Porches, Frankie Cosmos. They’re all different genres, but you can feel this sense of community in music. It’s really cool, and they’re putting out amazing music!

Hellwig: I’ve been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa in the past six months, and still haven’t gotten out of that phase. He’s too wacky for me to ignore!

Murphy: I used to listen to this band a whole lot, and recently they put out this new album called Close To The Glass. The Notwist is the band. They are so amazing! I’ve just been getting back into all their albums.

Since some of you guys studied film, I must ask what some of your favorite films are, and if you could re-score any film, which would it be?

Murphy: Favorite film for me is probably Children of Men. If I could re-score any movie, it would be No Country for Old Men because every time I watch that movie, you know, the entire thing doesn’t have a soundtrack! It doesn’t have any music in the entire movie, so like when I saw that movie for the first time, I thought about music that would be playing in it. It would be awesome! You could do anything with it [because] you have no frame of reference. It would be awesome.

Hellwig: My favorite movie of all-time is Jurassic Park, and if I could re-score any movie, I would re-score Jurassic Park.

Sampson: My favorite film is probably Rushmore. I really like great cinematography. I love the liar protagonist. I think it’s great.

Hudson: I guess I can think of my favorite movie lately, and that’s been There Will Be Blood. It’s a crazy, dark movie, but I don’t know, I just think that film from top to bottom is amazing. It’s really good. As far as re-scoring a film, I wonder what would happen if you re-score any romantic comedy because those are basically just whatever pop songs are out at the time. So if you re-scored it as this really beautiful, orchestral thing, maybe it’d be a great movie. (laughs) I don’t know. I just think that’d be an interesting experiment.

Anything you would like to leave us with?

Hellwig: We’re out of vinyl right now, but you can still buy Run the Jewels 2. (laughs)

I saw that online. Will you have more vinyl soon?

Hellwig: We’ll have more in January.

If you can’t wait till January, you can download a digital copy of The Albatross on iTunes. (And if you’re stumped about that Run the Jewels 2 comment, click HERE.) Foxing is touring throughout December.

Check out Foxing’s facebook page for tour dates, so that you can catch them while they’re still around!

Photo Credit: Hayden Molinarolo

 

Sarah Hess

Sarah Hess

At the age of six, Sarah Hess discovered True Blue by Madonna. This resulted in her spending hours in front of the bathroom mirror with a hairbrush microphone, belting out "La Isla Bonita" off key. Her love for music only intensified over the years thanks to her parents; her mother exposed Sarah to The Jackson Five and had her hustling to the Bee Gees, while her father would play her albums like 'Pet Sounds' and 'Some Girls' from start to finish, during which he'd lecture on and on about the history of rock & roll. Sarah would eventually stumble upon rap and hip-hop, then punk and alternative, and fall madly in love with Jeff Buckley and film photography.

After attending The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Sarah went on to study education at Dominican University, earning a degree in history. When not teaching, writing, or taking in a show, she is most likely to be found with a camera to her eye or hanging out in a darkroom.


You can follow Sarah Hess on twitter at @Sarahhasanh and view her music photography on her website: smhimaging.com.
Sarah Hess

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