There’s only so long one can sit in the busy outside area of a music venue, alone on an early Friday evening without beginning to feel (and look) incredibly strange, so I feel a huge sense of relief as Foxing’s tour manager approaches me after their soundcheck and introduces Josh Coll, the band’s bass player and co-lyricist. I ask him if he wants to go inside to do the interview, but he gives me a slightly apprehensive look and simply replies: “Oh… but I won’t be able to smoke in there.” We decide to head to a quieter bench across the road instead.
Foxing are coming to the end of their first UK tour, supporting Scranton-based emo band Tigers Jaw. “We were in Vermont working on a record and we got an email from our manager asking if we wanted to do an overseas tour with them,” Coll says. “We weren’t planning on doing any tours ‘till our record came out, but we really like Tigers Jaw and we really wanted to get overseas, so it was kind of a no-brainer for us”. The record he’s referring to is Dealer, the band’s upcoming sophomore release which is expected later this year. The band have been playing one new track on this tour, which was one of the few that they were able to, as he explains “the new record utilises a lot of different instruments and a lot of them are synthesizers, and we didn’t have the capability to bring them with us on this tour… the song we’re playing in particular doesn’t require anything other than the five of us and our main instruments, so that was one reason, Also, I think we just like playing it, we played it on our last US tour from time to time and we enjoyed it, so it just felt right to keep playing it.”
Coll describes the new record as being darker and more focused than their 2013 debut The Albatross, also mentioning that the band felt more confident in writing choruses in their songs. “Sonically it’s more focused, and I think it’s a little bit more direct in terms of song structure,” he said. “We wanted to tighten up the way we approach songs. Like when I listen to The Albatross in hindsight, it doesn’t feel self-indulgent, but it also it’s not as confident as we maybe are now as songwriters.” He also described a change in the way lyrics had been written on this release: “I think that that was something we intentionally tried to work on, I think we wanted to be little bit more clear, and a little bit more forthright. There’s never a discussion about how much we’re going to talk about something, but as writers both him and I have had more recently a desire to speak a little bit more candidly within the lyrics as to what the song’s about.”
If it’s not already apparent, I should mention how endearingly reserved and mild-mannered Josh is to talk to. He seems fairly tired, something expected of a musician approaching the end of a tour in a foreign land, yet still gives thoughtful answers, even humouring me when I asked him about the origins of the band’s name as a sound-check before we began the interview. (Foxing is a term referring to brown age-spots on books, and the word is derived from the chemical involved, ferric oxide – who knew?) He began talking about the lyrics on Dealer when I asked him about whether he viewed writing as something personal and cathartic, or whether he intentionally left his songs open-ended to allow the listener to interpret it how they wish. The answer, it seems, lies somewhere in the middle; he describes the writing process as very personal and “therapeutic”, and so therefore feels the need to keep the explicit details of song meanings “cloaked”: “To give that specific meaning kind of does two things. It takes a little bit away from the experience for the the listener, because anyone that listens to a piece of music, they’re experiencing that piece vicariously, they’re filtering it through their own life, their own experiences, and adding meaning to it that applies to them. When you give away the specifics of that, it maybe subconsciously alters the way people perceive that piece. And I think on the other end, for us as people you’re always trying to work out a balance of how much you want to reveal in your personal life, and how much people deserve to know… I think that it’s nice to keep some things to ourselves and let people have their own interpretation.”
He was happy to discuss some of the meanings behind songs on the record, however. When I ask him about the title of ‘The Medic’, he says that “initially, the desire to name a song that came from [when] I spent some time in Afghanistan, and became friends with one of the medics there, and he passed away… and also, it’s in some way a double meaning as the song content is about self-medication, a little bit, and so I liked the idea of [that] when you think about a medic, you think about someone who saves people, or helps people, but within that people who are abusing things are also medicating, but it’s not a positive force.” The title of the record, The Albatross is also an interesting reference: “that comes from a poem called ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’… I guess we felt the content of the record treaded similar paths. The albatross in the poem is something the ship captain is forced to wear around his neck, because he brought a lot of bad luck upon his ship. In maritime mythology, the albatross is like a sign of good luck, and so for us I think we looked at a looked at a lot of the content of the record as being like self-perpetuated bad luck, and being forced to reconcile with a lot of things that you’re bringing upon yourself.”
There’s no doubt that The Albatross is one of the more interesting rock albums released in recent years, and not just lyrically. The diverse and unique sound blends post-rock tinged emo with huge amounts of indie that borders on folky lo-fi. I ask him if the band tend to listen to the same music, or whether each member brings different influences to the table. “There’s kind of a running joke amongst the five of us that none of us listen to the same music at all. There are definitely overlaps, and there are bands and artists that we all agree on, but not that many. We all bring whatever we’re personally interested in, or you know, maybe it’s not a case of bringing anything at all.”
The band may still be in their fairly early stages, but the intense reaction from some of their fans doesn’t seem typical of a band on their first supporting tour of the UK. Foxing have earned themselves a dedicated and passionate fanbase, as have many relatively young bands in their scene. The high demand for The Albatross on LP is a clear indicator of this – even in times of economic recession, student debt and Spotify, the fact that a band with relatively little mainstream exposure can have physical albums continually selling out must be encouraging. “I think this is the first band any of us have been in that have had anything pressed to vinyl, so when it was initially pressed we were all really excited, and it felt like a little milestone. I think we were content with that, and now think we’ve put orders in up to the tenth pressing, which is really strange, I don’t think any of us had anticipated having to pick that any different colour combinations. I would never have expected so many people to want to own a physical copy of that record, so it’s really affirming and wonderful”.
Words by Joe Gilbertson