INTERVIEW: Nathan Evans Fox Cultivates Yallidarity
With his new album Heirloom, Nathan Evans Fox delivers a master class in consciousness-raising music that is also human and earthy. In our interview, Fox tells us more about his anti-Confederate politics ethos and his ruthless but caring approach to songwriting.
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With his new album Heirloom, Nathan Evans Fox delivers a master class in consciousness-raising music that is also human and earthy. The album finds Fox confronting parenthood in the wake of losing his father, and asking what it means to raise a child in a world where it feels our society is becoming increasingly unstable. In our interview, Fox tells us more about his anti-Confederate politics ethos and his ruthless but caring approach to songwriting.
Do you have any songwriting tips you can share?
First, be your best editor--equal parts ruthless and caring. Writing a good song is about killing your darlings, trusting that they compost well, and squeezing the juice out of every word, while still knowing when to bullshit and let it get loose and messy. Second, be considerate of your audience. Music is supposed to be connective, so write songs that honor the time and work that goes into listening. Folks have heard plenty of cliches, slop, sentimental love songs, both-sides political songs, sardonic white guy music, etc. Respect your audience by giving them a good meal with some meat and some sweets, and make them feel like somebody who loves cooking made it. Third, there is no correlation between being a shitty person and possessing artistic genius, so don't be one.
Explain the title of your album.
I became a dad and lost my dad in the same year. That season of profound transition left me considering what it means to find yourself dead in the middle of generations. Becoming a parent and grieving a parent both imply an awful lot of sifting through the legacies your parents left you. As an okra-obsessed gardener, I spend a scary amount of time thinking about seedbanking--selecting the seeds from the plants you like from this season to sow in the next . It's about culling and keeping, preserving and letting go, hope and loss. Heirloom is an expression of the ways I find myself between growing seasons, seedbanking the things I want to pass down to my children or culling what ends with me.
How do you kill the long hours in the van?
I listen to a lot of podcasts: Proles Pod, Upstream, old seasons of Blowback, various NBA pods, Behind the Bastards, etc. I also like to grandmothermaxx and use the time to catch up and give folks a call. Just doing some fellowshipping. But let's be honest, sometimes I just drive in silence and let the climate-controlled womb of the car consume me.
How are you using your platform to support marginalized people?
The biggest thing for me is being explicit with the politics that inform my music. That happens in plenty of ways: helping to organize the musician's union in Nashville, talking about liberation and socialist politics at my shows, rolling out zines about rewilding country music, and inviting people to connect with organizers and activists via my Anti-Confederate Southern History book club. There's an implicit agreement in country music that the farther left you go, the quieter and more abstract your political speech has to be. My (probably unrealistic) goal is to shatter that arrangement and make room for as many comrades as possible in country music. You don't have to agree with my politics to enjoy my songs, but you do have to know you're enjoying the fruit of something grown from anti-Confederate community. I don't want to offer listeners the convenience of avoiding the soldarities that produced the cultural goods they enjoy. No tourism. No cultural extraction.
What 5 albums are you going to make your kid listen to and why?
1. All my records. If they can stream it, I can perform better in the algorithm.
2. Amazing Grace - Aretha Franklin. This is one of the greatest live records I've ever heard. Hands down. The engineering is impeccable, the recording translates the energy of the room, and the songs are unimpeachable. This record is saturated with feel.
3. Roger and Out - Roger Miller. This record is many things: a reminder that country music can be playful, that feelings don't have to happen in monocultures, that drugs are dangerous.
4. Roses in the Snow - Emmylou Harris. This is one of the greatest country records of all time. Period. Full stop. Argue with God. Emmylou doesn't miss, and these songs feel like my heart found a home with a big comfy chair. Also, this record gives me an opportunity to give my kids an anti-Ricky Skaggs lore dump.
5. Desperate Man - Eric Church. This is one of my personal favorites by one of my favorite artists. It's inventive and playful, the kind of creative risk you don't often see A-list country stars take. It's a mullein plant in a country music landscape being overtaken by corporate kudzu.
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