Resonating with Bill Fox

Maybe we can do away with the shroud of mystery around Bill Fox.

For years, the Cleveland songwriter’s reclusive tendencies and reticence to promote his music or speak with reporters has been a primary talking point, sometimes overshadowing his brilliant songs. It’s true that Fox doesn’t follow any sort of music industry playbook. But over the last 15 or so years, since becoming a fan of his music and reaching out to him, I’ve found Fox to be mostly responsive and consistently gracious with his time. And in the months following the April release of Resonance, Fox’s latest full-length on Eleventh Hour Recording Co., multiple outlets have had success in speaking with the musician. 

“[The attention] doesn’t feel strange whatsoever,” Fox said during a recent late-night phone call. “I was ready to subject myself to whatever needs to be done to promote the LP.”

Often, Fox has straightforward, practical explanations for his musical presence or absence. He’s been playing more shows lately – including a Columbus gig at Ace of Cups on Friday, Aug. 1, with billmike and Marcy Mays – and that’s partly because he’s supporting the new record. But it’s also because he got a new guitar, and it makes playing songs in front of people more enjoyable. “It has a pickup in it, so now I can plug in and control the sound a little bit,” he said. “And I got a guitar strap for the first time in 20 years.”

And the origins of the new album? “These songs, for the most part, were in a scrap heap. I never thought that they would ever see the light of day. They just didn’t fit anywhere in anything I was doing,” Fox said. But all of that changed when a friend sent Fox a laptop equipped with ProTools, which allowed Fox to put on his producer hat and dig through the songs with fresh ears. He could digitally clean up his four-track cassette recordings a bit and sequence them in a way that made sense as a complete album. “Even though it’s of varying recording quality, to say the least, I was able to go in there and create song orders and distill an LP out of stuff that was just sitting in a junkyard,” he said.

Despite the humble beginnings of Resonance, no discerning listener would mistake these 11 songs for throwaways. In many ways, it’s a classic Bill Fox record, with all of the hallmarks that have made him a cult favorite – your favorite songwriter’s favorite songwriter (see accolades from Bob Pollard, Jeff Tweedy, etc.). The album captures Fox’s distinctive blend of power-pop and folk music enveloped in warm, warbly tape hiss. His songs have a timeless quality, sounding somehow fresh and familiar, like hearing a melody from a half-remembered dream.  

“I’m not an eclectic musician or artist or songwriter at all,” Fox said. “I’m very rooted in tradition.”

Resonance also covers Fox’s preferred lyrical terrain, boasting beautifully devastating love songs such as harmonica-heavy leadoff track “Terminal Way,” which contains this perfect couplet: “Get away, get away/I love you in a terminal way.” 

But Fox has always been more than a bard. He’s a mouthpiece for the workingman. (He even has a song titled “Get Your Workingman’s Things”). And he’s not afraid to get riled up and point fingers in a protest song. That tendency started all the way back in the 1980s with Fox’s short-lived power-pop trio the Mice, whose 1986 EP, For Almost Ever, features the catchiest song you’ve ever heard about American disillusionment, “Not Proud of the USA.” 

Or see “Men Who Are Guilty of Crimes,” an unreleased Fox song that ably soundtracked an Occupy Wall Street video back in 2011: “Oh canvassers, activists, congressmen plead/Put the blame down on Dow, put the blame on BP/But the ones who are guilty are the ones we don’t see/These men are guilty of crimes.” On Resonance, “Man of War” touches on similar themes: “Strewn with wreckage, corpses and carnage/Held captive but finally freed/Where victory is spoken, the markets are open/For the fingers of the men of greed.”

“There are implications of my own social and political discontent reflected in some of that stuff – things like excessive consumerism … and just the sense of overconsumption of post-World War II Western civilization,” Fox said. 

“Think of all the animals that get sacrificed for consumption,” he continued, referencing another Resonance track, “Meat Factory,” which isn’t metaphorical. Fox paints a grim, grisly picture of what it’s like to be stuck in a town where the only available job requires working with “severed heads, dismembered limbs,” just like “your grandpa done before, 60 years ago or more.” But Fox isn’t one to leave you without hope. Album standout “Lift Your Heads” plays like a ballad written to stir the hearts of the meat factory workers: “Lift up your faces you weary-eyed/Lift up your heads one and all/Lift up your eyes all you poor and despised/Lift your heads, don’t let them fall.”

Previously, Fox had set aside “Lift Your Heads,” thinking the lyrics came on too strong. “I sound like I’m singing from the point of view of a wise sage or something,” he said. But once he started sequencing the album, Fox liked it better when it was slotted next to “Desperation.” “I could temper it with that song, which is totally the opposite: ‘I’ve got a weight called desperation,’” Fox said. “I was able to balance it.”

“Lift Your Heads,” “Meat Factory” and “Man of War,” as well as “Wildflower,” were all recorded at legendary, now-defunct Right Track in Cleveland, where a former studio janitor named Trent Reznor recorded a little album called Pretty Hate Machine. Somehow the clarity of those tracks complements rather than competes with Fox’s home-recorded songs. “Wildlflower” also includes a guitar solo from Guided by Voices guitarist Doug Gillard, and the rest of the album features more collaborators than usual for Fox, including gorgeous violin from Janice Fields on “Lift Your Heads” and vocals from Karen Golden on “Wildflower.”

Perhaps the biggest collaborative surprise surfaces on closing track “Got Her on My Mind,” which Fox recorded with a full backing band during a multi-day studio session in West Virginia. Featuring background singers harmonizing and adding “oooh”s beneath Fox’s smokey rasp, plus organ and layered guitars, the arrangement has the potential to skew saccharine or overpower Fox. Instead, it’s an instant classic that makes me want to hear more of him in the frontman role. And it makes me grateful that Fox decided to go rooting through the junkyard. Artists spend years trying to write songs as good as the ones Fox discards.