I want to tell you about a song I have been playing a lot lately. It’s the kind of song you swear you already know by heart, even as you are hearing it for the first time. It’s like a Paul McCartney tune from the late 1960s that didn’t end up on a Beatles album and should have. (Is the song I’m talking about a cover of a possibly forgotten outtake from one of the Anthology albums? No, it’s not. I checked.) The singer is from Ohio, but his voice bears the faintest trace of a feigned British accent. He’s not doing a full-on English impersonation like fellow Buckeye Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices; It’s more like he’s evoking the ambience of a British accent, without sacrificing his organic, lived-in Midwestern raspiness, in a manner that makes me think about Paul Westerberg’s woefully under-heard 1999 semi-classic, Suicaine Gratifaction. (Is the song a Westerberg cover? No, I checked that, too.)
“Open your hearts from without and within / lift your heads don’t let them drop” is my favorite line. When he sings that part, it reminds me of the rustic folk-rock ballads that Gene Clark perfected in the 1970s. As Gene often did, the singer accompanies himself on an acoustic guitar. And he is backed only by a violinist, whose playing sounds both country and classical at the same time. (It is not a Gene Clark cover, I confirmed.) This song signifies a world of music that is instantly familiar and comforting to me, but it’s also new. And when I play it for the 20th time, I marvel that it’s still possible to hear music like this, a song that unlocks something inside that you forgot was there.
It’s called “Lift Your Heads” and it’s by a singer-songwriter named Bill Fox, who has just released his latest album, Resonance. For 99.999 percent of the population, this will register as the first-ever news about an artist with the most generic “Ohio man” name imaginable. But for a small cult of fans, it is a wondrous development. Resonance is the first Bill Fox record in 13 years, and only his fifth solo LP in the past 29 years. (He also fronted a power-pop band in the ’80s called The Mice that is worshipped by power-pop freaks like the aforementioned Robert Pollard, who has raved about them being an influence on GBV. Fox, in turn, sounds a bit like an amalgam of Pollard and his former GBV bandmate, the elfin-voiced Tobin Sprout.)
The bulk of Fox’s reputation rests on two albums he put out in the late ’90s, Shelter From The Smoke (1996) and Transit Byzantium (1998). They were mostly recorded at home by Fox himself on a four-track. Unlike the unruly blasts of psychedelic pseudo-arena rock turned out by his peers in GBV, Fox plays songs with Dylanesque instrumentation (voice, guitar, harmonica) and a Beatlesque melodic sense. And his lyrics — often lovelorn, occasionally political, usually introspective, and always poetic in a plainspoken way — are far better-written and heartbreaking than they need to be.
The mood of those ’90s records is homemade and intimate, like they weren’t meant to be heard outside of a close circle of friends. I’m thinking of “Sara Page,” an especially beautiful song from Shelter From The Smoke, where you can hear a TV (or maybe it’s a radio?) playing in the background. Or “Since I’ve Been Gone,” which like so many Bill Fox compositions seems to be about trying to live a decent life while negotiating various unspoken disappointments and traumas. “Field of dreams been cut down a ways / field of dreams been cut down a ways / field of dreams been cut down a ways since I’ve been gone,” he sings, without overplaying the hurt baked into the lyric.
That’s how I think it goes, anyway. Bill Fox lyrics can be hard to find, along with any other information about him or his music. Of all the obscure singer-songwriters that have garnered even a modicum of acclaim in the past several decades, I am confident in declaring that Bill Fox is in the top one-percentile of mysterious enigmas. Though the mystery is mundane in nature. He’s not Syd Barrett locked up in an asylum or Leonard Cohen meditating at a monastery. It’s as if he tried to make everything about himself unexceptional other than his music. There’s his comically un-Googleable moniker, as well as his nondescript, every-dude appearance on his album covers. Even in the company of musical outsiders, Bill Fox doesn’t fit in.
If that really was the strategy, it worked: Bill Fox has never been written about by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, or Spin, in his prime or otherwise. His reviews on AllMusic are light on biographical information and details on the records under discussion. With one major exception, you can’t really read or learn about Bill Fox anywhere. And, sure, you could say the same about most obscure songwriters. But not most great obscure songwriters, which Bill Fox is.
His absence from these platforms feels more like the product of artist design than editorial choice, as I discovered myself while trying to procure basic facts about Resonance for this column. (More on that later.) So, forgive me in advance for some of the educated guesses I’ve made. For instance, based on the scant knowledge I have of Fox, I believe he is now in his late 50s. I can’t say for certain when Resonance was recorded, but I am pretty sure one of the songs, “Man Of War,” dates from the early ’90s, and not only because it’s a quasi-protest number that references Desert Storm stalwart General Norman Schwarzkopf. It’s possible the recording also dates from that time, as Fox’s voice still sounds remarkably like it did on those late ’90s records. But his voice is also well preserved on the other tracks, so perhaps “Man Of War” was laid down with those tunes after all.
What matters most of course — on this I’m sure Fox would agree — is the music. And I’m happy to report that Resonance is uniformly excellent and presents an ideal entry point for newcomers. The first number, “Terminal Way,” is a great example of his knack for McCartney-like pop craftsmanship, reduced to hard acoustic strums and harmonica blasts. The chorus — “But get away / get away / I love yah in a terminal way” — signifies Fox’s romantic misanthropy, a recurring theme in his work and a source of unending melancholia stemming from an intractable “you can’t fire me because I quit” attitude.
And then there’s “Meat Factory,” a stunning dirge about small-town drudgery delivered with a deceptively light touch, like Donovan singing “Masters Of War.” Only Fox’s target isn’t the military-industrial complex but the local slaughterhouse, a hellish place where “all your early childhood hopes / get mangled in the blades and spokes” and the only salvation is that “an office bench / will raise you from the smell and stench.” I realize that reads like the opposite of a toe tapper on the page. But when Fox sings it, “Meat Factory” enters your brain like an ear worm that only seems like it’s been there since the time you first started caring about music.
I first heard of Bill Fox in 2015. I was, sadly, on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and I mentioned an interview I had done back in 2001 with the late, great power-pop legend Emitt Rhodes. A reader in the replies suggested I check out Fox, whose music resides in an adjacent lane. I queued up Shelter From The Smoke, and I was hooked.
Before long, I discovered the one significant magazine profile written about Fox — not that there are many insignificant Bill Fox interviews — which by default is the foundational text for anyone who’s a fan of his music. It appeared in a 2007 issue of The Believer, and it was written by Joe Hagan, an accomplished journalist who is currently a special correspondent for Vanity Fair. These days, Hagan is known for his political reporting, including meaty exposés about major figures like Henry Kissinger and Robert Kennedy Jr. Hagan also wrote a famously contentious biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, which I loved, prompting an invitation to my old podcast back in 2017.
Hagan became a Fox fan in 1999, after being introduced to his music by his wife. Along with being mesmerized by the songs — in his story he likens Fox to an unlikely (but appropriate) stew of Dylan, the Everly Brothers, Big Star, and Woody Guthrie — he was fascinated by the dearth of information online. That interest soon turned into obsession. From a distance, he tried for months to get in touch with Fox in his hometown of Cleveland. Failing that, he reached Bill’s brother Tommy, a former bandmate from The Mice, who described his sibling as “a crabby loner and contrarian who barely makes ends meet and refuses to talk about his music with anyone, especially a reporter.”
Digging deeper, Hagan learned that Fox was a diagnosed manic depressive with a history of self-sabotage. In the ’80s, just as The Mice planned to embark on a big tour, he broke up the band and ghosted his musical partners. (Which might explain Tommy’s acerbic take on his brother.) In the ’90s, after CMJ magazine called him “one of the most important artists of our day,” Fox torpedoed a potential record deal with Sire and seemingly fell off the face of the earth.
In one vivid episode from the Believer article, Hagan tries to reach Fox at the telemarketing office where he worked at the time. His boss answers the phone and says Bill is not there. “He was here this morning and then he left for lunch and I don’t know if he’s coming back,” the guy says. “Bill kind of makes his own rules.” Two hours later, Hagan phones again. “He came in for about a half hour and he said he was not interested in talking to you,” the boss replies.
This did not deter Hagan, who actually flew to Cleveland in the hopes of finally landing an interview. He only got as close as Fox’s inner circle of friends, who were not exactly encouraging of his journalistic efforts. “He’s not mysterious,” says one of his pals. “He’s just Bill. He’s just this guy we hang out with.”
When I reached Hagan by phone last week, he told me that the mystery of Bill Fox still lingers with him nearly 20 years later.
“Of all the things I’ve written about all kinds of people from politics and Hollywood, this story has had the greatest longevity in terms of people constantly coming back to me to tell me about it,” he says. “So, it’s been gratifying to have inspired people to get into him. It’s kind of what you dream about when you write about something like that.”
Hagan’s article wasn’t originally supposed to live online. The Believer didn’t post it on their website out of deference to Fox, who allegedly told one of his friends that he refused to talk to Hagan because “I don’t want to be on the internet.” The story only has a legacy because Hagan eventually included a PDF on his personal website, in part because so many people had come around looking for it.
The only other substantial article about Fox I could find online was a 2009 item from The Cleveland Plain Dealer, timed with a local show. Like Hagan, the reporter tried to interview Fox, to no avail. He did learn, however, that Fox had recently taken a job in the paper’s telemarketing department. One day, he found Fox outside the building on a break, smoking a cigarette.
“I don’t want a story,” Fox told the reporter. “With utmost respect, I don’t want you to write anything.”
At the end of Hagan’s Believer story, he expresses some misgivings about disturbing a man who clearly does not want public attention. “He wants to produce music without having to do what people are expected to do, which is interviews and go play outside of his town somewhere,” Hagan told me. “He doesn’t want to do that. And that’s perfectly legit.”
I agree with that. But Bill Fox did put out a record. And I know he wants people to be aware of this, based on an encounter I’ll discuss in a moment. I did not want to delve into his personal life. All I was looking for was the usual background information that artists routinely share in a press release — when was the album recorded, where was it recorded, who plays on it, and so on. In lieu of that, I have Hagan’s story, which references “Man Of War” as an outtake “from some early 1990s studio sessions that Fox recorded with money his father left him after he died of cancer in 1991.” Is the recording of “Man Of War” on Resonance the same “Man Of War” Hagan wrote about? For now, I don’t know.
In my imagination, I picture Fox as the sort of middle-aged hermit that seems to exist in every office. The one you tolerate and maybe even like a little bit, but who doesn’t seem to have any semblance of a private life outside of work. Only in this particular case, the hermit just happens to sing and record genius pop songs in his spare time, and those songs have traveled surprisingly far and wide. How can that be? Who knew the office hermit had it in him?
In that sense, Bill Fox feels more knowable to me than the average cult hero singer-songwriter. He’s mysterious but he’s not exotic. Bill Fox is, like this pal says, just Bill. But I wonder if the people in Bill Fox’s regular life know the version of Bill that his audience hears on his records, the sensitive soul who bares emotional wounds that never seem to heal. It’s possible that “the real Bill” actually lives in songs like “Desperation,” a broken-down ballad in the mold of Big Star’s Third:
I’ve got a weight that’s called desperation strangled around my neck
And I can’t break loose, stuck in this noose, my eyes peer straight ahead
Down a road of pure frustration I’ve been misunderstood
On gravel and stone I travel alone to where our love once stood
From here to you go I’m carrying through a weight that’s called desperation.
“I think it’s a rare thing to hear a recording that feels like you’re having a pinhole into a private world,” Hagan said near the end of our phone call. “And it’s a private world of somebody who’s just a beautiful craftsman of songs and just has a beautiful soul. I think that he has to put up certain barriers to entry. I’m not a psychologist, so I won’t try to pretend to know, but that was sort of the journey I was on when I wrote about him.”
I have my own “I tried to interview Bill Fox” story. It’s not as involved as Hagan’s, but I’ll share it nonetheless.
When I reached out to Fox’s label to get an advance download of the album, I asked if he was available to talk. I expected to be turned down immediately, but I was doing my journalistic due diligence. To my surprise, Fox emailed me later that day. Writing in curiously formal language, he pointed out that his album was not mentioned in an article (that I did not write) listing upcoming album releases for the month. “Hardly a big deal unto itself,” he assured me, “but there’s an inconsistency here that I don’t quite actually ‘get.’” Meaning that he wanted to wait on the interview until after I had followed through on mentioning his album on this website.
He did, however, consent in a later email to sharing a photo of himself to run with this column. (He also shared his lyrics, for which I am grateful.) He said he doesn’t often have his picture taken, which he admitted “is a detriment for image and promotion.” But I understood why. That’s just Bill.