A new Bill Fox album does not come along every day, but today, one has.
Fox, a Cleveland singer-songwriter and IYKYK underground hero, has always made it a point to avoid the spotlight. He fronted the cult power-pop band the Mice in the 1980s, inspiring a fledgling act called Guided By Voices and many other garage-rockin’ indie-pop types in Ohio and beyond, but pulled the plug on the Mice pretty early on and ghosted his bandmates, including his brother Tommy. Fox returned in the late ’90s with a pair of legend-sealing lo-fi solo albums, 1996’s Shelter From The Smoke and 1998’s Transit Byzantium, entrancing the likes of Elliott Smith. But Fox had soon disappeared from the public eye again, apparently torpedoing an impending record deal in the process.
Inspired after being featured in a 2007 Believer profile by future Jann Wenner biographer Joe Hagan, for which Fox refused to give an interview because he didn’t want the attention, Fox reemerged once more in 2012 with One Thought Revealed. That might have been the capstone on his career, except here he is again, dropping a new album on us after more than a decade away.
Resonance, Fox’s first album in 13 years, comes to us via Cleveland’s Eleventh Hour Recording Company. It’s almost dinner time in Ohio, the beloved homeland of both Fox and myself, so I don’t have time to elaborate any further about why this is so awesome, but fellow Midwestern music enthusiast Steven Hyden has already done so today if you need more context. Know this: The album is another mostly lo-fi offering that lets Fox’s formidable songwriting stand on its own power. There’s not much more here besides acoustic guitars, harmonicas, and Fox’s strong but fragile voice delivering righteous truths and personal outpourings. You can tell how much he loves the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and you can also tell what Bob Pollard and Elliott Smith saw in him.
If you’re looking to begin a deep dive, you might as well begin here, with this fantastic batch of songs that seemed like they might never arrive.