An accomplished songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Nathan Evans Fox began playing violin at age four and has since picked up the guitar, piano, and a bit of other instruments. Growing up on family land in Glen Alpine, NC, he was surrounded by hymn books, country, bluegrass, folk, and family. Originally trained as a hospital chaplain, Fox is no stranger to grief. His music makes something out of what remains, both wrestling with country’s messy legacy and embracing its effective power to ignite a rush of joy, nostalgia, or solidarity. His songs are full of the people, things, and moments he loves, from the old Mercedes Benz down the street and slow dancing in dive bars to memories of his grandmother and his enduring love of good trucks. Listeners can feel the humidity of a hot summer night, the low-key longing for home coming through the twang of the slide guitar and the understated gang vocals. Nathan Evans Fox debuts cosmopolitan country sound with his new album Wasted Love, due out Friday October 8, 2021. (Nathan Evans Fox, 2021)
“You start with your accent, you start with your twang, but your accent is also the place where you start to appreciate the rest of the world,” says Western North Carolina-raised songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Nathan Evans Fox. “Country music is my accent but it’s also the way that I communicate my love for the world.” On October 8, Fox is releasing his fourth full-length album, Wasted Love, a collection of tunes that decidedly marks his shift from writing folk songs to his own, “chaotic hillbilly” brand of country music—or in Fox’s words, “from plunk to spunk.” Nimbly shifting affective gears from simmering anger and contemplative reflection to wry wit and unexpected sass, Fox’s songs are simultaneously playful and insightful. Fox’s lyrics evoke the post-storm sizzle of an Appalachian landscape and the Biblical imagery that saturated his childhood. Much of his music is a kind of reckoning with his cultural and religious inheritance: “Don’t know where I’m going / just know where I’m from,” Fox sings in “Carolina Boy,” which was recently released via Mother Church Pew as the first single from Wasted Love. “This song spells out the complicated relationship I have to my hometown,” he says about the lusciously recorded, vice and hardship-filled “Carolina Boy.” “No matter how much I love the hills of North Carolina, leaving my hometown meant making better decisions instead of falling into well-worn pitfalls.” Fans can hear “Carolina Boy” now at this link and pre-order or pre-save Wasted Love ahead of its October release right here.
Below the surface, a thread winds throughout Wasted Love, capturing the specific ways love gets spent without expectation of return—as an unconditional overflow, as uncounted minutes with the one you love, or, watching his mother care for his grandmother near the end of her life, as “the generosity of caretaking love and the ways it refuses to keep score.” Just a few months after moving to Nashville, Fox was grieving the loss of his grandmother when he and his wife’s home got hit by a tornado, and shortly after he had to cancel shows and collaborations as the pandemic spread. Writing the album amid all this loss and uncertainty, he wanted to write songs that would provide respite. In this sense, Fox’s music is all about work: blue-collar work, care work, reflective work. “We need music to do work for us that we’re too tired to do ourselves. Our feelings are spent and our ability to do work is exhausted and we just need somebody to put some good feeling back in our body.”
Wasted Love Track list:
1. One Of These Days
2. Mercedes Benz
3. Lordhamercy
4. Carolina Boy
5. Good Trucks
6. When They Take The House
7. These Four Walls
8. Damn Hard
9. Some Things Are Coming Back Again
10. What’s Intended
11. Put Money Down
12. Wasted Love
Catch Nathan Evans Fox On Tour:
October 8 – Nashville, TN – The 5 Spot
October 23 – Ingram, TX – Fritzers Saloon
October 24 – Dripping Springs, TX – Dreamland
October 29 – Harlingen, TX – Melodia Cafe
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‘Wasted Love’ release date
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