The bio portion of Foxing's Bandcamp page reads: "Foxing is a band. Someday Foxing won't be a band." The de facto motto is both fatalistic and stoic — and has the benefit of being demonstrably true.
The seeds of Foxing were sown in 2010 when Josh Coll met Conor Murphy. Coll and Murphy had more in common than similar musical tastes. For starters, both joined the St. Louis music scene at young ages.
At twelve Coll moved from Greeley, Colorado, to Ballwin. At fourteen he began playing bass in dance-punk band the X and the O, which later morphed into St. Louis indie-pop darlings Team Up!! Raised in St. Charles, Murphy had a similar musical trajectory. When he was twelve, he became bassist for Torchlight Red.
The pair's paths crossed when Torchlight Red played a show with Coll's former band, Hunter Gatherer.
"Josh and I started talking about the local music scene," Murphy remembers. "The bands we looked up to were breaking up or moving or becoming inactive, and my generation of people wasn't doing a good job of taking over, my own band included. It led me to think more about taking things more seriously."
Shortly afterward, Coll joined the army and Hunter Gatherer disbanded. Deployed in Afghanistan, Coll kept recalling his conversation with Murphy. He dreamed of starting another band. "I needed a light at the end of the tunnel." He was still overseas when he asked Murphy to help him do it.
And so when Coll returned to St. Louis in August 2011, he and Murphy recruited former Hunter Gatherer drummer Jon Hellwig and guitarist Matthew Piva. Along with guitarist and singer Jim Fitzpatrick, the first incarnation of Foxing recorded three songs that would become the Old Songs EP in 2012.
(Historically, this is where my personal full-disclosure statement would be due. I worked with Foxing as the producer of the Old Songs EP as well as its subsequent album, The Albatross. We do not currently have a business relationship, but have remained friendly.)
With the recording complete, Foxing paused for a semester while Murphy studied audio engineering at Regent's University in London. Before he could return, though, guitarists Piva and Fitzpatrick both left the band.
"I kind of lost my mind a little bit," Coll says. "I was holding on to this idea that I was going to come home, and we're going to start this awesome thing and hit the ground running."
Across the Atlantic Ocean, Murphy initially assumed the band was over — until something changed his mind. "One day I showed the finished mix of the song 'Friendly Homes' to this girl I kind of had a crush on," he recalls. "She started crying while listening to it. I'd never been in a band anybody actually cared about, especially a stranger, and it was like, 'This seems important.' So I hit up Josh and said, 'When I get back, let's do it.'"
The revitalized band joined up with guitarists Ricky Sampson and Tommy Pini. The quintet finally began playing shows and writing new material, but tensions rose between Pini and the rest of the group. Two weeks before Foxing's first tour — and in the middle of recording The Albatross — the members asked Pini to leave the group.
"That was the hardest thing for me to do," says Murphy, who grew up with Pini. "Tommy and I are on good terms now, but it's always going to be a thing where we kicked him out of the band, and it'll never be that he decided to leave."
With a handful of Midwest gigs looming, the band looked to Eric Hudson, who had played guitar in Murphy's former band Torchlight Red. Then a student at Webster University studying jazz guitar and audio production, "I wasn't passionate about it at all," Hudson says. "I had seen Foxing play before. I was impressed, but at the time they actually just made me feel jealous and even more down about myself. I had an audio class with Conor, and one day he mentioned they might need a guitar player and asked if I would be interested. I encouraged them to try to work it out with Tommy, but yeah, I'd be interested."
The current (and likely final) cast of Murphy, Coll, drummer Jon Hellwig, and guitarists Ricky Sampson and Eric Hudson embarked on a two-week tour in the spring of 2013, playing songs for which Hudson had written the guitar parts mere days beforehand.
At the final show in Kansas City, the band crossed paths with Keith Latinen from the band Empire! Empire! (I Was A Lonely Estate). Latinen also runs Count Your Lucky Stars, a record label often considered a pioneer of the emo revival.
"We were playing a venue called Satan's Gay Acid Bath," Murphy recalls. "It was this weird shed that was just packed out with kids that were going nuts and literally hanging from the rafters. Right when we got out of there, Keith asked if we wanted to put out a record on his label. We talked about it in the van for about 30 minutes, and it was like, 'What else are we going to do? What else would we be holding out for?'"
Foxing finished The Albatross with a newfound energy, but initially didn't gain much traction. The band had joined Count Your Lucky Stars at a strange time. "Right before the record came out, they had fired their press agent," Coll says. "We had spent so much time and put a lot of ourselves in this record, we didn't want it to just disappear."
So Coll himself took on the duties of promoting The Albatross online. "He started worming it into all these blogs, and it spread around Tumblr and Reddit," Murphy says. "There was this huge, organic reaction, like a virus got out."
Foxing's self-produced, self-funded video for "Rory" only increased the momentum. The video helped grab the attention of Pitchfork Media, which said the song "feels like the goddamn apocalypse," and the Huffington Post, with The Albatross ranked No. 5 on its list of "Best Albums of the Year (That You Probably Haven't Already Heard)."
Coll is still dumfounded at the effectiveness of his DIY press campaign. "Everything I did was out of desperation to get people to hear this record," he says. "It became the most insane groundswell of anything I've ever been a part of. Kids were relentless about us online, and then the big players — who already said they wouldn't write about us — knew there was something there. The reverse usually happens, where a tastemaker will say, 'Here's something you should like,' and the just kids follow along."
Meanwhile, Foxing was touring the DIY circuit, winning over fans, and losing money hand over fist. Because Count Your Lucky Stars struggled to keep The Albatross in print, Foxing found itself playing shows without even having records to sell.
Though the band struggled on the road, it began to draw interest from other record labels. Foxing also started talking to manager Joseph Marro, whose roster included You Blew It!, Allison Weiss and his own band, the Early November.
"He liked our music and wanted to help," Murphy says. "There was no pressure. He told us if we liked his advice, maybe we can work together."
Perhaps the most crucial move Marro made was introducing the band to Fred Feldman, owner of Triple Crown Records, a larger label compared to the others sniffing around at the time. The group was won over by Feldman's offer not only to put out its next record, but to re-release The Albatross.
"I thought the album was strong and there was so much room to grow," Feldman says. "Our goal was to get more people to hear the band and get them better touring opportunities."
The latter half of Feldman's mission was realized in October 2014 when Foxing opened for fifteen shows with Triple Crown's flagship act, Brand New. Within months the band went from playing basements to sold-out venues with capacities in the thousands. It was a fitting endcap to two years of touring behind The Albatross.
"We could have stayed on the road," Coll says. "We had great opportunities, but we were going to go crazy if we didn't make another record."
