Interview with Stone Cold Fox
Thanks guys
How did you guys meet?
Kevin: You know, we have no fucking clue. Ariel and I met as Freshmen in college, probably on the quad in some smoke circle or something. Somehow we started working together and he actually produced my first album with my band at the time. But oddly enough didn’t really work together again till senior year and that’s when the early Stone Cold Fox stuff came into fruition. We went to school with Graham and Justin and recruited them for the adventure, and a year later we met Dave in a noodle shop. Classic fairy tale
How long have you been together?
Ariel: Rounding two years now
Who are your main influences?
Kevin: It’s really all over the place. Dave is a drummer from Eastman so he’s comin from the Jim Keltner, Jay Bellerose, Levon Helm neck of the woods. Ariel’s been really digging Metronomy, Tame Impala and the new Lucious album pretty much blew all of us away, definitely setting the bar high for new stuff coming out of Brooklyn. Justin loves NIN and Massive Attack and Graham is a pretty big WIlco fan. I’m just a depressed schmuck who locks himself in his room blasting Radiohead, The Walkmen and Arcade Fire. It’s kind of exciting being in a band that has such different influences, we are definitely not the type to all get the same fucking haircut. It ends up creating these endless possibilities, we really have the ability to steer in any direction so who knows what’s ne
How does your music feel?
Ariel: It feels like giving birth. There’s always a lot of effort, hardship and compromising between everyone to reach that happy medium but at the end of it we are always happy about the final product and music.
What do you like more, touring and playing live or recording?
Kevin: It’s kinda a toss up, Ariel will definitely say recording, but I’m gonna go against the stream and say live is where it’s at.
How do you write your songs and what process do you use to decide what goes your CD?
Kevin: Memory Palace was actually an incredibly time consuming album. I was pretty much writing straight for an entire year since September 2012, and didn’t really “find it” until late March of last year with the title track “Memory Palace” and “Sold”. The “process” is a whole bunch of things, never just one way to write a song. I think my favorite mode of writing is while watching films though. It’s very refreshing to get inspired by something other than music and I’ve always been bound to music and film, without one there wouldn’t be the other for me so that is when I write best.
We had a pretty high standards for this album and actually cut some great songs, but an album needs to have a sense of flow and we had to kill some babies to keep that flow going. Redundancy is the other key factor that we look at when deciding what gets on it. We really like to explore a new direction in each song so if two songs are riding the same train we just have to decide which one fits better, sometimes this can be very hard, but I think we made the right decisions and can’t wait to finally release it this May.