A record built to last.
“Nathan Evans Fox sounds like the truth. In the end, that’s what we go to songwriters for, isn’t it?” These words opened Alan O’Hare’s review for Americana UK, writing about 2018’s Texas Dust album. That record’s sparse textures and raw, understated, heartfelt emotion have remained in place, but the albums that followed (2020’s Kindness and 2021’s Wasted Love) gradually developed a wider musical palette, until we arrive at Heirloom, Fox’s latest release.
This is, immediately, a very special record, one for the real aficionados of americana music. This is a tour de force of songwriting; measured, poetic, wry, and still as truth-filled as ever.
Opener Lots of Beginnings has a steady rhythmic pulse from an acoustic guitar, giving a predominantly acoustic song a modern edge it might otherwise have missed. Fox sings a wish song to his new child, and as such, it could be bracketed with Dylan’s Forever Young or Jason Isbell’s Letting You Go. As much as it is a personal statement, it also feels like a widescreen invitation to Fox’s world. With nods to the hopes and fears of the future, it keeps a respect and an acknowledgement of the past, and the roots that thread through all our lives. It is deeply affecting, wonderfully understated, and musically satisfying.
“I’m scared that you won’t get an accent / Honey, we live in the city / But you gotta talk how you talk / I just miss how my Grandma did it”
“We lost folks we loved / If this goes right, one day you’ll feel the same about the two of us”
Another mark of Fox’s development as a writer is that every song here has its own identity, gradually adding to a bigger picture, but never just reiterating the same message.
For example, Racecar has a Springsteen-like feel, a yearning to escape but touching on political realities that straitjacket the young and old alike. It is told through the eyes of a young man for whom the chance to “drive a racecar really damn fast” is really a dream of freedom, though with the only prize being to “get loose now, or in the next life to come”. It’s a powerful song, and one whose message needs to keep being told, as the poor are always left behind when the times get harder.
By contrast, Landlords, Bill Lee, etc., have the same brand of humour you might find in a Hayes Carll or Todd Snider song. It’s a bit of light relief, a funny-boned diss song:
“I hope your dog don’t ever love you / don’t ever want to come home / Takes up at the neighbours / Barks at your window all night long”
Next comes the title track, which Fox states he wrote while awaiting the birth of his daughter. Not unexpectedly, then, there is a mixing of hope with worry, and a whirl of highly emotional memories and imagery. The music is a quiet storm of acoustic guitar and mournful fiddle, as you feel him desperately trying to make some sense of the world and put it in some sort of order.
This, in turn, is followed by the similarly toned Negative Space, haunting and again, so musically adept in its arrangement. It draws you further in with a beautiful cascading piano (courtesy of his mother) and the wheezy scratch of fiddles. If Heirloom welcomed his daughter to the world, Negative Space is a moving goodbye to his father. As with any great songwriter, the universal messages come from deeply personal places.
The songs that close the record just keep upping the ante. “Hillbilly Hymn (Okra & Cigarettes)” is a joy of a gospel-themed song, stomping and clapping and natural choir included. Fox notes: “To be clear, this song isn’t endorsing or rebuking any religious perspective; it’s simply using the language I grew up with in the Bible Belt to articulate the world I want to see. The only thing I’m being evangelical about is liberation.” It doesn’t matter what your background is; this is uplifting music.
Jesus and the Buck is a massively heartening song, the proof that not every American has the same version of Christianity. Fox sees the powerful using religion for their own ends and calls them out. It benefits from the sparse acoustic treatment, as every word can be heard loud and clear, and is surely a message to Fox’s compatriots to not allow themselves to be blindsided by those who do not have their interests at heart.
Finally, the delicately picked I Know the End, another song good enough to stand beside the best of the Isbell canon, with a slow, epic build to the music, and a finish which loops back to where we started, with the promise of “a lot of beginnings”.
Fox does the reviewer a favour by this rather neat summation of his latest work: “Truthfully, I don’t think the difference between public and private is as stark as many believe, and it is my job as an artist to draw out the ways power sorts itself out in our families, affect, communities, and imagination. Politics and poetics are always intertwined.”
Fox continues to reach into his own roots to illustrate the wider world in a way that has warnings and comforts, trials and successes, fears and hopes. This is an album to be listened to closely, with its depth worn so very lightly. Heirloom is a superb record, moulded of its time yet built to last.
