Sevindust is the latest single from North Carolina’s Nathan Evans Fox – and for those unfamiliar with the product, Sevindust is a pesticide commonly used in the Southern states of the USA to protect plants from pests and disease – effective for the targeted crop, but destructive to the surrounding ecosystem. It makes for a suitable metaphor for Fox, who reflects on other aspects of Southern life – particularly politics, family mythology and religion, as he says: “Over the last few years, I have had a number of hard conversations with family who have a Sevindust approach to familial love. While their politics, family myths, and religion offer protection for their loved ones, they bring about plenty of harm to others. This is a song about breaking up with that way of making family and those family members who refuse to let go of it.”
Nathan Evans Fox took a winding path before fully committing to music. Along the way, he worked blue-collar jobs that clarified his politics, including stacking tires in a windowless room at a Michelin plant in South Carolina. He served in AmeriCorps, attended seminary in New York City at an interfaith, socially progressive institution, and trained as a hospital chaplain, spending years accompanying families through crisis, grief, and trauma. Those seasons of witnessing hardship up close and grappling with how empathy can be professionalized and commodified within institutional systems now echo through his songwriting. After becoming a father while losing his own and stepping away from chaplaincy following the Covenant School shooting response in Nashville, he returned to songwriting with renewed urgency. Sevindust is taken from the album Heirloom, which is out on Free Dirt Records on May 29th.
