INTERVIEW: The Firefoxes

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Hi guys, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?

Excellent! Been a great start to 2018 so far and it keeps getting better every day.

Can you talk to us more about your latest singles “Don’t Give Up/Choose Love”?

Choose Love has been a campaign that we’ve had since the beginnings of this band; it’s a message that we’ve been consistent with throughout our journey as a band and we wanted to choose now, arguably one of the most turbulent and divisive times since the 1960’s to really drive home that we’re all human. We all have the same needs at the end of the day in broad terms and we just all have different ways of getting to those needs. We should be focusing less on how we’re so different and more on how we’re alike. We need to come together to embrace empathy, love, peace, understanding, community, and unity.

Don’t Give Up is a direct response to the rising numbers in suicides that we’ve seen in the past few years. When Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington passed away this past year, we knew it was time to put it out. We wanted to create an anti-suicide song to coincide with Choose Love and in a brilliant turn, it wound up being the first single. We wanted it to be a sort of call to arms to keep fighting the fight and get through whatever you have to get through to get to a better place in your life. It’s never easy, but when you get to the other side, it’s incredibly worth it. If you need help, reach out to someone and if you know someone needs help, reach out to them or to someone who can help. Everyone in this band has struggled with suicidal thoughts and attempts in the past and it’s very much a beautiful thing to be standing on the other side of all of this and we want anyone who’s where we were to get here with us and see what we see.

Did any event in particular inspired you to write this song?

Honestly, every event in the past three years has inspired us to do these two singles. The amount of hatred, violence, ignorance, divisiveness, apathy, and everything that comes between it has been dominating what we’ve seen in current events and it’s high time that we start talking about how we can be helping each other and coming together as a people. Things like these are enough to make a person who’s struggling give up on themselves and their lives. They both very much go together.

How was the filming process and experience behind the video?

It was a great time! We just threw a bunch of random items In our practice space with a bunch of our friends who also have been in similar places that we’ve been. We ordered a ton of pizza and other snacks and just went wild with everything. It was a fun and lighthearted process and after all the things that have happened in our live and the world in the past few years, we needed something as stress free and jubilant as that.

How was the recording and writing process?

Writing process was almost instantaneous when writing these two songs. We knew what we wanted to go for and where we were heading for and it wound up being 97% done by the second or third practice that we did each song. That’s how you know they’re gonna wind up great. Great things happen all at once. Recording was excellent! We recorded with Ted Young, who’s got a Grammy for his work with the Rolling Stones and we were recording in Lee Ronaldo from Sonic Youth’s studio; so you can imagine how awesome it was for us. It was a relatively short process and we banged everything out really quickly, so we got to enjoy a ton of time kicking it with Ted and Ted is honestly one of the funniest, coolest, and easy going producers we’ve ever worked with, so we always look forward to spending time with him.

Known for playing with different genres – how do you get to balance them together?

That’s an interesting question. It kinda just happens that all the genres we blend together just happen to be very intertwined in many ways. The real point where they all kinda connect together is probably that oceanic ambiance that they blend into. Not too many bands put shoegaze, folk. surf rock, indie pop/rock, and other alternative genres in a blender and expect it to come out sounding good. We just happened to blend well enough as humans, songwriters, musicians, and entertainers that the chemistry all works out right and you wind up with something incredible.

Does the new single mean we can expect a new material – how’s that coming along?

New material is in the works. We’re not sure exactly when we’ll be recording it, but most likely between fall and winter of 2019. The material is all done. We may have a cover song recorded soon, too. You’ll have to stay tuned to find out though.

Any tentative release date or title in mind?

Possibly this time next year if not, a little earlier.

Any plans to hit the road?

We’re always on the road. Haha But if you mean venturing out of our quad-state bubble of NY, NJ, PA, and CT we are playing at the East Coast Music Conference in Virginia in May, PVD Fest in Providence, Rhode Island and PEX Summer Fest in June and we’ll be traveling to Bethlehem, PA to play at Musikfest as well. There’s much more on the way, but we can’t quite announce those yet.

What else is happening next in The Foxfires’ world?

We just released a Spotify playlist of DIY artists on our recently verified Spotify account and we’re reaching out to all bands who may be interested in being a part of that playlist to send us material for it. You can find the Soundplate Submission Page in the description.

https://open.spotify.com/user/1230679389/playlist/6Y8NK1RZA6jfD6nP5fP2nK?si=giGibDScT5uFC4X_Q-1LcQ

Aside from that, festival season is coming up and we’ve got a ton of other great events in the works currently, but unfortunately, nothing we can quite announce yet; stay tuned though, cause if what we’ve got going through goes down, you’ll wanna hear about it.