You've probably heard a lot of music by Neal Fox (MySpace), even though you might not have known it. If you've ever watched Eye to Eye with Connie Chung, Bryant Gumbel's Public Eye, CBS Saturday Morning or the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, you've heard Neal Fox, whose incidental music for television has won several Clio and Telly Awards. Along with collaborator Nick Patterson, he also wrote the scores to Return of the Killer Tomatoes and Killer Tomatoes Strike Back.
Neal Fox is not just a "jingle" writer, though: he's been writing and performing music since the 1970s. But his career could serve as a warning to all those who believe that signing a contract with a Major Label is the ticket to becoming a Rock Superstar. Even though Fox had already released one album on Polydor's Event label, a collaboration with sax player Gus Mancini, he was "discovered" by Clive Davis and signed to Columbia as a solo artist. Shortly thereafter, while watching the news one day, Fox learned that Clive Davis had been fired, and Fox's Columbia deal went up in smoke. But wait a second, now! RCA Records stepped in to pick him up and released his first solo album, A Painting, which produced the Top Ten Dance Club hit, "In the Jungle." Everything was looking swell for Fox: his song "Babe" was tied in with the 1976 launch of Faberge's fragrance of the same name, and he and his band were fixin' to hit the road on tour. And then guess what happened? The president of RCA Records was fired! And there went Fox's tour and RCA deal....
His bad experiences with the Majors pushed Fox into the "jingle biz," but even though he found a lucrative career in that field, he continued writing songs--only now he'd formed a label of his own, Wire Duck Records, to release them. Having written two musicals (Meat Street and Jingle This!), an album of jazz-flavored vocal and instrumental music (Hotel de Swell), an adult contemporary album (HiPOCRACY), a unique multimedia show Pigeonholes, and the one-man show Thank You, Dan Rather, Fox released in early June his latest collection of songs, Now It's Personal.
Tapping into the same vein of narrative songwriting that informed the lyrics of Jimmy Buffet, Warren Zevon, and John Prine, Fox has created a rather dark, but cautiously hopeful, album that explores many facets of contemporary life in America. The album opens on a malevolent note with "A Zero With A Gun," the tale of a teenage shooter whose melody is very close to Warren Zevon's "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" and whose wry lyrics feature the very Zevonian line: "It's never too young to medicate." In fact, I'd say that almost every song on this album is reminiscent of Warren Zevon--but not to the point that Fox comes across as a Zevon clone. The influence is definitely there in both the music and the lyrics, but Fox has a vision all his own, and this is particularly apparent on the groovy "She Got Too Big For Her Body," a satiric take on women who starve themselves to match an unreasonable, almost inhuman ideal of "beauty." "A Cold Day Is Coming" is a straight-up protest song aimed at the "darkness and fear" that has claimed the nation during the Bush years, but what good is a protest song if it doesn't contain a call to arms? The chorus captures this perfectly with the lines: "Will you be the one we're looking for? / Will you even fight anymore?" "What The Hell Were You Thinking?" is a humorous bluesy number that addresses the age-old question of hindsight being 20/20, and "Sheep" (not a Pink Floyd cover) is a straight-up indictment of the utter stupidity of the herd mentality. "We're All Honna Be There (When She Dies)" ends the album on a beautiful, if almost infinitely sad note that expresses the same sentiments as John Prine's "The Great Compromise," which just goes to show that things aren't much better today than they were thirty years ago.
Fox is another one of those ultratalented "one-man bands" that I so admire, playing damnear every single instrument on this album, but where Fox really excels is in arrangement. Every song on Now It's Personal is expertly mixed and arranged so that every instrument is clearly heard, especially the vocals. Neal Fox is a superb lyricist, and the clarity of his vocals in the mix is crucial to the success of his songwriting. Not once did I have to read the lyrics in the album booklet to figure out what Fox is saying, and when you're writing songs to make a point or take a stand, you should be certain that your listeners don't need a rubric to understand you!
Neal Fox's songs are catchy, very accessible to a wide range of listeners, and most of all, topical. This is not a feel-good, everything'll-be-allright album--many of the songs are meant to challenge you and give you pause. But the doesn't mean that the album is depressing or somber. Far from it! This is a hip, eminently enjoyable collection of jams that balances the "serious" songs with lighter (though still sharp) fare to keep listeners entertained while giving them some weighty topics to think about. So get it before I have to come over there!
Links: wireduck.com myspace.com/nealfox
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