Consider this the fourth installment in a series of reviews concerning musicians to whom I am too close for objectivity. All are connected to a now well-documented house-show movement that blossomed for six months before struggling through the weeds of practicality. I had the privilege to be there when it did. The house-show cultus is still present in Dallas, in forms and shadows, though diminished. Fox and the Bird have been at its core throughout.
Fox and the Bird believe in music as orthopraxy: self-subsisting and without boundaries. It is a rare species that thrives with or without your attention. So far, the band has made a name for itself under those principles, without so much as a demo recording. On July 29, Fox and the Bird will finally release their debut album, Floating Feather, after two years of meticulous recording.
I have been embedded with this crowd for the better part of three years, so these songs are more like stories I have heard time and again from the same friends. I first caught Fox and the Bird performing in a friend’s living room. The sound then was thin and meek. After leaving town for several months, I returned to find them in House of Blues’ Cambridge Room, their sound fleshed out by trumpets and strings. Like all good stories, the songs had become grander with time.
Fox and the Bird are at their best when they have the most musicians, but the fact is Dan and Kelsey Bowman are not quite sure who is in their band right now. The married couple comprises the stable core of the band with an apparent revolving door built in for local musicians. These include a wanderlusting songwriter who enjoys escaping to the volatile Middle East, another with more lucrative musical obligations that keep him on the road and one who recently succumbed to the siren calls of Austin (Ray Weyandt, the only Dallasite for whom I will not buy a tank of gas if he likes Austin so much. In fact, I am thinking seriously of slashing his tires.)
Still, Dan and Kelsey are not anxious about the future roster, finding enough consistent contributions in bandmates Daniel T. Hall and Petra Kelley to build on their local momentum. It is a quietly growing popularity cultivated through an intimate approach to performing. Fox and the Bird are prone to float into audiences like the ghosts they invoke in song. When not wandering off stage, they busk city streets, dragging their mirthful brand of mobile, acoustic choir into the sidewalks and parking lots that are otherwise dormant.
Floating Feather is the admirable attempt to chase a sound that owes so much to nomadism. It does evoke a certain imminence, the image of a rabble of musicians crouched around a single microphone, close enough to rub shoulders and cheeks.
The eleven songs fairly represent the patchwork of five songwriters that composed them. Except for “Rome,” Wheeler Sparks’ enigmatic work is conspicuously absent, primarily because most of his songs belong to a future opus about his grandfather’s life. Ray Weyandt’s two contributions break in like gentle miracles. He is a wonder of a songwriter, always carrying off a little darkness on his back.
It is reassuring to know that Dan Bowman, like me, struggles with the titles people apply to his band’s music. The multi-instrumentalist with the duckbilled cap is often labeled “folk.” Personally, I think the word is about the least descriptive way to refer to something. It reminds me of a cranky Pete Seeger throwing a child’s tantrum and threatening to cut the wire that was making Bob Dylan loud and dirty. I don’t think Fox and the Bird can have truck with that kind of vaunted sanctimony.
What I think Fox and the Bird embody musically, as effectively on Floating Feather as they do in person, is humanism in the real sense, like Calvin or Pascal before them. It is a celebration of the human experience in all its palpable pleasure and want, especially the want. Fox and the Bird are people waiting, squirming for and with eternity.
The aesthetically obsessed are bound to take issue with what they imagine is a band affecting the personas of restless hoboes. And the chronically disdainful might dismiss Fox and the Bird as blindly cheerful. But they would be neither looking nor listening. What Fox and the Bird sing and play accords with the deepest strains of human worth and fulfillment. To capture that wholly is impossible. But their audacity to shuffle in that direction, with banjoes and trumpets and a sea roar of voices, is foolish to deride.
Photo by Sara Kerens
