Raised on four generations of family land in western North Carolina, Nathan Evans Fox grew up immersed in NASCAR culture.
“Stock-car racing is more of a civic religion than a sport,” he says. “Even if you don’t follow the races, you keep the lore.”
That lore is central to the emotional and thematic framework of “Racecar.” Fox’s latest single is a sobering meditation on tradition, capitalism and the exhausting redundancy of survival in the modern age.
“The image of an oval track holds a lot of symbolic weight for me,” says Fox, who’s now based in Nashville. “The sport created by moonshine runners trying to make a living in poor rural areas is emblemized in a track that only allows them to go in circles.”
That cyclical road to nowhere defines Heirloom, out May 29 via Free Dirt. Throughout his fifth album, Fox dissects the economic, religious and familial systems that perpetuate from generation to generation. And if that seems a little weighty and intense, that’s what you get with Fox. Before fully committing to music, he spent years cycling through blue-collar jobs, seminary studies and pastoral care work. A particularly brutal stint stacking tires in a South Carolina Michelin factory became, in his words, “politically clarifying.” Later, as a hospital chaplain, he counseled families through grief and trauma.
Over the past decade, those experiences have permeated Fox’s songwriting, which couches personal storytelling, liberation theology and working-class critique in the warmth and familiarity of traditional country music delivered with an indie sensibility. It’s a heady, all-inclusive space where even NASCAR is a worthy target for analysis.
“Stock-car racers don’t race to a destination—they engage in systematic neuroses, risking their lives to win at doing the same thing over and over again,” says Fox. “It’s a powerful metaphor … a truer symbol of American life than the American dream where we chase the novelty of the frontier.”
We’re proud to premiere Nathan Evans Fox’s “Racecar.”
—Hobart Rowland
See Nathan Evans Fox live.
