SXSW: Interview with Spence Koehler of The Stone Foxes

You simply can’t talk about 2009 buzz bands with out mentioning this blues-driven rock quartet from San Francisco. Their self-recorded album is raw but surprisingly well-produced, and its dirty, melodic slide guitar ambience sounds like what Springsteen would have done if he grew up in a steel factory community in Russia.

The Stone Foxes – Spence Koehler
SXSW shows:
Mar. 20 @ The Wave (SFxSXSW showcase)
Upcoming show:
Apr. 25 @ The Independent in San Fran; May 28 @ The Starry Plough in Berkeley

TW: So what have y’all been up to?
SK: Just gearing up for South by Southwest.

TW: Are y’all excited?
SK: Yeah. It’s kind of an honor to get asked by Talking House and the Live 105 to be in on their showcase. I’m pretty sure it’s Talking House’s showcase and Live 105 is cohosting or sponsoring it. So that’s how it got us there. We’ve got two booked so far. And we’ll just see how it goes from there.

TW: Are y’all taking a bus? Flying?
SK: We recently bought a sweet 15-passenger van so we’re going to truck it down there.
In January we did a two-week tour of the entire West, like down through LA and then out to Phoenix then Vegas, then up through Boise, up to Seattle and back down. But we did that in two of our own cars, so we decided that we needed a van to get out there. And we got this enormous ’91 Dodge Ram van, so we named it the White Whale. That’s going to be our ride. We’ve taken it down to LA and San Diego so we’ve deemed it road worthy. We took out the back bench, so we’ve got a drive, passenger and two bench seats and then all the gear in the back.

TW: Do y’all make it down to the South Bay at all?
SK: Every once in a while. We’ve played there. I’ve got a cousin down there and know different people down there, but we haven’t played there that much. We’d love to. We just haven’t had any booking offers.

TW: Tell me about the music; are y’all partial to any categories or genres?
SK: Everything we play seems to be based in the blues, whether it goes toward rock ’n’ roll or toward country a little bit. More electric blues for sure. Lots of slide and real over-driven dirty blues. Also the raw tunes we write are loosely structured in the blues so it’s like blues, rock, roll and country I’d say.

TW: When did the self-titled album come out?
SK: We started recording it in April and we just did it in our garage, just wanting to document what we had so far, didn’t really have big plans for it. We recorded it all ourselves and mixed everything ourselves and once we had it mixed it sounded pretty decent so we pooled some more money together to get it mastered and some people started liking it so we put that out in August and have since gotten some great managers who’ve helped push it to radio and other venues and kind of really helped us out.

TW: Are y’all still playing tracks off that album or will there be new stuff in Texas?
SK: There’s going to be new stuff for sure. I think even on the tour in January a third of the set was new at some shows. So we’ve written a lot since then. There’s a lot in the bag. We’ve been thinking summer might be the next time we record or maybe do some touring. But we’ve got some pretty sweet and exciting material that we’re all developing, playing it out and giving it all kinds of tune up.

TW: There’s a lot of buzz around The Stone Foxes. You have Aaron Axelson raving about it, a lot of press calling it a great buzz band for early 2009, is this something y’all pay attention to, does it stress you out, or all you just going with the flow?
SK: It’s kind of exciting. This is something that we do for fun and for people to respect it and get excited about it then that’s fun; we’re glad that people like the music that comes out just naturally.

TW: And you all have jobs right now?
SK: Yeah. We’re all working day jobs. I work at a plant nursery up in Richmond in San Francisco. Everybody has got their own little thing that they’re doing. You kind of just got to find something that is fairly flexible so you can take off for a weekend or a week to go down to Austin, which I went to school for product design and when you’re building models or working on some big project for 70 hours a week you can’t really do that. You kind of have to find something you enjoy doing that’s going to give you some freedom to move around a little bit.