Weekly Skews - Good Skews: Nashville-based Country Singer, Nathan Evans Fox

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Producer Matt here: We’re testing a new pilot episode for a project called “Good Skews,” a show exclusively for our audio podcast stream. With this offering, we’d conduct longer-form interviews with people making a difference. It's a show about good people doing good things. So if you like this episode, email us at [e-mail] and tell us your thoughts.For this first episode of “Good Skews,” we talk with Nathan Evans Fox, an Americana-country singer and songwriter from rural North Carolina. We talked about growing up in a Conservative Christian household and how his family inspired the music he's making today.Support the show

Hello and welcome. You've probably already noticed by now that I am not Trey Crowder nor Mark Aegee. This is producer Matt, and I am here with a new pilot episode for a project we're calling GoodSkews, a show exclusively for our audio podcast stream. On GoodSkews, we conduct longer form interviews with people who are making a difference. in the world. It's a show about good people doing good things. So we'll talk to artists and activists, elected officials, and everyday folks who are making a positive change, despite such bleak and depressing odds. With all the chaos and depressing shit that's happening every day,

we wanted to produce something a little bit more positive. So we're testing out this additional format, and we want to know what you think. If you like this offering from this universe, email me at show at weekly skews.com. Like I said, it's only a available on our audio streams. So you'll have to go to Spotify or iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts and subscribe to the weekly skews podcast to get these episodes. All right. So for this first episode of Good Skews, we are going to talk with Nathan Evans Fox, an Americana country singer and songwriter from rural North Carolina. We talk about growing up in a conservative Christian household and how his family inspired the music he's making today. He posts hilarious videos on

Instagram. So you should check out his Instagram account by searching Nathan Evans-Fox. And with that, here's the interview. Why, you got to be so old day. Keep my motor turning over rain.

Time keeps slipping. You keep looking at me like we're 17 again. Well, I ain't ever warned for nothing but still keeping unfung the guts. You've been working the country heart.

You've been working the country heart. All right, well, Nathan Evans-Fox, thank you so much for joining us today and to talk a little bit. You grew up in rural North Carolina and you're now a country singer, Americana singer. Talk a little bit about how growing up

in rural North Carolina set you up for a career path like this. Yeah. Lord, I don't even know where to begin about where I grew up. I grew up on a dead-end road. I was fourth generation on a piece of family land. And so when you grow up on family land like that, there's a lot of kind of tradition that happens pretty quickly and kind of accumulates. and so there's a lot to sing about you know my granddad was a was a veteran um all my grandparents

worked mill jobs and kind of migrant southern jobs um everything from you know west texas old fields to um west virginia coal mines um and so and then you know selling in western north carolina end up doing a lot of textile jobs and things like that back before nafta took everything out but Um, there's just a lot of, a lot of war and work comes home with you. Um, and it works out in your family system. You know, these things, I think people often think that these kinds of systems of power are really like impersonal and abstract. And the truth is like, it comes down to as simple as like how you're disciplined in your family. It comes down to the kinds of things that people get reactive to in the home. It comes down to the ways that PTSD manifests or the ways that people are, aren't available because of work. It comes down to the ways that people deal with disability. illness because of the ways that their bodies have had to do things for work, for work and for war. Musically, I just kind of sing and say kind of what feels natural to me. What I grew up hearing, you know, you hear a lot of bluegrass, hear a lot of gospel.

I also grew up very fundamental as Christians. I heard a lot of Christian music. There's a lot of kind of kind of, I call it single use plastic in my music, kind of musically. But then there's also the kind of the more driving part for me, which is that, like, I want to make sure my music does the work of sorting through the ways that power impacted the people that I love and impacted me, the ways that power impacts my family's ability to grieve, my family's sense of resilience, and the things that we came home with, and the ways

that I don't think that I'm isolated in that. Like, these aren't unique things. My family had their own unique experience of these things, but these things happen to folks all throughout the U.S. and in places that are impacted by the U.S. And was your family really into music, or where did you first kind of pick up playing with other people? So, I mean, I got, yeah, there's music kind of all on all sides of my family. The biggest thing for me was that my mom played piano.

And so we would kind of, my family being real, real, real fundamentalist Christian, we would kind of help, like, plant churches and stuff. And so we would always kind of be the, like, the worship, like, when people need to start new church, we'd be the worship band. and so my mom would play piano and my dad would sing and then I started playing like violin when I was four and then kind of picked up other instruments along the way so I would always kind of play with them and one of the cool things about you know I got a lot of feelings and a lot of critiques for the kinds of Christianity I grew up in but one of the things that was cool about this was that like it was

very kind of horizontally organized and so as like you know a 10 year old I was given access to playing music um with everyone else now it was a lot like hotel conference rooms and strip malls and stuff it wasn't anything fancy but it does kind of get your chops up and gets you a kind of sense of like musicality and maybe maybe what you're comfortable with doing and where your voice is so is this like keyboard worship music or is this like bluegrass gospel no i wish it was something as cool as that no it was just keyboard worship music it was closer to barbara strice and than it was to Tony Rice. What did you play?

I mostly played violin with my parents, and then with slowly kind of move into mandolin and guitar. I actually went to Bible College, so very familiar with the Cassio aesthetic of that type of music. The way I got into music, you know, just casually was we would go to our church, and that was where all the like sound equipment was. And so I would like sneak in my cool, friends, and I'd play drums, and we would play, like, I remember one time we were playing like stairway to heaven or, you know, some Led Zeppelin song in the church sanctuary and

the pastor walked in. That's big trouble right there. Yeah, he was pretty cool. I think he was a big fan. But, yeah, that connection to church music has always kind of been strong, especially in country music, but I think there is like an idealized, like I remember the first time I ever went to like a bluegrass worship service. I was just blown away with, like, how cool that was and how lame the, like, hand drum, keyboard thing we were doing was.

Yeah. Well, I, when I was, like, seven, I would get a quarter a week as an allowance, which, you know, did help me by my first animal trap. But I had decided to give, like, 75 cents a month to the AM gospel station because. Oh, my God. Because I loved it. Like, it was all, like, gathers and then just dudes who were. were nowhere near as famous as the Gaithers. And out of that stuff was so great.

And that's not quite, you know, that's not quite bluegrass, but it has that kind of like old-time religion sound. So when did you make the switch over to more of that country? Like what was your bridge from kind of that? I don't know. It's maybe a little bit more, depending on what kind of music group you guys were playing, but like 90s pop-inspired Christian music over to more of a country sound. Yeah, I mean, you know, I have a funny relationship with religion and the religion that I grew up in, and I for sure shed a lot of that. I've shed all that stuff that I grew up in, kind of my first year of college, because it was killing me. And so I kind of was like, I was kind of playing a little bit of music here and there. And I like to just kind of like record things in the basement and work on things. And what?

wasn't finding things that like I was I was playing around with like all the things you like when you're a teenager the like kind of screamo metal post hardcore stuff um like that's I think that's what you mostly grow up on is like a hillbilly and in you know like that's the real sound of rural America right there yeah and sound loud rap like that's what you grew up on yeah um and then I got to a point there I was just like I'm not really like this doesn't feel right And so I had just a little like summer in college where I was like, I'm just going to write kind of more folky country like we're going to sit down with an acoustic guitar and write songs. And I realized that it just came supernaturally, like, or not supernaturally. It just came out very naturally.

Like it just kind of, it was, it felt like it was just a part of my body. And I think a lot of that's because it echoes the things that I grew up. around like my mom all i grew up you know family land i grew up right next to my mom all and um she would always have she would to keep the birds out of her blueberry bushes she would keep a radio playing and she like triple bag it in grocery bags and just leave it outside a little battery powered radio and i'd just be walking up um through the field to her house and i'd hear you know just country music coming off off of you know big dog 92.1 or whatever um and it was just kind of always around. And so I think there was something that just came very organically about just not trying to be

not trying to sound too big for my hometown and just sounding like it a little bit. And I didn't start playing like, I didn't really start playing music solo until about 2016. It just wasn't the biggest thing that I needed to sort out in life at the time. But that was where, I mean, I kept writing songs and stuff and um and kind of started making moves towards being country so talk about the move to because you've seen i think you've seen us about this a little bit about moving kind of from north carolina to nashville talk about the decision to move to nashville yeah um well i've moved all around so until i was 25 i never was more than an hour and a half from where i grew up

And then I moved for a year and a half to New York City. I moved for a year and a half to Houston. I moved for two years to Atlanta. And then I moved to Nashville. And some of that was that I got married and my partner's work, you know, she had to be in a lot of those cities. And that was honestly, that was incredibly difficult to leave my home and to leave, you know, the folks that were my family and also just to leave a place that means so much to me.

Um, the other thing is that, you know, 2008 to 2011, 2013, maybe, um, the recession did a huge number on my hometown. Um, like if I'm remembering right, we had at 1.25% unemployment. It was a mill town. They told nobody to go to college. Didn't tell them by a leave house. They said, just, just go work at, we go work at the plant and you'll have a job for the rest of your life. Um, and so it just, I mean, my hometown's cool now. People go back and they're like, cool, yeah, cool breweries and stuff. And, and I'm like, yeah, that's great for them now. But that was, that's, that's been over a decade in the making, and that's taken a lot of recovery. So there weren't really opportunities for me to go back that were going to be economically viable and we're going to be good for me in the long run. So it was just really hard to move. I'm glad I did it because it forced me,

it forced me to like make sure that my world was bigger and to stop being a skis. scared of the world as I had kind of always been. But at the same time, it also forced me to really, like, I was in a place where I had to put a finger on what it means to be from the hills, what it means to be from the south, what it means to have an accent. You know, like, you know, my life isn't particularly hard. There's lots of, you know, I'm just, I'm a white guy, but you do walk in a room with this accent and people immediately think you're stupid.

And so it really just clarified a lot for me and clarified a lot of. about the kinds of society that I just don't belong in. When you got to Nashville, did you recognize the rural representation that's produced there? I mean, there's a lot of tension right now in country music, in Americana music, even just in the distinction between those two genres of music about who represents small towns, what is small town life? Is it Jason L. Dean or is it, you know, something else? And I'm wondering, you know, having made the move from Western North Carolina to Nashville, do you, is that tension real or is that more manufactured? I mean, it's a tension for me. It's like a, it's a culture

war that I want to fight. You know, I can't speak to, I can't speak to everybody else, but I can say that like, I think it was Oliver Anthony, bless his heart. he got in a he he got in some he called out i think it was like parker mccallum or somebody for having back in tracks and i just and this is a kind of thing that like these these bros do in country music they go back and forth about what sounds authentic um and that's just so uninteresting to me because there's such bigger fish to fry in country music and in the ways that country music is a really vital cultural space that gets overlooked by a lot of folks until they need to grift off of it and um yeah

So, like, I don't know what the tension is, but I do know that there's a lot of people who are trying to sell off a tourist view of the country. You know, I say a lot, like, I think, I think if you think of the country as a metaphor and also a real place, the biggest threat has been suburbanization. It's been people that want to tell you, this is what a family looks like, this is what gender looks like, and it's all to marshal people into being consumers who are afraid of the city, which is just code for white flight. And so I think a lot of country music reflects those values. you listen to a lot of contemporary country music now and not all of it like i don't want to paint with too broad of a brush because i think that's also unhelpful but there's a lot of folks in country music now who will who get bogged down in selling you or super reductive version of the country where there's not hardcore music there's you know everybody drives trucks instead of uh cavaliers

and you know and old you know old beat up compact cars and they'll and they'll tell you all the kind of identifiers of what it means to be country and they're all it's just a of consumer goods is all it is it's a hat it's a belt buckle it's a truck um and then it's you know not that is that they treat their gender like the same way where it's basically a consumer good and the point is to always give the kind of most legible account of who you are and it ends up feeling like cause it ends up had like a bad yellowstone uh episode so uh yeah it's kind of where I'm at with it I think like I don't know where everybody else is but I want to give voice to country music as it kind of, as country life is, which is a little wild, a little feral,

a little out of control. And it's a place to be kind of a little fugitive and a little free rather than trying to tell everybody like, this is how you survey and cul-de-sac your gender, your family. This is how you choose to be a good consumer. Instead, it's like, this is how you take care of each other. And this is how you find a place to be a little weird. Yeah. And I think that, for me, feels a little bit more authentic. I always struggle, too, with what country music is because like i grew up saying i was a country music fan i love old time and traditional music but um but that's different than country and you're you're you're describing what i would what i call the the cul-de-sac cowboys because i'm from south dakota and um you know didn't grow up on

a big ranch or anything like that but grew up with horses on the edge of town and um every time i see somebody with a cowboy hat or cowboy boots i'm like what kind of horse you got and look i don't horse and it's just I'm not even being an asshole about it but it's just like oh cool I want to talk about you know horses but all my friends were skateboarders and we had to like ride our bikes to the edge of town so that we could get on the concrete because we only had gravel roads and you couldn't skateboard on gravel roads like that was also very much a part of growing up in rural areas yeah um and I think there's a lot of interesting like you said artists out there I've mentioned this before but I'm a you know big fan of Bubba Sparks not necessarily because I like his music but like you

You know, Bubba Sparks actually captured something that was country. He came across more maybe in the hip-hop space. But, you know, a lot of my friends love Tupac when I was growing up. And, you know, now they all drive trucks. And it seems like there's been a narrowing of that identity in the last several years where, you know, we used to be able to like Tupac or M&M in the Royal America. And now it sort of feels like Jason L. Dean tells us what to think. and bullies us, tries to bully us if we don't comply.

Yeah, I feel that entirely. I think some is like people don't even know what their roots are. Like I think, I think that the, I mean, you know, not to be that guy, but I think the process of what capitalism has done to the country, you know, the ways that people, it's a lot harder to make sure that people are fed. It's a lot harder to get together with your family. It's a lot harder to find a way of making a living that doesn't involve punching the clock all that. time. It's harder to kind of like, you know, live off the land or kind of, or you not be kind of brought online to a way that kind of contemporary consumer culture needs us to work and live. And so folks are just kind of like, well, I'll look for an identity, but somebody's got

to sell it to me first. And I think that's like, that's out the problem. Yeah. And you've, I've heard you describe your, in the past, you forget how you described it, but you incorporated the microplastics of country music or the single use plastics like you just mentioned. Talk about what you mean when you say that. Yeah. I think country music is like, I think when we do it well and what I like about country music when I hear it done well is that it's like it's kind of folk music for a world that can't undo all the things that we find ourselves in. It's not like there's no nostalgia to it. It's not pretending that the world is all like, you know, train tracks and fields and farms. But it's like, man, a lot of the country right now is just, you know,

We all got a spoons worth of microplastics in our brains. And we live in a world where we can't get past that. We can't get past the fact that, like, we have a giant, like, ain't there'll be many birds left. Ain't going to be many bees left. And so a lot of the things that are like kind of quintessentially, nostalgically country are gone. And so we live in a world where we can't undo the ways that capitalism has,

you know, changed it and it can't be taken back. And so country music is, to me, like folk music for the microplastic era. Yeah, that's such a great way of phrasing it, especially, I mean, because I think your, that your music is, it just feels so recognizable. I mean, it's not, it's not overly one genre or another. It's just like the kind of stuff that I picture my friends listening to or like, it's the kind of, you know, it's like, it's familiar in a way that's also new. You are working on some new music. Do you want to talk about the new projects that you're working on right now? Yeah. I've been putting out singles a little bit the last year or so. And I've got one coming out the 23rd, I believe, of this month of May. And it's a song that honestly I wasn't going to put it out because I'm also putting out a record. And I'd love to talk about that too. But it just kind of got picked up a little bit. It got some steam online. And I realized that people were responding to it and also realized that thematically it just didn't work. We decided to call it bottleneck. But the last.

couple years have been a real bottleneck for me. I became a dad. I lost a dad. I live in Tennessee. The politics here are awful. And I had a job where I was up close and personal with a lot of that stuff. And so just kind of wrote, wrote through that experience. And honestly, a lot of it is trying to, and I think this is a lot of what I do in my music now is try to give voice to anger in a way that doesn't give rise to violence, is an expression of fragility, but it's a kind of like anger that helps quick in a sense of compassion, helps quick in an sense of agency,

helps provide a sense of wisdom. I mean, this isn't something that's new to the world. This is something that, frankly, is, I think, pretty new to a lot of white guys. But, yeah, I'm trying to learn to be angry as an expression of love and of grief in the same ways that I can tap. into despair and all that, but sometimes the world needs a little bit more hope. And I think anger is oftentimes an expression of that hope. So I'm doing that. And then I'm also working on a record

that I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to put it out, but hopefully it's within the next year. It's called heirloom. It's about having my kid and losing my dad in the same year and also thinking about the ways that Warren works sort themselves out through family and about the things that I want to pass on to my kid, what kind of heirlooms I want her to have. and the kind of the kind of cultural, social, emotional, moral inheritance that she's going to get from me. And also just the terror of raising a kid in the world that we're in right now and for me in Tennessee and in the South. Yeah, Tennessee has become quite the hotbed of right wing or I don't know. What word do you want to use, fascist?

Yeah. It seems to be attracting people these days. And I can't imagine having a kid in that environment. But how do you think your view on on things are shifting at having had a kid recently? I tell people I now have to stay with the trouble more than ever. Like I was, you know, it's going to be hard to toss a rock and hit a songwriter who's not a depresso in one way or another. So I was content to just be like, yeah, the world's hard. Like I guess I can kind of throw my hands up and I know that, you know, whatever happens, I'll have an exit out of here.

Um, but then when you have a kid, it's like, I have to think and feel and hope for another generation at the very least. Um, and I know that we should all do that for each other in general, but then to live with that every day is, it's like having another nerve ending sewn on to me and it reaches out into the future. Um, and so it's, it's, you know, I think some people, family becomes a point of quietism for them. Like they, they can retreat to their private life. But for me, I feel like it's really pushed me out into the world. Um, and so it's, it's, you know, I think some people, because I need the world to be good to her. I don't know what her gender situation is going to be when she's older. I don't know what the state of the planet's going to be. I don't know what the state of the U.S. is going to be. I don't know what work and health care and education are going to look like. I can tell you, education right now in Tennessee looks pretty bad. I don't, you know, I don't know how safe the schools are going to be.

And so I, you know, those are all things that I now, like, I've got more skin in the game. I've put more in the pot now. And it feels more personal. It feels so much more personal when I see the state of Tennessee got to public schools. It feels so much more personal when I see the state of Tennessee attack trans kids and politicize trans kids. It feels so much more personal when the government starts to kind of go at health care because all those things could or already do come home to our family in a way that I have, that I love more than life itself. And you have a substack newsletter and you talk a lot about on your substack what musicians and artists can do in sort of today's landscape. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think the big picture is that I, there's a lot of people who are kind of, I can't stand sentimentality. I'm just too practical for that. Like, I don't think that we're just going to express our way out of fascism. like it takes some some real work but i still think that culture has a real real real play real uh real uh role to play in um in helping make things right and so i just kind of like i just wanted to to honestly for myself set down what i think some clear like real actionable objectives are as a as a culture worker and as a culture maker and so for the most part it's it's just kind of making sure that um

that that that whatever needs to most of of it is about kind of maintaining the stories that need to be told and providing an alternative to a lot of propaganda that we get, the kind of the Jason Aldean propaganda, the kind of wishy-washy resentment that folks like Oliver Anthony sold us in that Richmond, North of Richmond song. It's making sure that, like, I give people something that is fun and thought-provoking and works in their affect and gets in their imagination and their desires in the ways that music and art does, but attaches them to a sense of history and a sense of community that's ultimately productive and provides a kind of counter to the right-wing copaganda of all the stuff that we're

getting in country music otherwise. And why do you think more country artists aren't speaking out? I mean, you see it a little bit, but I mean, and also it seems like once an artist speaks out, they get kind of pushed out of the country genre into Americana or some other art. as, but, you know, the designation, but what, what is holding people back? That's a good question. I, I mean, I honestly don't know. I, there's, I think, I mean, if I could guess, I think half of it is that there's a good old boys club, like the industry is kind of a good old boys club. Um, some of it is also that I think that's just where the big money is.

I mean, country music wants you to be, the really commercial country music wants you to be as broadly accessible as you can. And so they're going to just. sell um and like i don't say this in any pejorative sense i love making slop for the piggies i'm a piggy myself i like feeding in the trough but they are going to make sure that you sell sell whatever slop um all the piggies are going to eat and and so you know the moment that you take a stance that is unpopular then it just doesn't sell as well um and so i think you know the u.s like a lot of the country audience has been so propagandized that what sells is just what is in the water, which is transphobia.

What's in the water is, you know, loss-cause nostalgia. What's in the water is a lot of fearmonger in and a lot of like, well, men are men and women are women and all this kind of stuff. And so the moment that you kind of deviate from this kind of thoughtless common sense, you just, there goes your market. That's my guess. Do you feel like that's new? I mean, I think back to, I mean, it. Jimmy Carter was a Democratic president. He was friends with Willie Nelson.

He threw some of the best country concerts in American history with Johnny Cash and the Allman Brothers and, you know, the kind of the Wayland Jennings, Murrell-Hagerd crowd. They probably definitely, they had some problematic songs for sure, but they were at least focused on working, you know, people's issues. And it seems like that's, that went away at some point. I mean, I do think 9-11 changed a lot of it because it became about how you create good soldiers and how you make people more loyal to America and to the flag than to their sense of the world and to each other. And I think part of that is also that, I mean, once again, not to not to be that guy, but I think one of the things that whiteness has done for people, and not all country music is white, but a lot of it is marketed to white folks. One of the things that whiteness has done is that it has stolen people's allegiance from class solidarity and from thinking about folks that are struggling with work and are struggling with their bills. And it's made them allegeant to whatever kind of empty, hollow bunch of smoke whiteness is. And so I do think that that has been an erosive force in country music because it has shifted away from class towards race, towards whiteness.

you've got the album coming out. You're doing some tours. What's next for you this year? What else is on the horizon? I'm going to be on the road for a couple weeks this month in kind of throughout the Midwest, Louisville, Detroit, St. Louis, a bunch of spots in the Midwest. And then I'm going to be working on getting the record out. I've got some, if I can get my ducks in a row, I've got some fun ideas for music videos and stuff. And so I'm going to be trying to be trying to get on that and get my kind of backyard wrestling-themed content up and running. And where can people kind of keep track of what you're up to? Yeah, I'm on Instagram, TikTok. I'm trying to get more people over to my substack. It's both where I kind of talk about music and also kind of do a little bit more thinking and writing about culture as well. So those are kind of the big spots for me.

I'm also on Spotify. I guess if you want to listen to music, Spotify, please buy merch. puts it put diapers on my baby um it gives me from being you know uh peed on do you feel like spotify has been a good development for artists or do you feel like it's it's taken advantage of you hell no it's so it's so bad um i'm working on a podcast with my friend lindsay no uh who's also a wonderful country artist about a book that recently came out by liz pelly called mood machine and it's about spotify and there's you know there's a there's a couple things that have been nice about Spotify, but that's more because they've provided an alternative

to the super hierarchical record industry, but they've only done that by creating an even steeper hierarchy. I think folks think of Spotify as like a music platform, and the truth is their tech company. And so you look at what tech companies have done to everything in the U.S. and in the world, and Spotify is really no different. So where's the best place for people to like get your music that benefits you? Um, band camp's great. If you can do anything to download, like even if you buy vinyl, buy CDs, like buy merch, um, you could listen to my, my record, my entire catalog a thousand times through on, on a streaming platform and it's just not going to, you match the money that I could make from buying one CD or buying one piece of vinyl or download the music off of iTunes or band camp. Now, I say that and like, you know, money's tight for folks. And I do, I'd rather just people listen. Um, if you've got the money to give, please give it. But, you know, spend merch and support the artists that you really enjoy and listen to. But if you can't, you know, at least tell somebody. I always tell people,

if you can't give me real, if you can't give me real money, at least, at least help my songs get heard because I do think that they're trying to get a little bit of work done in the world. And so where's the best place to get merch? My website, nathanevonsfox.com, also bandcamp. I'm just Nathan Evans Fox on bandcamp. And I do have to say this. I'm not Nathan Fox. Hey, that's the guy out there, and I'm not Nathan Evans, the guy who did the sea shanties in 2020 and got incredibly famous. I didn't know that I was walking into a trap with this name, but here we are. All right. Well, Nathan Evans Fox, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. All right. Well, that's the first episode of Good Skews with Nathan Evans

Fox. We'd love to know what you think. Are you interested in hearing more content like this from the skeuniverse. Send me an email at show at weekly skews.com and we'll see you next time.