Red Fox Run plays bright, fresh-faced pop-rock songs that manage to avoid coming off as either cheeky or overly earnest — the kind of music, evidently, that makes Barry Fey glad he's no longer in the music business. The act got its start when friends Daniel Rondeau, Joshua Hester and Lucas Henderson started playing music together as Neighborhood Hero. In mid-2010, the trio got a new drummer — Olympia, Washington, native Tristan Ringering — who brought along his friend Matt Mosberg to fill out the low end on bass, and the revised lineup eventually dubbed itself Red Fox Run, a name that was stamped on boxes from an orchard in Palisade that Henderson's mother had bought at a farmers' market in Castle Rock. We sat down with the bandmembers recently to talk about their new album and their alleged run-in with Fey.
Westword: With your new album, [take]ctrl, you decided to go into a studio to record instead of doing it yourselves. Was there a particular kind of vibe you hoped to capture?
Daniel Rondeau: On this album, we were going for a Pinkerton kind of sound, but that didn't happen. So many bands try to sound like Pinkerton and, just like us, fail. The live-room reverb feel, it sounds like you're in the practice room. The songs on the CD are partly what we carried on with the previous drummer. We have a whole new lineup of songs we're going to start releasing live once we get them dialed in. Hopefully we can record them without many pauses. So this is just the beginning for us, and we're pretty excited about it.
So what was this episode, as it were, that you had with Barry Fey at that Play It Forward benefit last February?
Joshua Hester: He said, "I'm glad I'm no longer involved in modern music because of bands like this." We looked at each other, and we couldn't tell if he dissed us or if he just didn't care about music these days in general.
DR: It was after he was pried for a response. He was on a judges' panel for a benefit we were doing. They were like, "Well, Barry, you're in the music industry, you should have something to say to these guys." And he said, "One of the reasons I'm no longer in the music industry is because of bands like this" — something to that effect.
JH: So we use that for inspiration because old people don't like us.
DR: They had the rest of the band leave the stage for that part and had me stand there and listen to these judges, and I can take that. But this guy kind of pissed me off, so I was like, "I need to figure out some way to discreetly flip him the bird." So I started rubbing my headstock with my middle finger facing him. The crowd couldn't see it, but for some reason I feel like I won.
