NEW ALBUM COMING FROM CLEVELAND SINGER/SONGWRITER BILL FOX IN 2012.

I first heard of Bill Fox’s band, The Mice, via Superchunk & Guided by Voices. They were playing a show together in Columbus, Ohio, and covered “Bye Bye Kittycat.” One of GbV’s former labels, Scat Records, eventually reissued their work, and circa 1997 and 1998, Bill went solo with two records: Shelter from the Smoke, and Transit Byzantium, which are 2 phenomenal records of quiet, Dylan-esque, music.

For a long time Bill was deliberately trying to stay out of the spotlight, but in recent years he’s been playing shows in his hometown of Cleveland. The Other Paper brings us the news that 2012 will see a new album from Bill Fox, which is extremely exciting to hear. The press-shy troubadour even answers some queries in said article.

If you’d like to learn more about Bill Fox, read Joe Hagan’s profile from the Believer, which was a profile of the singer that established both his legend and mystery. Here’s the opening of that piece, which you can read here:

Can beauty cause cardiac arrest? “That’s what it felt like to me,” my
wife says. “Cardiac arrest or maybe a lightning bolt to the sternum.”

This is how it started: She worked in town but lived in the country, requiring a long, solitary drive home that gave her time enough to wonder why she was spending her twenties alone in a Vermont farmhouse. Disquieted, reaching no good answer, she hit SCAN on her radio. A change in frequency, a change in thought. And there he
was: One man and one guitar. A circular melody, a high, lonesome voice, lyrics of plaintive confession.

Here’s a sampler playlist - there are some MICE songs in there too: