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He recalls thinking: “I’m gonna be Remy from House of Cards. He sold his music gear and left his Oklahoma home town to work in Washington DC, as a deputy press secretary in the Obama administration, in 2014. “There’s not a lot of Black examples of the National, who have built a thing for decades and aren’t going away,” he says. If he is to juggle a music career with starting a family, as he wishes, he knows he needs to make his moments count. I started to see music as a revolutionary act: Black people, queer people, women, building things that hadn’t existedĬox recorded Farm to Table just months after releasing Live Forever, as though fearful that public interest could vanish overnight.
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Its playful braggadocio is complicated by some disembodied Auto-Tune, capturing what he calls the “two Barteeses”: one humming with bravado, the other spooked by his whirlwind career. He wants the song “to feel like you’re looking at a mirror and the mirror is talking to you”. Oftentimes they’re like: ‘It’s not even about the money.’ But I’m not coming from that!”
SNAIL COSTUME PROFESSIONAL
“It’s something you never see in indie rock,” he says of the track, which proudly reels off his professional accomplishments. Cox namedrops all three on his latest single Cosigns, another unfashionably forthright statement. Live Forever won tastemaker approval, including support slots with such indie royals as Courtney Barnett, Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers. He is an authentic bundle of contradictions: a DIY grafter who can blast arena-sized hooks a self-mythologist with wobbly self-esteem a business-savvy pragmatist with half a mind to tear down the industry.
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He swiftly signed to 4AD and released his debut album, Live Forever, by turns channelling anthemic thunder, punk abandon, lo-fi rap nihilism and ambient dislocation. “And it’s all OK! I’m lucky I can express it.”Ĭox, 33, came to prominence in 2020 with an eclectic EP of National covers, swapping the Ohio band’s ennui for wide-eyed bombast. “Some days I feel like God other days I feel like a snail,” he admits at one point, equally amused by both extremes. Perched on the corner of a hotel bed, he bounces through stump speeches without teetering into overearnestness. He is not the only artist to sweep into indie promising a borderless, post-genre future, but he may be the first to do so while rocking denim shorts and a floral summer shirt. Given his conviction, Cox presents a remarkably easygoing front.