Fox is the brand-new single by rising Cavan band Marcus Magee & The Hollaw Men. It is the second release from the band’s eagerly awaited forthcoming debut album Rising from the Hollaw, which will be launched at a sold-out show at The Sugar Club in Dublin next month.
Fox follows the success of their debut single’ Mac Dee’, a powerful reflection on frontman Magee’s cancer journey, released last month to critical acclaim. The track has been receiving national airplay and has attracted international fans after being selected by the Spotify Release Radar. “A beautiful and poignant piece of work” – Fiachna Ó Braonáin, RTÉ Radio 1.
Fox is a blues-rock-inspired song combining folk sensibility with an easy-listening melody injected with powerful lead guitar. It conjures up a sense of mystery and intrigue with a touch of malice while humanising the life of a fox at nighttime. Fox was born after lead singer Magee found himself thinking about the life of a fox following an attack on the lambs he keeps at his rural organic homestead near Cootehill, County Cavan.
“I was away on a whitewater kayaking trip in Slovenia, and my wife sent word from home that a fox had killed two of our lambs which were only two days old. At first I found myself enraged and cursing the fox but as I paddled down the river, I found myself reflecting on the life of the fox and taking a more compassionate view. I realised that he’s trying to survive, as we all are. He’s doing what’s natural to him, and in a world where natural habitats are being destroyed by humans at a phenomenal rate, it’s hard for animals to survive in the wild. I thought about the lonely nighttime life of the fox and I kind of felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for the lambs too and guilty that I wasn’t there to protect! The experience then led me to thinking about this in the human context, of certain humans living on the edge of society or outside of the mainstream, sometimes contending with anxiety, loneliness, isolation, and depression, or for others, it’s a choice to not fit in, to go their own way, which I respect. So fox is an exploration of all this. It was one of those songs I connected deeply with, and in the emotion of it all, wrote it very quickly in the one setting. We love performing it live, it has real passion in it.”
