Conor Murphy has fond memories of being in Canada. “I want to be in Montreal so badly. I miss it a lot,” he tells me during our Zoom call, although he also claims it’s not always on stage that he has the best experience. “We played some of the worst shows that we’ve ever played in Montreal. Just like for like attendance or something, or like we just mess up really bad when we’re there. I think part of it is that we just have so much fun while we’re in Montreal, just like so much! Also, I took French in high school and it’s the only place where I can use my very, very intermediate French.“
Murphy will return to Montreal next Spring when his band Foxing opens for Manchester Orchestra at the city’s Corona Theatre. Today sees the release of the St. Louis-based group’s fourth album, “Draw Down The Moon” and it’s been a long time coming.
“I need it to be away from me,” Murphy says. “It’s a combination of, we’ve been working on it for a very long time and also the brutal amount of time that we have been rolling it out. We’re in the fifth of six months of rolling this thing out which is just what you have to do at this point for a band of our size, you know, a very middle-class band. Also with the pandemic, not knowing when anything would return or if it would return. I’m proud of us for being inventive about the way we filled up six months of time, you know. We made our Ritual website and we did all of these things, the singles that we released, you know, we released half of the album before the album comes out.”
Draw Down The Moon came together after working for more than a year at the band’s studio with guitarist Eric Hudson at the helm as producer. From there, the band took the songs to Georgia, where they holed up for a couple of weeks with their friends in Manchester Orchestra.
“We’ve done two tours with them before this upcoming one. The first was in support of their album, A Black Mile To The Surface. We grew to be very good friends, looked at them as this kind of big brother band. We were showing them demos of our album Nearer My God at the time and after the tour, we kind of had this communication between ourselves, like, calling or texting each other, just talking about music or life or whatever. That was really important. And also just the amount of advice that they were giving us all the time was incredible.”
The two bands hit the road again in October and Murphy admits to a healthy competition between them that he says forces both groups to raise their game on stage. I ask him what makes for the perfect Foxing performance.
“I think in a physical sense if I’m totally exhausted then I know that we’ve done something right. If I’ve gotten hurt during it, if I’m bruised after it, I think that that is the most important thing. Truly putting too much into a show, especially as a frontman for something. Thinking of it as entertainment in that regard and not thinking about tomorrow’s show, but really leaving it on the stage, I think is so important.”
Murphy says he also looks forward to playing to people who don’t know his band yet.
“Those support tours are like the absolute best times to really put everything into it because there’s this feeling of trying to win over a crowd that is such an awesome challenge of, you know, a thousand people and there’s maybe a pocket of them that are there to see you. But for the most part, people don’t know who you are and trying to convince them that this is worth looking into by way of putting on a great performance… There’s something about playing to people that have no idea who you are that excites me so much.”
Watch the full interview below:
Foxing play Corona Theatre with Manchester Orchestra on 16 March 2022. BUY TICKETS HERE
“Draw Down The Moon” is out now via Hopeless Records.
