Featured Conversation: A Walk With Foxing's Eric Hudson

Published on Dec 25, 2024

I think it’s okay to hate something but I think what’s important is to remain curious about things that you don’t like and things that you hate, mainly because I think that you’re missing out on an opportunity to understand or learn something about yourself, or learn something about something you don’t understand. That could be really important, and I think it also helps you learn more about the things you do understand. I wish more people would do that.

Would you like to introduce yourself?

My name is Eric Hudson, and I play guitar in the band Foxing, and I also produce and mix and record music for the band and for other bands.

[Eric is outside and walking while we are recording the interview and what follows is less an interview and more a delightful stream of thoughts from Eric]

Okay, so when we talked earlier, you said you wanted to speak about your early experience with vinyl and how that influenced you.

So I’m not a big vinyl collector necessarily, but I’ve just kind of happened into collecting from my dad and my grandparents. And also, the first label that Foxing was on was a small emo label and one of the perks of being on that label was that, essentially, you just get a bunch of vinyl from these small emo bands, and a lot of those records have ended up being pretty rare and sought after. But it’s weird, because I think the cool factor of having those records is a little lost on me. It’s kind of funny for that reason, but I have them and and a lot of those bands I knew personally, and I am still friends with so it’s just kind of funny that I would have them, not someone on Discogs who is like, foaming at the mouth to get it or something.

For me, it started with my dad, primarily, who is a big classic rock guy. Boston was one of his favorite bands. ZZ Top was one of the others, and REO Speedwagon. He would always tell this story about REO Speedwagon because they’re a band that was really big in the Midwest, which is where we’re from. And he would always tell a story about being in college in the late 70s and early 80s, and how he would pass this REO Speedwagon vinyl around his dorm, he started listening to it first, and then other people in the dorm were like, “Hey, man, what is that, that’s awesome.” And then they would all put it on whenever they were making out with girls in their dorms. And he’s like “Yeah. And I feel like every time I got the vinyl back, it was in better condition than I gave it to them in, because the guys loved it so much as their making out music, and so they would polish it and all this stuff for me.”

So I feel like a lot of the classic rock stuff I associate with, sort of the vinyl sound, and especially that Boston record, because he would always put it on and he had this big stereo with these big Jensen speakers. And I don’t know how old it is, but it’s got it to be from like, the 80s, because it also has a cassette player in there. I don’t even think it has a CD player. It’s really big, big speakers. It sounds really good. And I remember him just putting on, like the Boston record, for instance, through those speakers. And I don’t know, I think that’s a very nostalgic thing for me, and that’s kind of where my journey with vinyl, I guess, began.

From there, I kind of got an interest in playing music for myself, you know, like learning how to play guitar and stuff like that. And so once I kind of got out of the music that my parents got me into, which is a lot of classic rock, I think the music I got into on my own at first as a kid was literally, like Backstreet Boys and stuff like that, because, you know, that’s what kids at school were listening to.

I remember my cousin started playing the electric guitar, and I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, so I wanted to do it myself. And I think from there, it’s weird, but I feel like music kind of became less about fun and like pleasure for me, and almost more academic. So everything with my relationship, from vinyl and music from that point on, it was still fun and meaningful to me, but sort of had an academic feel. Like I couldn’t listen to something without trying to dissect it, basically. 

It was a similar thing with vinyl. I kind of discovered, you know, obviously sampling has been around a long time, since the 70s and, the early hip hop movement and everything. And I kind of discovered that I can use that technique to write songs in Foxing and in other bands that I was in, but I wouldn’t do it quite the same way that you see it in hip hop. And I wouldn’t use the same reference points. 

So what I’ll do is, sometimes I’ll go to a small record shop. I don’t really enjoy the bigger ones as much, because at a small record shop you know who’s a huge dweeb, who’s very into, like, whatever he’s selling, and is probably losing money off of the shop, right? And, I go to their bargain bins, and I just start picking out records that look interesting to me, or just something that I’ve never heard of before, or like I just have no idea what it is. And I guess what it is based on the cover and I’ll just start listening to them. And if there’s any little snippets of music that I’m listening for, like two second clips, or five second clips. And if there’s anything that’s really interesting, I’ll just put it on. I have a really crappy vinyl player that also has a headphone out, and so you can use that as a way to kind of digitize it, if you record from the headphone out.

I’ll collect all those little snippets of songs and then put them into some software and just kind of go through them and collect the ones that are all in, like a similar key, and then put them together and see, what it sounds like, or what sticks out to me. And there’s been a lot of moments where those snippets have made it into songs, or maybe they didn’t make it into songs, but what they did do was kind of inspire the direction of a song I was working on. And that means, on a record that comes out, or, at the very least, inspires the direction of another song. 

So I feel like that’s one way that I use vinyl all the time. I used it on this past record (Foxing) a bit, and then on our record Nearer My God, especially, that was done multiple times, on multiple songs that made it to the record. The song “Heartbeats” on that record has a bunch of orchestral samples, and that is taken from, originally, from a vinyl of a Rachmaninoff symphony. And there’s a little sample in the song “Five Cups” from that record, where me and the other guitar player at the time had done some psychedelics. There were coins placed on a record that was playing. So it kind of weighed it down, and it created this, like a demonic sound. I forget what record it was. It might have been an American Football record or something. And that ended up in there as a background sound.

 So if you go to record stores, what are you looking for these days? Are you looking for offbeat, kind of weird records to use in that manner?

Yeah. I’m very rarely looking in the way that I think most people do, which is like, “Oh, I’m looking for, like, a rare fnd, or something, you know, something that’s undervalued.” I typically -  because I am going through almost more from a utilitarian standpoint - am purposely looking for things that I’ve never seen or heard of before. I’m using them for any kind of compositional reason. I end up getting very interested in what I find and what it is, you know, because one thing that’s really cool, especially in the bargain bin pipelines, is that everyone does a lot of streaming now. And I think something that’s kind of not talked about enough is how much stuff isn’t cataloged onto streaming? Stuff has come out that you can’t find digitally, you know? And I feel like, if it’s not, I mean, this is a whole separate topic, but I feel like we’re gonna lose a lot of media. Because it’s absolutely one place where you can find things that you won’t like in the modern world, at least you’re not going to find, and I don’t think many people are even going to hear, maybe not even hear ever again, unless somebody really likes that really weird record. You’re finding these things - I found this electronic record from the late 70s, and it was this Japanese electronic artist (Tomito). But basically, he, on this particular record, his whole thing was, he was a big classical musician, and he was playing “Claire de Lune” and stuff like that. But making electronic early synthesizer versions of it. Okay, that’s cool, yeah. And I was experimenting with synthesizers for the first time, and then playing “Claire de Lune”, but in a weird, electronic way. It’s recorded really weird. And it gets very psychedelic at times, and ambient at times, but then it comes back to the song. 

And just hearing that record, I was like, whoa. I was not expecting this. Obviously, I’m familiar with all this classical stuff, and it’s cool that he took early synthesizers and decided to kind of experiment with it, but then it made me go down this rabbit hole of him and his career, and other stuff that he did, and he was this very, relatively small artist who made all of these weird electronic records in the 70s and early 80s and then it got me interested in other artists. He was associated with the movement in Japan at the time of other experimental ambient artists and then that eventually led me to French electronic music of the 70s and 80s, so it was just kind of a gateway into something that you otherwise wouldn’t know, as long as you remain curious about it. It can be a gateway into so many things you’ve never heard or experienced before at the very least, even if it’s not something you’re going to listen to every day, it’s still something that’s like, well, this is a very interesting moment in music that I otherwise would know nothing about.

 I think people sometimes maybe get caught up too much in it. This sounds stupid, maybe, but I think people sometimes get caught up too much thinking of something that’s art with, well, how much do I like this? And based on how much I like it, I’m like, you know, that’s how curious I’m going to be about it. You know what I mean? And I think that it’s certainly okay to not like something. It’s actually, I think it’s okay to hate something but I think what’s important is to remain curious about things that you don’t like and things that you hate, mainly because I think that you’re missing out on an opportunity to understand or learn something about yourself, or learn something about something you don’t understand. That could be really important, and I think it also helps you learn more about the things you do understand. I wish more people would do that.

Eric Hudson is a guitarist and producer for the band Foxing, as well as a producer for other artists. Foxing’s latest album is available for purchase here