Bill Fox Lives.

A bit of non-film related news...

I'm a little bit late in picking up on this, but Scat Records will be re-releasing Ohio singer/songwriter Bill Fox's two solo records Shelter from the Smoke and Transit Byzantium. Originally released in the mid-1990s, these two records have been favorites of mine since I picked them up back then. I loved his music ever since and wondered what happened to him until the Believer published an article about him in last year's print version of their music issue.

His CDs have been out of print for a while and once the Beleiver article was published, the price for his used CDs sky-rocketed on Amazon. (I remember seeing Amazon affiliated merchants asking up to $125 for Shelter from the Smoke, soon after the Believer article was published. I checked a couple of weeks ago and they were now down to about $25 to $50.) The company that released both of Fox's CDs, Spin Art, went out of business in 2007. With Spin Art out of business and Fox essentially not interested in the music business, I wondered if they'd ever be available again.

Thanks to Scat Records they will be available again, and perhaps, better than ever. A few years ago Scat did a great job with their 10th anniversary re-issue of Guided By Voices Bee Thousand, releasing it on both CD and as a 3 LP set. Both added tracks to this already stellar record. In addition to that, they pretty much simultaniously re-released recordings by Bill Fox's 1980s band the Mice for the first time on CD. Now with Bill Fox's solo material, they plan to release it for the first time on vinyl(!) and they are including - what looks like both on vinyl and CD - Fox's Bird of the World 45.

Even though I already have the Spin Art versions of his CDs, I'm gonna save my pennies and buy both a CD and LP version of both. Shelter From the Smoke is due out in September, and Transit Byzantium's release date is TBA.

Once again Scat Records made me a very happy boy.

-Eric