Spreading Their Wings: In Conversation With Foxes And Peppers
Foxes and Peppers is the musical alias for the duo of Fox Amoore and Pepper Coyote. Over the past few years, they’ve been taking the furry fandom by storm with their energetic live shows and albums full of original content.
In January, their first non-convention show in the UK was announced at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. I sat down with Fox and Pepper before their show and had a chat with them about their upcoming album, music in the fandom, and Nashville.
You’ve been performing together for four years. What sparked you two to start working together musically?
Fox Amoore: Roughly three to four years ago, we were doing a convention together. I originally had another singer I was going to work with, but he couldn’t make it due to unforeseen circumstances. I then learned that Pepper was going to be at the convention-
Pepper Coyote: I was not going to be at the convention. You asked me to.
FA: Were you not?
PC: You asked me to, remember?
FA: Okay, so I thought Pepper was going to be at the convention, but then I contacted him anyway and then he said “Yeah, I’m gonna go”. So then all of a sudden we were looking at each other’s songs and wondering what we could scrape together in the next few minutes before we were to go on stage to perform. We somehow managed to pull together 10 songs that we had done individually and worked our way up from there. People liked it, and afterwards one of our friends came up with the name Foxes and Peppers, and that was where it started.
PC: At the time I had just moved to Phoenix and into my “temporary” apartment - and it was temporary because it was kind of terrible. It was the day I had finally gotten a mattress. It was my first time really moving away from home or university. It was about 5am, because Fox was emailing me in UK time, and I received a message saying “Hey, can you do a show? Here are the songs we think we want to do”, and it worked out and Fox thought I was consistent enough to do shows together. It worked out really organically, it was neat. There was no recruiting or anything, it just kind of happened.
How does it feel to be playing your first non-convention show in the UK at a venue like the Cavern Club?
FA: It’s pretty special. We’re very used to playing conventions. It’s really cool being able to play at a venue with such an amazing amount of history for the first time. But we wouldn’t be doing this without the support of the fandom anyway, because for this show it’s going to be predominantly furries coming to the show anyway to support us, so it’s kinda cool to be able to play a convention and then sort of move out from it and play regular venues like the Cavern Club or the Ivory Blacks in Glasgow.
PC: We’re extremely lucky to have the size of audience we have. Our problem is that our fan base is widely distributed. So furry conventions work out because people get concentrated into “Okay, we’re all going to go to this one event” so our fans are in the same place. When you do a show just in Liverpool, there aren’t just a thousand furs just hanging out already in the same place. It lends us a new set of challenges and I’m excited to see how it works out. I’m always the type who is very nervous and hesitant about success until it’s happened. I’ve already started getting the jitters about performing in the Cavern, I’ll be trying to ignore them for the rest of the day.
FA: Are you sure that’s not the coffee?
PC: [laughs] It started before the coffee.
Your new album, Spread Thy Wings, comes out on the 1st December. Did you have a similar thought process with this album as you did with Hashtag?
FA: We kind of went along a similar premise where I would write chords, Pepper would write lyrics, I would sometimes write lyrics, he would sometimes write chords, I would score an orchestra, he would score out choir parts, so we kind of get together and collab as much as we possibly can and then create the album. That’s basically what Hashtag was. With Spread Thy Wings it was kind of the same concept on a larger scale in a big professional studio.
PC: It’s extremely rewarding to be in a collaboration where we seem to genuinely do 50/50 of the composing and the creative work. It’s cool. Anybody reading this who has tried to do group work at school, you know what that’s like sometimes. I think we found something special here that we’re gonna hold on to as long as we can.
Do you have any big plans for this album next year? Where are you taking it?
PC: This is the big!
FA: This really is the biggest thing we have planned for it so far. Obviously next year we have a lot of convention bookings. We’re waiting to see how this show goes. If it turns out we can fill the Cavern Club then it looks like we could actually do this kind of thing more in the future. We can look into that and actually do a set that is mainly focused on Spread Thy Wings, but at the moment we’re kind of going with the flow. Once the Cavern’s done, once MFF [Midwest FurFest] has been and passed and we’ve released it then I guess we’ll see where it takes us.
PC: We’ll continue to have the big furcon shows. The exciting new part is the potential for big “noncon” shows. I’ll assume the plan is mostly to be in the States. I don’t want to say that everything depends on this show, but quite a bit depends on it and that adds to the nerves.
What encouraged you to choose Nashville as the location to record the album?
PC: If you think of music in the US, that’s the city that you think of. If you ask someone “Where does music happen?” they’ll say Nashville. We also realized that it was a good choice because the quality of studio musicians that are just around the area. Most people know it for country music, but currently Nashville has a ton of session musicians who just hang out and record all the soundtracks to the video games you play, so if you wanted to book an orchestra then they’ll come in and play your songs.
FA: I feel that as a musician, Nashville is the place you want to end up. For me, Nashville is a dream, but because of the level of support that people actually give us it was an attainable goal that we felt we could actually try and accomplish. So we contacted Ocean Way [the studio in Nashville the album was recorded at] and said “Hey, what are the stipulations? What do you need from us? What deposit do we need to get into this studio?”. We worked it out with them and worked it into the Kickstarter and told our fan base, “Look, if we can raise this amount of money we can record in a world class studio in Nashville.” And it was incredible. The atmosphere of the city is nothing like anything else I’ve ever experienced.
PC: It’s also really small! Like you hear “Nashville, the big city!”. It’s like a big little town. It’s cosy at the same time, it doesn’t have intimidating factor that even somewhere like Liverpool has, like the tallest building I think is like, 8 or 9 stories.
You recorded this album with quite a few musicians in the fandom. Would you say that music is sort of under-appreciated, or that it hasn’t reached a big audience?
PC: It’s kind of lacking people putting out records. I know tons of musicians in the fandom, there’s just very few that publish, if that makes sense. It’s as if you had a ton of friends who are like “I’ve been writing a book!” and they never quite put it out for you to read. There are plenty of musicians in the fandom. The collaboration that we do is kind of difficult because we live so far apart, and that adds a whole other layer to it. You have to be lucky enough to have enough people in the fandom who live near you to make your band, or go solo, or do a long-distance collaboration. All of which are inhibiting factors that I think leads to fewer live musicians in the end - which is also why I think there’s so much electronic music in the fandom, because you can do it solo. It’s kind of the norm, you can do it yourself.
FA: With the fandom growing I’ve definitely noticed more and more musicians are starting to get involved, and honestly, that’s really great to see.
PC: I’m excited to see Xephyr that weekend! At MFF we’re seeing a hard rock band called Xephyr, they’re Canadian, they’ve got a record going. I’m hoping they take off.
FA: There’s a jazz band, Swingin’ Tails, they’re playing.
PC: They’re great.
FA: There’s Divine Dragon Cannon, they’re playing. There’s actually a bunch of bands and musicians at MFF, so I guess when you look at the larger context you start to see that there are musicians in the fandom.
PC: But compare how many live bands there are to how many DJs. There are musicians, just the ratio is off. But I see it as a ‘rising tide raises all ships’ sort of thing. More live music is good for everyone - it seems to be going that way - and hopefully it continues.
FA: I also know some really talented musicians who are great solo singers and perform and release stuff online. For a lot of them they have anxiety issues being on stage. You come across a lot of that, not just in the fandom but I think in general too. You can get very talented musicians who are too scared to go and express themselves. If you’re reading this, don’t ever be scared to take your opportunity and go up on stage.
PC: It’s kind of why it’s nice to do the long-distance online collaboration. You can record a track and send it to someone without having to get in front of people necessarily. We actually have a few people that we’ve worked with who took a while to get on stage. We were like “It’ll be alright, you can do well and perform on stage and it won’t be terrible. You’re a fantastic performer, we have a recording to prove it”.
About the distance, how difficult is it for you to record stuff together?
PC: It’s remote so it’s actually super easy, we just email each other stuff.
FA: Yeah, we have similar setups in our houses so we send each other our scratch tracks, we send each other ideas, our chord sheets, and we’ll gradually add stuff to it. We quite often hire musicians like a guitarist or drummer to actually play on the tracks as well. Dropbox is our friend for this sort of thing.
PC: Yeah, Dropbox is great. [laughs] Shout out Dropbox, please sponsor us!
FA: Hah, the amount of times we’ve used it! We have large dropboxes that we share with band members and they listen to the parts. We play the synthetic drums and then we take those synthetic drums out. They then play the live drums over that, it’s then recorded into the track, they send it back to us, and we mix and master it.
PC: We essentially have assembled five or six “home recording” people and made a band out of that. We’re not the first ones to do that.
FA: It’s fun, though.
You fundraised the album through Kickstarter. How supportive would you say the furry fandom is when it comes to supporting its talent such as artists and musicians?
PC: I am shocked we get the level of support we get. I feel entirely undeserving of the amount of money that people seem willing to give to us. In the past two years we’ve done three total Kickstarters between the two of us. Fox had one, I had one, then we had one, and they were all successful. People are super generous. Before I got into the fandom I used to play regular bar shows. You’d sell maybe, an album if you we lucky. We’ll play a convention and we’ll sell 30 or 40 of them. The fact that people are willing to put down money for what they support is really cool, and it’s rare.
FA: I think generally as well that furries really do appreciate original content. It’s what you do as a furry, you create your own character, you create an original thing, and I guess when you’re doing creations like that maybe it speaks to them.
PC: Even the shirt I’m wearing right now is not from a store - some furry made it. Somebody that’s just decided “I want to make shirts” and they did it. If it’s good, people will buy it. Everybody in this fandom is clever enough on a computer to pirate our music if they wanted. They don’t support us because they necessarily need the music as a commodity. They just like us and choose to support us. I like that.
I’ve heard many people say that you are a staple of their convention experience. Did you ever see yourself getting as popular as you are?
PC: I started playing in stairwells at conventions. I was the guy with the guitar that security would say “Get out of here, you’re being too loud” to. [laughs]. So, no. I did not see that coming.
FA: I wasn’t expecting it either. I remember years and years ago when I put my first track on FurAffinity. I was not expecting it to roll the way it did. I wasn’t expecting to be on main stage at MFF. We’re on the MFF main stage like, next weekend.
PC: That did not happen instantly.
FA: No, it didn’t. It has been a great deal of effort going from, as you said, stairwells at conventions. From a panel room to a secondary stage.
PC: And then you get to main stage at like, 10am.
FA: [laughs] You gradually work your way up the ladder.
PC: Don’t give up on doing your paneling. If you’re reading this remember that success only comes after a whole lot of failure usually. Unless you get a mysterious benefactor who wants to fund you.
FA: So honestly, no, we weren’t expecting it because we don’t ever expect to get to where we are. We’re just having fun with it and wherever we get with it is just a bonus.
PC: It means a lot that somebody would say that we’re a staple of their experience.
FA: It does mean a lot. Thank you.
PC: If we improve someone’s con, awesome.
Spread Thy Wings by Foxes and Peppers is released on the 1st December. You can get it here.
Fox Amoore recently started up on Twitch! His channel should grow quickly as he is one of the most talented musicians out there. I am a huge fanboy so listening live is a privilege. He played my song request this morning 💖!
