Fox Stevenson – aka Stanley Stevenson-Byrne – is a singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist. Much of his career has been as a DJ and producer in the DnB scene, until he debuted with his live band and released his more alternative album, Killjoy, in 2019. Since then, Stevenson has gone from strength to strength, having previously received praise from the likes of Billboard, Dancing Astronaut, Earmilk and Clash to name a few. With Lava, Stevenson hopes to captivate listeners further with his most inventive release to date.

In this interview spotlight, I chat with Fox about the latest release, challenges, technology and more.

Full Q&A along with links and music below.

Let’s dive a little deeper into You, the artist and your music. What attracted you to this genre(s) or style(s)?

I’ve always been really interested in mixtures between elements in music that Are generally thought to be opposed to each other. I come from dance music originally and then dance music people don’t write songs, sure they write vocals with lyrics and melodies but generally they don’t write songs they might write one hook about feeling higher or some shit like that, but generally songwriting is overlooked. 

For me Fox Stevenson is a songwriting project and this track lava is steadfast at the centre of that, The fun thing about this track for me is it’s completely electronically produced the only things that were actually were the guitars and the vocals everything else was produced like a dance track (despite its obvious rock lead intentions). I quite enjoy playing with that strange middle ground.

I kind of like to think of it as an uncanny valley between things being real and things being engineered musically speaking

What led you into this journey with music? And further, what drives you to push it out to the public?

I’m compelled to make music, i’m not sure exactly when that happened but at this point it’s kind of a given in my life, it’s my default state, with absolute joy. 

I’ve been putting my stuff out on the Internet for anybody to hear since I was 15, I genuinely adore the process, learning something and bringing that information onto the next experiment. At a certain point back in 2008-ish my little beats started garnering a little attention and it just kind of kept going from there!

Who or what influences your creativity? Have your tastes in music changed over time?

That’s such a big question! I think on a micro level, the instant feedback you get from music production really inspires me, like putting down one element of a song and just allowing your brain to extrapolate from that, rinse and repeat till you have a track! 

But plenty of other creatives inspire me too I’m a huge fan of Beck, Counting Crows, bill withers, NERD, gorillaz, the prodigy, Noisia, pendulum 

My musical taste has definitely changed. for a really long time I was very focused on beats and giant release moments with huge drums and things like that. and as I have come to know that territory better I like to think of that as a given, so now I’m really interested in what makes a song great even when you strip away all the production. 

So what excites me the most of the people who can do both of those things at once, beck being a good example

Were you trying to accomplish anything specific on this new project? Creatively or otherwise?

Actually yes! I wrote this song together with my guitarist and we were trying to capture that sort of early to mid 2000s slightly video gamey, slightly Anime-esque tone, total nostalgia glasses music. It all started from the guitar riff and we kind of just went from there.

As a side note the credits music from the power puff girls totally has the vibe we were looking for

What was the last song you listened to?

Wichita lineman – Glen Campbell 

Which do you prefer? Vinyl? CDs? MP3s?

I think I think MP3s they get a bad rap but high quality MP3 these days are totally serviceable, and you can’t beat the convenience of digital

Not to say I don’t sit down and take the time to listen to vinyl every once in a while

How about this one…. Do you prefer Spotify? Apple Music? Bandcamp? Or something else? Why?

This ones easy; I don’t really know much about Apple Music or bandcamp so Spotify is the one for me, it’s all there and my playlists are on it 

I feel like which ever one I ended up using the first would be my answer here

Other than the digital era overwhelming us with access to an abundance of music, what is the biggest challenge you face when trying to connect with or find new fans?

The hardest thing for me is the fact that you generally find me straddling / mangling genre lines,  if you send my music to specialist dance radio they say it’s “too pop” or “too rock”. Then if you send my music to specialist rock radio they’re like “it’s too electronic”, and I know it’s not all about radio but that example can be extended to the rest of the places I might hope to gain listeners. 

Where is the best place to connect with you online? Discover more music?

I’m pretty active on Instagram in terms of updates, but if you want to dig deeper we have an amazing discord and Facebook group community of awesome people who just so happen to also listen to my music!that would be a good place to start I think. That or you can catch my streams on twitch, which I’m doing most weeks

Anything else you’d like to add before signing off? 

I always struggle with this question so I’ll just say have a nice day and thank you for reading through to the end, I hope you like the new song 🙂