King of Foxes 

Hi, I’m Olivia Street, and I’m the songwriter, singer, and guitarist in King of Foxes.

We’re in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

King of Foxes is my solo project, but I’m lucky enough to work with some great musicians who contribute so much. I have some players based in Toronto and some in Edmonton, so the band is a little bit different depending on where you see us play! The first King of Foxes album came out in 2016, and we just re-released our second album, Salt & Honey, on vinyl this year.

 This was such a fun track to record, because it’s definitely a departure from our usual sound. I had the opportunity to work with a producer named Beatchild when I was doing a residency at the National Music Centre in Calgary last year. We collaborated on “No Wrong,” and I love the direction it went in – it’s definitely electro-pop, but it has a vintage quality to the sounds in it. I love that this song became what it needed to be organically, but that the original essence and intention are so present in it.

During that residency in Calgary, I did a lot of writing by myself in my hotel room in the evenings. No distractions: a Jazzmaster, a notebook, and a bottle of wine (and a king size bed, all to myself!) For this particular song, I had a clear vision of the melody, lyrics, and chord progression, but it initially had a folky vibe. I knew I wanted to take in a more contemporary direction. Byram (aka. Beatchild) has such a gentle energy and way of working; it felt like a natural progression to add the electropop elements. Now the song feels like it belongs to the 21st century.

Lyrics, to me, are the fascia in the body of a song: the essential connective tissue that weaves everything together. Sometimes I’ll hang on to a thought for years before it becomes a lyric, turning it over in my mind and trying to figure out why this piece of information is important. When I’m in the writing process, I do a lot of free-writing and object writing, as exercises to distill my abstract thoughts into imagery. The “thought nugget” of this song came from a vision I had when I was pregnant with my son. I had what can only be described as an out of body experience, where I saw that the baby inside of me was protected and unconditionally loved, by me… And that I, too, was unconditionally loved, by some higher power – my “light body” was holding me and caring for me, just like my body was doing for this tiny baby. The image I saw reminded me of Russian dolls.. so my entry point into this song was trying to describe the tiniest Russian doll, small enough to be swallowed, “like a pill.”

We recorded this partially at the National Music Centre in Calgary and partially at Beatchild’s studio in Toronto. His studio space is inside the Coalition Music building. (Coalition is a label that’s home to some heavy hitting Canadian artists… I am a huge Our Lady Peace fan, and when I walk around in that building, looking at their pictures on the walls, I feel like a total fangirl!)

With no expectations other than to explore where we could go with it.

In addition to Beatchild, Brandon Baker of Electric Religious, came out to Toronto with me and laid down some of the textural guitar parts.

Ariel Posen, Groenland, Don Vail, Zaki Ibrahim

I spend time with my 4-year-old son and our yellow lab. I read a lot. I do yoga. I drink martinis. I buy more T-shirts than I probably need. I’m also a sweatpants connoisseur.

We have festival dates lined up, and we’ll be doing some pocket tours around Alberta. I’m currently writing songs for a new album (can’t stop, won’t stop!)