Music Appreciation: Chloe Foy

I went to a folk music conference, here in Kansas City, a few weeks ago.

That’s right, folk music. Folk Alliance International.

They’ve formed an alliance and everything.

After the third time I mentioned to someone at the conference that I’m not really such a big folk music fan, I thought about whether that was really true. And I decided that since I own a record by Fotheringay, the 1970s British folk-rock band with Sandy Denny and Trevor Lucas in it, I should probably just admit to myself that I am a fan of folk music.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of!

It’s a great record; I bought it at an antique mall.

The conference, and my experience there, are things I want to spend more time writing about. I’m working on an essay that’s about, among other things, all that can happen when a song is performed in the same place you’re in, how closed off from that experience so many of us have been for what’s really been a long time, thanks to the constant threat of airborne pestilence, and my hope that folk music can save us from total societal destruction, which it definitely can’t.

It was a strange experience, that conference. What they do, all through the night, is take the furniture out of several floors' worth of hotel rooms, and convert them to performance spaces. So a visitor can walk down the hall, wander into a room, and hear a great performance of something that’s under the umbrella of folk—which many varied things are. When they’re tired of that, they can go next door and hear something completely different, maybe something performed by musicians from another country. And on and on.

It’s like something out of a dream.

I stayed out later for it than I have for anything in probably eight years. At least that.

Anyway, since I don’t know yet how to write about those things in a way I’m satisfied with—I’m trying to figure it out, all the time—I’ll do something I definitely know how to do, which is to tell you about one of the performers I saw, and embed YouTube videos of her other performances into this blog post.

Chloe Foy is a singer/songwriter from a country called England. It’s an island off the coast of Europe that also produced Bob Hoskins, racism, and the lion’s share of my ancestors. I don’t think about my ancestors all that much—but I do when I meet someone from England, especially Chloe Foy.

Not everyone from England looks like the people I come from, but Chloe Foy kind of does. Like, it’s not at all uncanny, but she wouldn’t look out of place at our Thanksgiving dinner—a holiday they don’t celebrate where she’s from.

The important thing is, Chloe Foy is a brilliant songwriter and a great musician, and I want to tell everyone about her, despite how I don’t know how to write about music or most other things.

Thanks to stuff being online, I don’t have to try to put it into words.

This was one of the songs she performed, when I went to see her in one of the hotel rooms; it’s the title song from her first full-length album:

I got to sit about six feet from her as she played that song and other songs. It was really something, especially in the midst of this interrupted life.

And while I didn’t get to hear/see her perform this one, it’s the first song of hers I ever heard, and as soon as I’d first heard it I was hooked:

I don’t know what it is about certain songs. They press against our brains and leave imprints there that last the rest of our lives. If I knew how to duplicate that effect in writing, I would.

Anyway.

There’s something thrilling, I find, about coming across an artist who is still, to all appearances, in the early stages of their life’s work. While I don’t consider Chloe Foy a beginner, it seems plain enough to me that she has a great deal more to bring into the world.

For the longest time, I listened almost exclusively to musicians who were either dead or who had done by then what was probably their most notable work; they were known quantities by the time I found out about them. They were handed down to me by the prior generation, or the one before that.

And maybe Chloe Foy is a known quantity, whatever that means; I really don’t know that much about her; but I’d like to think, in part because it makes me feel good about persisting in the world like I am, that she is only getting started, that she will continue to make beautiful things, continue to grow and surprise us, and bring a greater depth to the lives of those who listen. It feels so good, to have things to look forward to.

And I hope I can figure out how to write about music, because at the moment I am beyond inarticulate about it. When I try to do it, I feel like I’m speaking in tongues, like I’m not making any sense at all.