Bantam Foxes, a three-piece group composed of twins Sam and Collin McCabe and Jared Marcell, is no typical rock band.
The group is touring the country in Collin’s car as it continues to gain exposure. On Oct. 30, Bantam Foxes will perform for the first time at the Voodoo Music and Arts Experience.
Though they describe themselves as New Orleans-based, the McCabe twins hail from St. Louis, Missouri. After coming to New Orleans to attend Loyola University, they met Marcell, a New Orleans native who attended Loyola.
The three were floundering in bands that didn’t work out and gave a new three-piece band a try. The Daily Reveille sat down with Collin to chat about the group’s upcoming Voodoo performance.
The Daily Reveille: So how is the tour so far?
Collin McCabe: It’s really good, actually. We did St. Louis, Milwaukee, [Wisconsin], Chicago, then St. Louis again. Louisville, [Kentucky on Oct. 21], Tuscaloosa, [Alabama on Oct. 23], Atlanta on Saturday. All in a week. My poor car, my poor, poor car. We’re back in New Orleans Sunday night and then we hit it hard to get the set for Voodoo prepped up.
TDR: You’re performing at Voodoo in New Orleans, how excited are you for that?
CM: It’s especially a big deal to me because I’ve worked for the festival since I moved down here. It’s not like I was working in parking I was carting artists around and that sort of thing. That sort of thing was always fun, but this year is kind of a big deal to me because I’ve worked there for so long. I made a joke with my interns last year that next year they were going to be carting me around, and lo and behold. It’s just really exciting. I mean Florence and the Machine’s playing and Ozzy Osbourne. I’m more excited about it feeling like this next logical step for us to start taking.
TDR: This is your first time playing at Voodoo as a band, right? What are you looking forward to most?
CM: Yes, where we’re playing it. It’s a big stage, and I’m just stoked it’s a huge festival. I get to go see people that I love and play for people I love. It’s going to be rad. Festivals are cool, I’ve been going to festivals for a long time. We’re taking that next step and that makes it feel huge.
TDR: What’s your favorite thing about New Orleans?
CM: I just love New Orleans. It’s a great city to be a part of. There’s so much there to influence you, whether it’s the other bands that are within the scene that we’re in or it’s the other music that’s happening. It’s a beautiful city and it’s fun to be a part of and to be able to play music in what is a town known for it, sort of feels like a privilege. It’s not just a city, it’s New Orleans. People come down to New Orleans to see live music and I get to be a part of that.
TDR: What’s your favorite part of performing live?
CM: All three of us really know how to read off of each other. I know how Jared plays I know how Sam plays. It’s almost like an ESP kind of thing. The three of us are like brothers, and it’s like getting up there with your two best friends and knowing exactly what they’re going to do before they do it. We’re one thing that’s happening, and we can make a lot of noise with just the three of us.
TDR: How do you incorporate your influences into your music?
CM: Well, Sam and I grew up listening to a ton of Nirvana and all of the stuff that really hit in the ’90s. What’s so cool about a lot of that stuff is that there’s like real meat to the instrumentation for a lot of that music, but there’s also really great melody. There’s a lot of really great pop songs. A lot of Nirvana’s stuff, those are pop songs. Most of the [alternative] rock that came out in the ’90s had pop influence. That’s a huge influence on all three of us.
TDR: I have to ask you about the band name and how you came up with it.
CM: This story’s great, actually. Sam wanted to use “Foxes,” and we were listening to Beck a lot at the time. He has this song called “Hotwax,” and none of the lyrics make sense on purpose. One of the lines had “silver foxes looking for romance,” and Sam’s like, “Oh, let’s name it Silver Foxes.” I’m like, “Yeah, that sounds cool.” We threw that at Jared, and he said, “Guys there are seven million dad bands that are named Silver Foxes.” There are tons of bands that are named that, so we Googled it, and it’s true. Jared really likes boxing, and we’re all short, so all three of us fit the bantamweight class in boxing. So we went with that.
TDR: Craziest tour story so far?
CM: I could tell you tons of crazy tour experiences, but you can’t print any of them. They’re all that bad. We sleep on floors, we meet weird people all the time. Here’s a safe for work one. Over the summer, we were going to New York. We played in Columbus, and we were supposed to play in the lower east side of Manhattan. That is a 10 hour drive. It was not something that we could feasibly do in one day. After the show in Columbus, we went and got White Castle and coffee, and we drove all night. We were driving through Pennsylvania and doing just fine for a long time. It hit about 4:30 in the morning and there is no gas anywhere, and our gas light comes on. It was terrifying. We get off at this exit, and all of the gas stations are closed, and one of our tires is losing air quickly. We stopped a trucker, and he said there was one a couple miles from there. We managed to actually get there without running out of gas at 4:30 in the morning in the middle of Pennsylvania, somewhere I’ve never been, I know no one. We got gas, pumped up the tire and drove for another four hours on it before we got to New Jersey where we could change it.