Originally published on Huffingtonpost.com
While the Stone Foxes may situate themselves in the "classic rock" wheelhouse, the band is no nostalgia act. By mixing heavy riffs with crack musicianship and sharp lyrics, the band has quickly developed a rabid following of music fans who, at the end of the day, just wanna rock.
After spending a few months on the road, touring behind their sophomore full-length Small Fires, the band is back in SF and ready to show its hometown what it's made of. Below, a Q&A with singer and drummer Shannon Koehler.
How long have you lived in San Francisco? I moved here when I was 17 for college, so eight years. I moved from Tollhouse, Calif. That's a very small place up in the Sierra Nevadas. We lived 20 minutes from a gas station up in real rural country. So the thing that [my brother] Spence [Koehler, who plays guitar in the Stone Foxes] and I used to do for fun was mine for iron with rain gutters.
How do you mine for iron with a rain gutter? So you run out of things to do; that's the first ingredient. The second is that our folks had taken down our rain gutters. We put filters on them and went down in our creek, took a bunch of dirt, put it in the gutters and let water flow though them. In the end, you have iron, which you have no idea what do with because you're eight years old.
Did you guys play music when you were growing up? Yeah.
Well, I played baseball a lot; I loved playing baseball. But Spence quit baseball and started playing guitar. Then I didn’t have anybody to play with because the neighbors weren't even really our neighbors because they were, like, three miles away. So I decided I had to learn how to play drums.
What type of music were you guys playing then? Probably not too far from what we do now (laughs). Hopefully we've gotten better. Spence found mom's old "Led Zeppelin IV" record and that was the first thing we ever heard.
Click here for more questions with Shannon!
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