How Sum 41's 'Fat Lip' Turned Eric Hudson Onto Music

When Eric Hudson was 11, a cousin showed him his brand new guitar and proceeded to fumble his way through the riff to Sum 41’s Fat Lip. It blew Hudson’s mind and changed his life. From that moment, growing up in St Louis, Hudson was all about the guitar. He played in teenage outfits, went to college to be a jazz guitarist, and, ultimately, “dropped out to be in this indie-rock band”.

That indie-rock band is named Foxing, and, touring with them across the world, Hudson is aware that, in some grand cosmic way, everything he imagined as an 11-year-old is playing out. “My life has been all about playing music. Getting to where I am now is really my dream,” he offers. Of course, the reality isn’t quite the same as the fantasy; touring, as a mid-tier indie-rock band, is a grind. “You drive all day, you soundcheck, you have to make sure you actually get a chance to get food, and then the show starts, then you do it all again,” he says. “It’s not as glamorous as it seems.”

Hudson joined Foxing when the band were making 2014’s The Albatross. “The sound was very much already anchored in this sort of emo/indie-rock crossover,” he recalls, “[but] we definitely didn’t want it to be the only kind of music that we made. And, so, I think every record since has been us trying to experiment with different influences that we have and find other directions that we want to take our sound in.”

The recently-released third LP for Foxing, 2018’s Nearer My God, is, to Hudson, a “great example” of this desire. “Whenever I hear a record that sounds like the same song for ten tracks, while that’s impressive, I’m also a little bit bored by it,” he says. “We don’t want to make a record where the songs all sound the same. 

“We don’t want to make a record where the songs all sound the same." 

"We don’t want to make a record that you can just put it on and ignore it... I don’t want someone to listen to [our album] and be bored by it. I want people to listen to it and have a strong reaction. Even if that strong reaction is, ‘I hate this! I can’t do dishes to this!’; that’s fine. It’s better than being ignored.”

Part of the rationale for this is knowing how, in the streaming era, musical listening is often passive more than active. “There’s no denying that how music is consumed now is vastly different to how it was ten years ago, and ten years before that,” Hudson says. “We’re aware that, for the average person, nowadays, music is now a background thing. We hope that there are moments, on our records, where something jarring happens in a song and makes you stop.”

Like its predecessor, 2015’s acclaimed Dealer, Foxing conceived Nearer My God as a singular, cogent work; an album in the classic sense. “We want it to be one, solid piece, a record that’s meant to be listened to in its entirety,” Hudson says. “I actually feel like we excel at that. The truth is, we don’t know how to make a record that has two hot radio-friendly singles, and the rest is just this thrown on whatever. Sometimes, I wonder how it would be different if we were good at that. But we’re definitely not.”

The only extra-curricular, digital-realm activities were a handful of bonus tracks. These weren’t B-side throwaways, though: instead, Foxing cut Nearer My God’s title-track in four other languages: French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. “Just because you’re not an English-speaker, that shouldn’t mean that you don’t get to participate in our music in your own native language,” Hudson offers. “That was the idea behind it, and I think people really enjoyed that. We definitely have a strong fanbase in Germany, so I know the German-speakers responded to it. I noticed that, when we released the version in Japanese, that a lot of places in Japan picked it up. But we didn’t do it to get overseas press coverage. It was more conceived as a ‘thank you’ to the people that are already fans of us in those places.”