Solomon Fox, IRL

It’s late August, and the L.A.-based multi-instrumentalist and producer Solomon Fox—one of the most talented musicians to come out of Durham since his own brother Elijah, a few years before him—is less than two months away from releasing the second solo album of his career, and his first since 2021. One can imagine, based on that alone, how much there is for us to discuss, from influences and sound to the motivating spirit behind this release. And at various points of our conversation, we do.  

But in the back corner of Banh’s Cuisine, amid the low din of the back-to-school, Duke student lunch crowd, we’re spending just as much time talking about a lesser-known aspect of his professional oeuvre: dedicated, stressed-out impresario of organic, DIY music festivals.

“A bunch of people would come, some people would camp, but it sort of got out of control,” he explains of his first such endeavor, 818 Fest, which took place for four years on a family property along the coast of Virginia. “There was one year where people were doing fucking heroin. Somebody vomited in the printer. One guy stole another guy's shoes and threw them into the Chesapeake Bay.” 

The 818 Fest, perhaps for its own good, no longer exists. And yet its intrepid creator remains unbowed. The day after we meet up in Durham, Fox is headed to southern Virginia to a sprawling, 80-acre farm that he and a group of childhood friends purchased during the pandemic, for the third year of Grouse Fest, a friends-of-friends weekend gathering animated by the same passion for community and creativity as its debauchery-laden predecessor. 

“It's just so much more natural to me than any other setting,” says Fox. “It's the same thing I feel about shows—I love just experiences that feel super intimate musically. And this is one of the most intimate, because it's just so … uncorporate.”

That Fox (born Gabe Fox-Peck) would have an affinity for the raw and unembellished makes sense for someone whose musical origins are about as earnest and no-frills as it gets: learning piano at home alongside his musically gifted older brother, then starting a high school band called simply Tahmique & Gabe (later Young Bull, with Mique Cameron) that was born out of a spur-of-the-moment, joint performance in the school talent show. (They placed third.) 

Now years removed from Young Bull’s late-2010s height of activity, Fox’s horizons have continued to expand, and his profile grown, on the strength of work like the Grammy- and Oscar-nominated song “Stand Up,” from the film Harriet; production for acts like Smino and Emeline; and his own solo singles, like the transfixing 2023 ballad “Stay.” 

There’s one other important detail to his recent history, too: a series of bizarro social media music videos from last year, featuring a totally deadpan, expressionless Fox looking straight into the camera and singing about the awkwardness of parties, struggles with punctuality, and the definition of “cooking,” as he rips through every part of the song’s dazzling instrumentation all by himself. Viewed millions of times and cosigned by the likes of Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, and Ty Dolla $ign (and even leading to a remix of the State Farm jingle), there’s little doubt that as Fox heads into the release of Sweettooth on October 9th, the videos are responsible for a larger share of his public recognition than anything else. That’s fine with him, as long as it gets people to actually connect with the artistry behind them, and “meme music” isn’t what he’s remembered for overall.

“I definitely think of those as little hooks to bring people into the bigger universe—I do enjoy goofing off, and that was part of what made those so fun, but I also have all this other music,” he says.

Across the baker’s dozen of groovy, glittering, fully formed tracks on Sweettooth, that much is obvious—as is the single-minded persistence and knack for playful ingenuity that makes his many avenues of expression, from viral Instagram videos to no-marketing farm festivals, feel like one coherent whole. He returns to Durham to play at the Pinhook on November 9, 2025. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been making music professionally [including Oscar and Grammy nominations] for a while now, but what really introduced you to a lot more people were the viral Instagram videos last year. What got you started doing that in the first place? What were you expecting with it?

The previous year I had put out some music, this was 2022, 2023. I was mostly just working with other people and producing, but I was trying to put some stuff out here and there and just see what was happening next. And my manager at the time, which was kind of the classic thing for a lot of people, was just saying, “Post on TikTok! TikTok every day, every day.” I was trying to do that, and it wasn't hitting. I was doing dumb little skits, I wasn't enjoying it. It was clear that I was doing it to get attention. It just feels so cringey to me when you're trying to get attention. So I just didn't really follow the advice for a long time. And before I had those things go viral, I hadn't posted for six months, I had mostly abandoned it. And then randomly I just made this dumb jokey thing that, even as I was doing it, I was like, “This is so stupid.” But it was funny. 

It was genuinely amusing to you.

Yeah, it was music that I'd made and that clearly I wanted to be doing. And I didn't mean for it to go anywhere. It wasn't heady. I was just having fun with it and showing my actual personality instead of trying to take myself too seriously.

"What am I going to be, Weird Al Yankovic? I mean, no shade to that. That's cool. He did his thing, I guess. But that's not the music I want to make."

Was it one of the first ones you posted that went crazy, or they slowly got bigger and bigger over time?

The first time it went pretty crazy. That was the song "You Don't Cook," which was actually about my friend Anna. She's always making these premade meals. She’ll be like, “I'm cooking this meal,” and I'm like, “You're not cooking, you’re heating up some Trader Joe's shit.” And so then I was just taunting her a little bit—loving taunting. It did well initially and then it just kept going up and I was like, "Holy shit, I've never had anything go viral really before." 

When that starts to happen—and I think even on a smaller scale lots of people run into this with social media—it can suck you into spending more time doing it or even subconsciously have you thinking about it when you’re doing something else. Did you have to consciously pull yourself away from the temptation of making more content and be like, “No, I want to be a musician”?

Yeah, I still think about it. It's definitely a struggle. I'm grateful for people who enjoy what I'm doing, but I definitely think of those as little hooks to bring people into the bigger universe—I do enjoy goofing off, and that was part of what made those so fun, but I also have all this other music.

Yeah, you don't want that to become your career.

No, not at all. I don't listen to any joke music, personally. So it's like, what am I going to be, Weird Al Yankovic? I mean, no shade to that. That's cool. He did his thing, I guess. But that's not the music I want to make. And maybe this is egotistic, but there's been some other people copying my style or just the deadpan looking angry and playing.

Do people tell you about that or it literally just comes across your feed?

People will tag me in it. People will be like, "This is Solomon Fox’s shit!” I would never tell someone to do that, but every time that happens, I'm like, “I hate this shit.” I don't want this to be the thing that I’m known for, you know?

Have you noticed it being that hook that you want it to be? Has it helped people get into the actual music and opened up opportunities?

For sure. It also helped me realize what my strengths are. I don't want to go only into meme music, which would be the most negative way to put that, but at the same time, I do realize that in my previous album [Solomon], there's not a single solo on the whole album. And it's like, if you've ever seen me play live, I'm taking solos. That's a primary form of my voice musically. So that was the positive thing [from the videos] I was seeing: “Oh, this is what works, this is what people are reacting to.” So kind of blending those worlds has been what led me to this place that I'm at now, where there's a lot of intimate moments, but there's also some fun moments that are kind of, I don't know the right word for the character, but sly or whatever.

Before Solomon Fox, your career started in Durham with the hip-hop/R&B group Young Bull. How did the group come about, and how did it impact your career before you moved out to L.A.?

It was massive. I was so blessed to be a part of that, honestly. It started with me and Mique [Tahmique Cameron] meeting on the [Durham School of the Arts] JV basketball team, and that was probably 2013. We were sophomores in high school and—it almost sounds like it was from a movie, but there was a talent show and it was run by the math teacher, Mr. Maultsby. We both didn't sign up in advance, there was an audition for it after school, and it was me and Mique but there was only one slot left and [Mr. Maultsby] was like, “You guys can decide between you who wants to do it, or you guys can do it together.” And at that point we'd never done any music together. We were [both] just like, “Well, what songs do you know?” We both knew "Ordinary People" by John Legend. We didn't win the talent show—we got third place.

We started going back to my house after basketball practice—I lived a block from DSA—and recording. At that point I was writing and producing stuff, but I was just doing it myself in my room. The first song we made was “Can’t Get You Outta My Head,” which I was like, “Here, you sing these words instead of me.” And that was the beginning of our thing. We posted on SoundCloud and I remember it got 1,000 plays in the first week or month. 

Do you feel like it was just randos or there were a lot of kids in school that liked it?

It was kids in school and then they would send it to their friends. When we did our first show [at The Shed, in Golden Belt], it was all kids from high school. We didn’t even have the name Young Bull yet, it was just Tahmique & Gabe. We actually started picking up more once I went to college, my freshman year. We just kept growing it, and then we finished the album [Sopadelic]; the summer after my freshman year, we [also] added Christian Sinclair to the ranks, and then the next summer we did some touring. It was so great, it was such a fun time. The musicians were so dear to me, and still are, and I learned so much about writing and producing. We've been laying low, but we have a whole project basically that we've been working on slowly for the last four or five years, so that’ll come out next year. Khrysis produced on it too, another Triangle legend, as well as some other folks. But yeah it's just been—we had a project ready to go, and then we split ways with Christian and so we kind of had to start over.

"That's kind of a weird blessing in disguise for being a solo artist—it's like, well this is the shit I'm doing and if you don't like it, that's fine, but I'm not trying to please everyone … at least in theory. I'm not totally liberated of expectations, but I'm getting closer, I think."

Your brother is also an insane multi-instrumentalist and producer in his own right [Drake, Kali Uchis, SZA, Denzel Curry]. As the older sibling it seems like his journey has always been a few steps ahead, but now y’all are increasingly on a similar plane and sharing the same spaces. Is that something y'all talk about? Like, how you wanted to do this and now it’s happening?

Totally. I mean this was always our dream when we were kids making up songs in our parents' house. It never felt like [it was] possible—it’s just something that sort of has happened, which is crazy. It doesn’t feel real. But we don't really talk about it that much. We both are kind of just onto the next a lot of the time. So we don't necessarily reflect a lot, [but] we'll have moments that are just really like, “Wow, bro, we really made it. We're here. I can't believe this is happening.” 

It's also definitely felt nice in the last couple of years to be like, “I can do this too, in my own way.” And it's not just "Elijah's brother."

Was it that way for a period of time?

It was definitely that way for a while—meeting people in L.A., just being in situations where it's like I'm known primarily as his brother. I could always hold my own, that was never the issue. It was more so just that’s how I was known. And it was like, "Damn. Both of ’em can play. What the hell?" I mean, maybe there were times I fucked up the vibe but very rarely. He was always very generous with bringing me to stuff. But yeah, it was important for independence to do my own path, my own trail.

You’ve had a solo album before, but I imagine one of the things about this album, given all the production work you’ve been doing for others, is stepping out into that spotlight again as the front-facing leader of something. How are you feeling about that going into this rollout?

Yeah, it feels really, really exciting. Definitely a little scary. It's a lot more pressure. I'm definitely a creature of comfort, and I wear a lot of hats, so sometimes my fear of being the center of attention can lead me to run between different stuff and sort of keep avoiding that. So this is kind of me facing my fear a little bit, but it's also, it's so rewarding, the feeling of hearing people sing along to a song that you wrote—there is nothing in my life that's ever compared to that. And not in an ego way, just in a "I did something and now it's bigger than me." You know what I mean? And that feeling is so nice. So it's more pressure but also more rewarding. 

That's interesting because I didn't know if it would be a lot of pressure, or if your career is set up now where it’s more about the production work and this is something to do as a side quest without a lot of expectations weighing on it. 

I like doing both. I mean the reason I'm so drawn to producing generally is I just love building tracks up and layering. I'm in my happy place when I'm doing that. And it is simpler when you're producing for someone else, because it's like, well, I have to make one person happy, which is the artist. It's not related to me, you know what I mean? Maybe it'll reflect negatively on our thing if it doesn't do well, but who cares? When it’s you, you're answering to the whole world. And I think that scared me for so long. But it’s also exciting because there's no one to tell you what to do. 

Also, the older I get, the less I care about what people think. I literally don't have the energy. I used to be such a social chameleon. I would just code switch and all that shit and just make myself useful to people in different [scenarios], which is part of how I became a multi-instrumentalist and a producer that has ties in multiple genres. I was good at picking things up and giving people what they wanted, but I literally don't have the energy to wear all the hats all the time anymore. And so that's kind of a weird blessing in disguise for being a solo artist—it's like, well this is the shit I'm doing and if you don't like it, that's fine, but I'm not trying to please everyone … at least in theory. I'm not totally liberated of expectations, but I'm getting closer, I think.

Are there any memories or lessons from how things went on that previous album that you wanted to do differently on this one? 

[On Solomon], I was trying to make it palatable. I was trying to make what I think anyone would think of as good, as opposed to something that some people might hate and some people might really love. I think that, in retrospect, [I was] channeling this thing of, like, “This is undeniably good. Nobody can tell me that this is not good.” But that's not the way to make something interesting. This time I think I do that better, which is kind of keeping people on their toes. I'm just committing more to different worlds with the different songs. 

The other unlearning from that is I'm a little bit less obsessed with having my hands on literally every aspect of the creative process. Like on [Solomon], I mixed it and mastered it myself. It was partially because I didn't have any money at that time to pay someone to do it. But also I was a control freak, kind of. And I played every instrument. No manager, no press, no anything, just did it myself. Which I still think is a positive way to learn. But [this time] I worked with an incredible engineer the whole time and he brought up stuff that I never would've ... I'm like, "Oh yeah, it makes so much more sense." And I brought in, there's a lot more features on this. I don't think there were any features on that project.

Are they mostly instrumental features?

Vocal features and then some others, yeah, also some instrumentalists. But still for the most part, I played every instrument. I probably play 90 percent. But yeah, those two things. Trying less to be not bad, and trying less to be the only one.

There were already so many skills being flexed even on the early stuff like Sopadelic, and I'm wondering now what things you feel you're working on or challenges you're working out when you're playing? Any new instrument you're just messing with now that you just picked up?

I'm trying to get nice at lap steel [guitar]. And pedal steel eventually. I mean, I would say the thing that I'm working on the most now is songwriting. The project after this, I know I'm skipping ahead, but it's a lot more introspective. There's basically no drums. It's a lot of acoustic guitar layers and a lot of very intimate writing. So that's been the world I've been drawn to lately.

Writing songs, there's been two kinds of creative processes. One is make a beat, fuck around on Ableton or whatever, find a melody, hum a nonsense melody until you find something cool. And then add words. And the other process is write a song on a separate piece of paper with an instrument, with one instrument before you even touch it. And the latter one is the one that I've been trying to dig my teeth into.

It's newer to you.

I've always done it, but there's a weird thing where it’s hard to mix those, because sometimes when the song was already written, it's hard to find the earworm thing that makes that other method work. And when you're going [the other] way, it's hard to add meaning. You're just trying to respect what sounds cool and you're like, “Will I even try to make it mean anything or just keep it nonsense?” Sometimes it's better to keep it nonsense.

Yeah. So what's the deal with this land you bought in Virginia?

In 2021, a bunch of my friends, mostly people I went to high school with from Durham, we pooled our money to buy 80 acres in Bassett, Virginia, with a small house on the property and with the idea that we all had different things we wanted from it. For me it was always—ever since I heard Bon Iver forever ago, I think, that planted this fantasy that still dominates my life—of building a remote recording studio and having a farm. But anyways, they all have other interests—some of them are artists, some of them are interested in sustainable agriculture and stuff like that. So basically the idea was to build a place we can go.

And a place to escape the zombies.

Yeah that was the other—the main guy is, he's both super into environmentalism and also a complete doomsday prepper, almost fully that. So he was like, we need somewhere to go when everything hits the fan. So yeah, a combination of those interests.

So you must have done the first of these festivals pretty soon after you got it.

Yeah, so this is the third year doing this festival [Grouse Fest]. It’s a very DIY kind of farm festival: [there’s] this horse stable that we turned into a stage, there's a creek. On Saturday, we're going to do a scavenger hunt; I actually need to plan that. Mud wrestling, slip and slide, all types of fun shit. And then some insane, talented musicians with stuff ranging from bluegrass to the stuff I'm doing, to a heavy metal group, which is kind of crazy. It's just all fun shit that you can do as loud as you want because it's our land.

It evolved out of a thing that I used to do in a different place in Virginia, which is my grandparents' land on the Chesapeake. It was called 818 Fest, which is my birthday, August 18. And we did that for four years. It was just me calling my friends, my musician friends, and we'd set up a stage. A bunch of people would come, some people would camp, but it sort of got out of control. There was one year where people were doing fucking heroin. It was just like—somebody vomited in the printer. One guy stole another guy's shoes.

Wait, why was there a printer at a music festival?

Well, because that's the thing. My grandparents had built this retirement house that they moved out of. It was on this beautiful land in Virginia on the coast, and it has water and it's just a natural amphitheater. It was a perfect place to have a party, but we were calling it a festival. Then it started getting bigger and people would bring more and more people that I didn't know, and man, there's so many stories from that. But yeah, one guy got mad at another guy and stole his shoes in the middle of the night and threw them into the Chesapeake Bay. Didn't tell him about it in the morning. And then the guy in the morning was just like, "Has anyone seen my shoes?" And I was like, "This is the most passive-aggressive aggressive interaction I've ever heard in my entire life."

So it got to be too much for me. And I was also the only organizer. It was just me. And I was always so stressed out and I was also doing sound. I was doing every single thing. It was terrible. But this whole friend group, they all came to that, loved it, and every year people would be like, can we help you with anything? And I'm like, "Yeah …" but didn't really know how to delegate. Same problem with the last album, actually. I guess that's a theme here. 

This is just something you love though, putting on these DIY festivals.

Yeah, I mean it's the best. It's just so much more natural to me than any other setting. It's the same thing I feel about shows—I love just experiences that feel super intimate musically. And this is one of the most intimate, because it's just so … uncorporate.

For some people I could see how there might be a desire, given how everyone has loved it so much, to make it a bigger thing. But it sounds like you wouldn't want to ever make it something like that—the whole point is how lo-fi it is.

Exactly. We're not trying to blow it up. I mean there is part of me that thinks it could be profitable to do that. But it's not our main interest. And it's almost become a friend reunion too, in a lot of ways. There's a lot of people that I'll see there that I haven't seen since the last one we did. There's a very home, community feel about it, which is nice. I'm just not that interested in the business side of music.

Like the logistics of running a music festival?

Yeah, anything really … running a recording studio, any sort of standard thing that you would see a musician go into.

Well, you mentioned wanting to have a studio—or you just like the idea of it?

I really want to do it, but not as a commercial space—as a place to work on my music and bring artists there. I'm trying to, even when I'm working with other artists, just be more project-minded and, like, "Let's lock out two weeks to work," rather than, like, musical speed dating in L.A. where it's like you get one session with somebody and you don't see them for four months, and it's hard to get into shit.

If you come to Bassett, Virginia, you can't leave. I've got you trapped.

Ryan Cocca is the founder/editor of Super Empty, a former furniture entrepreneur, and someone who thinks Weird Al did his thing. I guess. He (I) can be reached at ryan@superempty.com.