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Local gay favorite on the brink of stardom?

Peter Fox’s new album shows singer is ready for primetime

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“Out of the tree of life I just picked me a plum,” croons the fabulous and fantastic Peter Fox.

Fox today stands on the brink of stardom, if there’s any justice in the music industry. Of course justice in the music industry is an oxymoron.

As a singer in the jazz and adult contemporary spotlight now, with the issue of his first and self-titled CD, Fox is certainly ready for prime time. But meanwhile the business model of the once robust recording industry has fractured into splinters of its former self, as CD sales have nosedived.

So how does someone like Fox, having spent nine seasons with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington (GMCW), and who also recently wrapped up a three-year run with the close-harmony pop acapella group Potomac Fever, market himself?

Fox is avoiding record labels and concert promoters to do it himself. “I went the independent route because music is in my soul and the independent route with the available tools and reach of the Internet is now actually a feasible way to reach a fairly major audience, allowing me to do what I’m meant to be doing,” he says.

A longtime GMCW audience favorite, Fox has picked a plum opportunity with the songs on his new album, recently launched at a special concert at the Kennedy Center restaurant veranda. He is as easy to like as he is easy on the eyes — and his charm is rooted in the easy listening of his sound and his lyrical first tenor voice so sweet with feeling as well as perfect pitch and phrasing.

The songs are each special to him, as explained in the album liner notes at his website, PeterFoxMusic.net, including “When You Meet an Angel,” a number first performed with the GMCW at the Lincoln Theatre. The angel theme will be familiar to his fans, who recall vividly his bare-chested starring role recently as heartthrob “Teen Angel” in the Chorus’s production of “Grease.” Speaking of the song, Peter admits that he had just broken up with someone who was sitting in the third row on opening night, but he recalls also that the song “later came to mean more” to him, “as a few dear family members and friends passed on to their next chapter.”

Another song, “Nightfall,” is a deeply layered ode to living a life without a lover but with the “extraordinary love I have shared with friends.” He declares finally in the song, “I am contented to be my own family, a family of one!”

Peter says, “it took me some tome to really grasp the various levels of message in this song, but I now so appreciate and deeply understand that one’s life can be so rich and full without any typical idea of the modern primary relationship.” Indeed, he says, “the song speaks to gratitude, the simple joy of just accepting what is.”

But one song alone stands out for its utter perfection of lyric and melody, “I Can Hold You,” written by David Friedman, the composer, record producer and Hollywood film score composer for Disney animated features like “Aladdin,” “Pocahontas” and “Beauty and the Beast,” for which Friedman was also music supervisor for the Broadway stage version.

Friedman is the author of many astonishing songs of inspiration, hope and love — collected in several CDs such as “Listen To My Heart: The Songs of David Friedman” (2002) and 63 of his best-known songs are also in his “Songbook.” Fox has taken one of them, “I Can Hold You,” he calls it “one of the most tender songs” on the album, a song he first recorded in 2005 but is now completely remixed and remastered — because “the song speaks to hope.”

“I am most struck by the way the singer offering to hold another who has been battered by life may really be wishing to be held in the same way,” he admits.

Fox, who grew up in New Jersey and had a boyfriend “discreetly” in high school, earned his BS in business administration from Penn State University, and came out to his family in his early 20’s. He spent seven years in Pittsburgh as a paramedic and then spent two years on the road as a long-haul trucker saying of that time,”I basically spent two years by myself.” He moved to D.C. in 1997 to work in the health care field and “do music.”

“Music is a conduit to what’s right,” he says. “Let’s get people connected to the joy of their own stories through song.”

His album is available now for $10.99 from PeterfoxMusic.net.

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Music & Concerts

Underdog glorious: a personal remembrance of Jill Sobule

Talented singer, songwriter died in house fire on May 1

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Writer Gregg Shapiro with Jill Sobule in 2000. (Photo courtesy Shapiro)

I’ve always prided myself on being the kind of music consumer who purchased music on impulse. When I stumbled across “Things Here Are Different,” Jill Sobule’s 1990 MCA Records debut album on vinyl in a favorite Chicago record store, I bought it without knowing anything about her. This was at a time when we didn’t have our phones in our pockets to search for information about the artist on the internet. The LP stayed in my collection until, as vinyl was falling out of fashion, I replaced it with a CD a few years later.

Early in my career as an entertainment journalist, I received a promo copy of Jill’s eponymous 1995 Atlantic Records album. That year, Atlantic Records was one of the labels at the forefront of signing and heavily promoting queer artists, including Melissa Ferrick and Extra Fancy, and its roster included the self-titled album by Jill. It was a smart move, as the single “I Kissed A Girl” became a hit on radio and its accompanying video (featuring Fabio!) was in heavy rotation on MTV (when they still played videos).

Unfortunately for Jill, she was a victim of record label missteps. When 1997’s wonderful “Happy Town” failed to repeat the success, Atlantic dumped her. That was Atlantic’s loss, because her next album, the superb “Pink Pearl” contained “Heroes” and “Mexican Wrestler,” two of her most beloved songs. Sadly, Beyond Music, the label that released that album ceased to exist after just a few years. To her credit, the savvy Jill had also started independently releasing music (2004’s “The Folk Years”). That was a smart move because her next major-label release, the brilliant “Underdog Victorious” on Artemis Records, met a similar fate when that label folded.

With her 2009 album “California Years,” Jill launched her own indie label, Pinko Records, on which she would release two more outstanding full-length discs, 2014’s “Dottie’s Charms” (on which she collaborated with some of her favorite writers, including David Hadju, Rick Moody, Mary Jo Salter, and Jonathan Lethem), and 2018’s stunning “Nostalgia Kills.” Jill’s cover of the late Warren Zevon’s “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” on “Nostalgia Kills” was particularly poignant as she had toured with him as an opening act.

Jill was a road warrior, constantly on tour, and her live shows were something to behold. My first interview with Jill took place at the Double Door in Chicago in early August of 1995, when she was the opening act for legendary punk band X. She had thrown her back out the previous day and was diagnosed with a herniated disc. To be comfortable, she was lying down on a fabulous-‘50s sofa. “I feel like I’m at my shrink’s,” she said to me, “Do you want me to talk about my mother?”

That sense of humor, which permeated and enriched her music, was one of many reasons to love Jill. I was privileged to interview her for seven of her albums. Everything you would want to know about her was right there in her honest lyrics, in which she balanced her distinctive brand of humor with serious subject matter. Drawing on her life experiences in songs such as “Bitter,” “Underachiever,” “One of These Days,” “Freshman,” “Jetpack,” “Nothing To Prove,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Island of Lost Things,” “Where Do I Begin,” “Almost Great,” and “Big Shoes,” made her songs as personal as they were universal, elicited genuine affection and concern from her devoted fans.

While she was a consummate songwriter, Jill also felt equally comfortable covering songs made famous by others, including “Just A Little Lovin’” (on the 2000 Dusty Springfield tribute album “Forever Dusty”) and “Stoned Soul Picnic” (from the 1997 Laura Nyro tribute album “Time and Love”). Jill also didn’t shy away from political subject matter in her music with “Resistance Song,” “Soldiers of Christ,” “Attic,” “Heroes,” “Under the Disco Ball,” and the incredible “America Back” as prime examples.

Here’s something else worth mentioning about Jill. She was known for collaboration skills. As a songwriter, she maintained a multi-year creative partnership with Robin Eaton (“I Kissed A Girl” and many others), as well as Richard Barone, the gay frontman of the renowned band The Bongos. Jill’s history with Barone includes performing together at a queer Octoberfest event in Chicago in 1996. Writer and comedian Julie Sweeney, of “SNL” and “Work in Progress” fame was another Chicago collaborator with Sobule (Sweeney lives in a Chicago suburb), where they frequently performed their delightful “The Jill and Julia Show.” John Doe, of the aforementioned band X, also collaborated with Jill in the studio (“Tomorrow Is Breaking” from “Nostalgia Kills”), as well as in live performances.

On a very personal note, in 2019, when I was in the process of arranging a reading at the fabulous NYC gay bookstore Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, I reached out to Jill and asked her if she would like to be on the bill with me. We alternated performing; I would read a couple of poems, and Jill would sing a couple of songs. She even set one of my poems to music, on the spot.

Jill had an abundance of talent, and when she turned her attention to musical theater, it paid off in a big way. Her stage musical “F*ck 7th Grade,” a theatrical piece that seemed like the next logical step in her career, had its premiere at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre in the fall of 2020, during the height of the pandemic. The unique staging (an outdoor drive-in stage at which audience members watched from their cars) was truly inspired. “F*ck 7th Grade” went on to become a New York Times Critic’s pick, as well as earning a Drama Desk nomination.

In honor of the 30th anniversary of Jill’s eponymous 1995 album, reissue label Rhino Records is re-releasing it on red vinyl. Jill and I had been emailing each other to arrange a time for an interview. We even had a date on the books for the third week of May.

When she died in a house fire in Minnesota on May 1 at age 66, Jill received mentions on network and cable news shows. She was showered with attention from major news outlets, including obits in the New York Times and Rolling Stone (but not Pitchfork, who couldn’t be bothered to review her music when she was alive). Is it wrong to think that if she’d gotten this much attention when she was alive she could have been as big as Taylor Swift? I don’t think so.

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Music & Concerts

Tom Goss returns with ‘Bear Friends Furever Tour’

Out singer/songwriter to perform at Red Bear Brewing Co.

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Singer Tom Goss is back. (Photo by Dusti Cunningham)

Singer Tom Goss will bring his “Bear Friends Furever Tour” to D.C. on Sunday, June 8 at 8 p.m. at Red Bear Brewing Co. 

Among the songs he will perform will be “Bear Soup,” the fourth installment in his beloved bear song anthology series. Following fan favorites like “Bears,” “Round in All the Right Places,” and “Nerdy Bear,” this high-energy, bass-thumping banger celebrates body positivity, joyful indulgence, and the vibrant spirit of the bear subculture.

For more details, visit Tom Goss’s website.

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Music & Concerts

Kylie brings ‘Tension’ tour to D.C.

Performance on Tuesday at Capital One Arena

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Kylie Minogue visits D.C. on Tuesday.

Aussie pop icon Kylie Minogue brings her acclaimed “Tension” world tour to D.C. next Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Capital One Arena. Tickets are still available at Ticketmaster.

The show features songs spanning her long career, from 1987 debut single, “The Loco-Motion,” to “Padam, Padam” from her album, “Tension.”

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