A large part of musician Kathryn Severing Fox's adult life has been spent on the road. When she's not on the road, gig bags and instrument cases packed with everything from a viola to a guitar sit beneath the Steinway grand piano that takes up most of her living room in Creston. When I visited Severing Fox, most of them have just returned home with her from the Acorns & Antlers Songwriters Festival in Boone, North Carolina. They had the baggage tags to prove it.
During the festival, Fox played with Mary Gauthier, one of her songwriting idols. After the show, she gave Gauthier a copy of her debut album, Sweet Beginnings.
“Handing one of these to her was kind of wild,” she says, holding up a CD with a portrait of her on the cover. “You go, ‘Oh my gosh, do you have the time?’”
Now, Sweet Beginnings is Severing Fox's first original album. She describes having a moment handing off her original work, but she's not an unseasoned professional musician. She's a classically-trained strings player and songwriter who has toured internationally as a part of the crossover string production Barrage 8, and has performed live and in the studio with artists such as Pharrell Williams, The Beach Boys, and George Benson.
In 2022, she added The Eagles to her list of performance credits when the band stopped at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines. As part of a larger string section, Fox got to play four songs with the group, including “Hotel California.”
“I just got a random email and frankly thought it was fake. And then I was like, ‘Oh, shoot, okay. This is real. Yeah, I'm doing that.’”
Coming from a “very classical family”
Severing Fox was raised in an artistic and musical family in southern Wisconsin. Both of her parents are retired high school choir directors, and her mother’s an opera singer. Her father also conducts for civic choirs and orchestras. Then there's her sister, Michelle Quednow, who is a poet who penned the lyrics to the opening song and title track of Sweet Beginnings.
“That’s actually the first poem she ever sent me. It took me maybe five minutes to write the music for it. I was like, ‘This is very odd.’ I've never had this process happen where literally the music wrote itself.”
Severing Fox says she began playing piano and viola at five years old, and that her dad taught her to sing even before that. “I have pretty early memories where I would be in the car waiting for my mom to come out from the grocery store with my dad and he would teach me and my sister how to sing different melodies. Once we got the melody down, he would teach us how to harmonize with it.”
During her time studying classical viola performance at the University of Miami, she worked with pop and jazz music legends Chick Corea, Bobby McFerrin, and Gloria Gaynor. “The dean at that college knows everyone, and so he was bringing in really big names for us to play with," she said.
After she concluded her master’s program in 2015, she began touring with Barrage 8, an international touring group featuring string performers representing each instrument of the string octet. She was the sole violist in what she describes as a fully-choreographed show complete with “Britney Spears mics.”
When that tour finally ended, she caught up with her husband who was then teaching in Bloomington, Indiana. They both tried to figure out what came next. He had just been offered a job as a musical director at Southwestern Community College in Creston. “Just being artists, it's kind of the life we signed up for in a way," she says. "You have to go where it's available to do it.”
That progression from touring performer to musician in rural Iowa was sudden, and as Severing Fox describes, challenging.
“I went from ten months a year touring and doing like seven shows a week to ‘Now what?’ It was kind of a really big shift in my life, not only moving here, but also just in general, trying to figure out what’s the next step.” Along with her husband, she began working at Southwestern Community College, teaching courses in classical voice and ear training, as well as lessons in violin, viola. cello, and guitar. She also tunes pianos.
Determined to find opportunities to continue playing live, she quickly inserted herself into the Des Moines music scene, picking up gigs with Bob Pace and several other local bands, as well as playing with touring acts and writing and recording the string arrangements for Golden Bear Studios. Now, several years into her life in Creston, she says she feels that Iowa is exactly where she’s supposed to be. “I would have never guessed that this was the right place for me, but now that we've been here five or six years, I feel like I really have my feet here in the ground.”
The Sweet Beginnings of writing original songs
Severing Fox is also one half of The Weary Ramblers - a new band with Ames singer/songwriter Chad Elliot, and she says Elliot played a large part in the development of Sweet Beginnings.
Despite their respective musical circles sharing many mutual members for more than three years, Severing Fox and Chad Elliott didn't actually meet each other until a few months into the pandemic. She had been a fan of Elliott’s since first moving to the state and finally reached out to him to introduce herself during quarantine. Eventually, Elliott suggested putting on a co-headlining show at the Goldfinch Room in Ames.
Despite being a touring artist with arena and concert hall experience, Severing Fox admitted to Elliott that she’d never performed original music for anyone.
“The respect that's there and the platform he's allowed for me to go through…It's amazing what he's done for me and also how much he cares about my music. I feel my songs wouldn't be what they are really without him. I thank him on a regular basis.”
Severing Fox is effusive in her admiration for Elliott, consistently pointing out his influence on her life, her songwriting and on her solo debut album Sweet Beginnings. He painted the album cover, co-wrote a song, and contributed his guitar-playing and singing throughout the album’s fourteen songs. He'll also be playing alongside her at her album release show at xBk on Dec. 28.
About her debut album, Sweet Beginnings
Through songs spanning traditional folk, Western swing, and even jazz, Sweet Beginnings explores relationships, family, and the natural world. The stars and moon are all over this record, and the flames of joy and love burn in several songs.
She points to the sonically spacious ballad “Summer Moon” as a breakthrough. “I sat down like a year ago and realized that I was working really hard at writing songs with a lot of metaphors. I just needed to write something that got to the core of things: ‘What is love to me?’ and have it be a love letter. I just needed something simple and so this one kind of just fell out of me very fast.”
When she went in to record Sweet Beginnings, Fox says she took more than forty demos to Bryan Vanderpool at Golden Bear Studios. While only fourteen of them ended up on this album, she plans on getting back into the studio this winter with Elliott to record a proper Weary Ramblers album. In the meantime, she says that ever since the songwriting dam finally broke for her, the songs haven’t stopped showing up at her door.
“I feel like it just funnels through now. It’s like never ending. I can't turn it off. Every conversation I have is like a song. Every single time.”
This story was funded by a grant from Prairie Meadows.
