Portions for Foxes: Bess Rogers

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

A lot of the music in this series is from the years around 2010 - maybe 3-5 years to each side - when apparently I was paying a lot more attention to new music, or the ecosystem (new-music notifications in iTunes and elsewhere, a pre-streaming emphasis on buying songs, a robust network of blogs to highlight new stuff, and so on) was closer to the ways I like to discover new music.

I don't know if it's an failing-ecosystem thing or a you-can-only-chase-fame-so-long thing, but a lot of those artists seem to have quietly dropped out to do other things since then, and this is one example.

My song this week is Everything to Lose by Bess Rogers, who had a bunch of music - great music; I dithered between about four of her songs for this series - for about a decade, including this Travel Back EP in 2009, but seems to have gone quiet since 2016.

It's got a great shuffling, handclap-y beat to start off, with a first verse of Rogers' voice just over that percussion before the rest of the music kicks in for the chorus:

why so down baby?
why so glum honey?
if the only thing you want is money
then you've got everything to lose

I guess you could call it a message song, but it's one of those messages everyone agrees with - if you only care about money, you're gonna miss out on a lot. But we don't always come to music for unique or profound thought - we don't come to music for that most of the time. We come to music to tell us things we know but might have forgotten, and do it with a punch.

Rogers has a lovely, flexible voice and it serves this song well - it's a fast song, and a moderately loud one, but she's never straining, never pushing. It just all flows out - boom boom boom. Three minutes, in and out: says what it needs to, like any great pop song. And this is one.