With many detours along the way, Frank Bango’s new record The Truth Fox proceeds as a sequence of mid-life reckonings and recognitions.

Scene by scene, a man confronts the isolation, loss, and insecurity of age. It is an acutely personal passage through karma and regret, but it is synced to a larger sense of culture-wide instability and danger hovering just outside the windows of these emotionally rich and melodically generous pop songs.

The sum effect is that of a terrible but strangely affirmative clarity, perhaps available only at a certain age. The singer’s essential protective myths—safety, stability, agency, and connection—have eroded past his ability to enforce them any longer.

The Truth Fox is ripe with a species of wisdom that most people would prefer to avoid if they had the choice. Indeed, the personae in these songs frequently try to bargain, reason, and fox their way out of it. By the end, however, they elect this developmentally-appropriate truth as their own; they “choose the given,” as the American memoirist Annie Dillard wrote.

Frank Bango has suffered a lifetime of Elvis Costello and Graham Parker comparisons, earned as much by his unfailing, articulate melodic imagination as by his treble-forward vocal timbre. He is indeed about as anglo as a mature New York songwriter can get, short of pure affectation. His clever chord progressions flow downstream from the Beatles and the Zombies. His melodies are generally free of blues, soul, and folk devices and full of baroque pop implication. Long-time writing partner Richy Vesecky’s blend of observational acumen and surreal playfulness calls to mind Ray Davies matched with Syd Barrett more than any tough American rock poets.

As skewed and idiosyncratic as their themes can be, Bango and Vesecky always have one eye fixed on the big targets of the heart as well. They take on lost love and missed opportunity in the elegant waltz “I Never Thought of You That Way,” a theme that returns with a keener sense of dissolution and finality in “Devil By Mistake.”

In the tender “Adventures Nearby,” a father invokes a stock and cautionary “big world out there” story to try to keep his maturing child closer to home, a ruse designed for his own heart’s protection. In the haphazard, almost nonsensical didacticism of “Discipline,” we hear a voice of patriarchal authority withered finally into pure self-parody, happily abdicated by its owner, revealing only the aching plea underneath that his loved ones stay close and stay connected.

The elegant title track is a lucid stage setter about comeuppance and coming to terms, but “I Don’t Know Anyone Here” may be the purest expression of the record’s emotional center—the inescapable solitude of consciousness and the flailing against it for connection. The specter of sinking ships and imminent social collapse flashes into view in the unlikely, pathos-filled emergency room Christmas song “Holiday Episode.”
In the jangle pop grandeur of "We Must Imagine this World Is the Entire Universe," Bango and Vesecky make explicit the moral physics that unifies the entire record: the inner world and the outer are the same place.

The Truth Fox is sparing in its sonics and flourishes; for every lush and layered pop construction, there is solo or nearly solo acoustic intimacy or two. The record’s greatest stylistic outlier, “When a Man Is Not a Man,” is also one of its most daring highlights. Here, Bango temporarily suspends his anglo guitar pop in favor of a soulful, Bacharachian piano ballad. Keeping step, Vesecky employs uncharacteristically broad strokes in this bold, gospelized treatise on personal responsibility and a world plagued by infantilized masculinity.

Many works of art get described as “mature;” very few chart the actual nitty-gritty emotional processes of maturation quite as well as The Truth Fox.

John Burdick, New Paltz, New York April, 2023