BIO
Hen in the Foxhouse is an international dream pop band featuring Elena Krell and Ru Lemer. Based in the Hudson Valley of New York and Bishop Stortford, England, respectively, Elena is the songwriter and Ru the engineer. Hen in the Foxhouse takes inspiration from social justice movements, nature, cosmology, and the absurdity of life.
Elena's voice is unique and beautiful, soulful and jazzy, with multiple timbres. She navigates her break as well as anyone you will hear. The lyrics are authentic but not over-thought, poignant and hilarious by turn. As a queer nonbinary person from Honduras, Mexico and Germany, her transnational background offers a refreshing sound and perspective in the din of celebrity-seeking singer songwriters.
Elena was a professional opera singer in the San Francisco Bay Area and then a full-time tenure track professor of Women, Feminist & Queer Studies at Vassar College for ten years. Her album art is by multiple Grammy-winner Brian Grunert, and she has been featured by Radio ISA (France), Music that Needs Attention (Holland) and Fatea Records (UK).
Hen in the Foxhouse’s debut album Look Up is set for released summer 2024. Themes of embodiment, feminism, fantasy, and nature permeate this record. The songs are drawn from Elena’s vivid imagination, feminist of color ethos, and a love of nature: a dragon that flies you from dream to dream, talking trees, and an Ani DiFranco-esque tirade against childhood sexual abuse.
Look Up is Elena's first full album release since 2018. After leaving her full-time career in academia in 2023, she has blossomed into an artist with renewed purpose. On the album's single “Whatever They Want,” she sings about how she wished there were no billionaires so that everyone could “have a million dollars to do whatever they wanted.” Her conviction in the transformative power of music stems not only from her own experiences, but many years teaching singing and songwriting, Black and indigenous feminisms, and over ten years studying and practicing as a anti-oppression informed clairvoyant.
Elena is joined on Look Up by longtime collaborator Ru Lemer on keys, electronic effects, Kit Massey on violin and viola, and bassist Yoni Marianer. Sound experimentalist and percussionist Nuno Brito rounds out the arrangements with his precise yet deeply embodied drumming. One of the songs, The Birds, is a string quartet with no vocals, featuring soaring melodies in 3 violins and 1 viola. Elena is a trans-genre artist: as at home in neo/classical as in indie pop.
The resulting album is a unique offering to the overlapping worlds of dream pop, neoclassical music, folk, and anti-folk. At times hushed and waiting, at others full and assertive, Hen in the Foxhouse’s sound is both languid and urgent. At the heart of Look Up, Elena's aetherial voice invites us in and helps us feel.
What People are Saying:
“Krell’s warm and versatile voice sparkles in both the folk, pop and Latin American songs.
Nice and enjoyable album.”
— Keys and Chords, Belgium
“A real artist. A real musical personality.”
— Radio ISA, France
“A singer-songwriter at her best. How honest and beautiful can someone play and sing? A delightful experiencelistening to her sensitive voice!”
— Marino Serdons (Keys & Chords)
“This is music to listen to, and I immediately think of the statement made by this year's winner of the European Song Contest, Salvador Sobral, when he spoke of having to get back to music with aspiration...”
— Musik An Sich Magazine and Website, Germany
“Drawing on a mass of musical influences from North and South American pop and folk to Gypsy Jazz & classical music, ‘As Eli’ is unquestionably one of the summer’s brightest gems.”
“They would not be out of place at the annual Antillean parties in the Belgian Hoogstraten, the biggest festival in Europe in Latin American music. In a short time, As Eli has become very dear to me.”
— Music That Needs Attention, Holland
"Not a lady to be pigeon holed!"
”As a follow-up to her magnificent album ‘As Eli’, the latest release ‘Xo’ from Elena Krell is once again offering an excellent blend of pop, folk, blues and jazzy songs.“
— Roots Time www.rootstime.be
“On As Eli, the songwriter does in fact reflect in a variety of clever and direct, candid and literate ways on hot-button themes of identity and the experience of transformation. But it may take a listener a few spins to key in on such currents and undercurrents, so immediately striking is Krell’s songcraft, their expansive musical range, the glowing intimacy of the production and arrangements, its pervasive sense of artful melancholy.”
— John Burdick, Hudson Valley One
Shows.
06.14.24
Branded Saloon
Brooklyn, NY
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08.23.24
Rough Draft Bar & Books
Kingston, NY
06.15.24
Chromatic Studios
Kingston, NY
Free!
06.16.24
House Show
North Hampton, MA
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08.7.24
The Hush Lounge
Kingston, NY
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