Joseph Arthur Comes Clean

A professional musician since age 16, Arthur has spent half his life living the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Growing up in Akron, Ohio, he was turned on to Smokey Robinson-penned pop songs via his parents’ record collection. “The Four Tops were big in our house, then I got a Kiss record, Hotter than Hell, in my Easter basket one year,” Arthur recalls, breaking into a smile. “My older sister was into Dylan, and I got into Ozzy Osbourne, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones. The first record I ever bought was [the Stones’] Tattoo You.” When his aunt passed along an electronic keyboard to 13-year-old Arthur, he started writing his own songs. “I couldn’t play along with my records, so that’s why I started writing my own. The keyboard had a sequencer so I started writing these little electronic music things. I thought I was a genius, and I would play them for my mom. And she’d be like, ‘It sounds like Chinese music,’ and it would crush me. I wanted her to say, ‘That’s the most genius thing I’ve ever heard.’” Arthur picked up bass next, and by the time he was a high school senior, he was playing three sets a night in local blues bars with Frankie Starr and the Chill Factor. “We were hot shit,” says Arthur. “I made 50 bucks a night and started going to school a half-day. Frankie was this genius guitar player. We opened up for Stevie Ray Vaughan twice, and he wrote Frankie a note and said, ‘You’re an inspiration.’”

In 1990 Arthur moved to Atlanta with another combo. There—when not working at a music store or as doorman at a club in the punk/bohemian neighborhood of Little Five Points—he holed up with his four-track and his muse. At the time, Arthur described his sound as equally influenced by Nick Drake and Nirvana. “It was a point of isolation: my band disintegrated, [I] split from my girlfriend of three years,” he wrote about the period in a 1997 article for Musician magazine. “I was separate and fragile, like an egg rolling in awkward circles until it begins to crack … I wrote and recorded 10 songs that month … I was pure focus and drive to get what’s inside out with as little fear as possible.”

That’s when Arthur’s luck changed. A tape of his songs was passed from hand to hand until it somehow reached Peter Gabriel, who called and left a message on Arthur’s answering machine, telling him he liked what he heard. “I must have sat in that room listening to that message for an hour, reading meaning into each word, each pause, and each breath,” Arthur recalled in his Musician essay. The next thing he knew he was in New York, playing a gig at the Fez in front of an audience including Gabriel and his pal Lou Reed, who’d brought his DAT along to record the show.

Looking back now, Arthur sees the night and his subsequent recording contract with Gabriel’s Real World label as “an amazing time, like winning the lottery.” He immediately joined Gabriel’s WOMAD tour and began roving around Europe. “I was literally one week out of working at the music store in Atlanta,” says Arthur, “and I got to go to this thing over there called Recording Week, which is musicians from all over the world getting together. I got to meet and hang out and jam with Joe Strummer. A whole family from India was playing one of my songs with me, and I was recording with Karl Wallinger [of World Party] on bass.”

Arthur’s extraordinary, expressive voice—which can rise to near falsetto heights, then nosedive into a sensual croon—was the perfect instrument for such diverse accompaniment. His debut, Big City Secrets, was produced by Markus Dravs, a German techno musician who’d worked with Brian Eno. Arthur’s melodic songcraft, acoustic guitar and harmonica were propelled along in a sea of beats and sonic exotica (including “string fossil bass”; the berimbau, a bow-like, Brazilian percussion instrument; a cow gong; and a Venetian xylophone). “We had a ‘no-reverb rule’ on that record,” says Arthur, “which is very brave for a first record. There was a lot of fearlessness and experimentation in it. It was an exploration, which I’ve wanted to do with every record since.”