Pages tagged “joseph arthur”

Singer/songwriter on the verge of a nervous breakthrough

OK, the 2007 Ryan Adams Overprolific Songwriter Contest is on—and Joseph Arthur is off to a strong start. Less than seven months since Nuclear Daydream, Arthur plans two releases. Sixteen tunes take shape as Let's Just Be, a chaotic mix of gorgeous T. Rex acoustic reveries ("Gimme Some Company," "I Will Carry It"), cheeky Stones-inflected rockers ("Diamond Ring") and studio-jam goofiness (20 minutes—20 minutes!—of "Lonely Astronaut"). Placing "Lonely Astronaut" in the dead middle of the album won't do much for your patience, but it illustrates Arthur's current looseness. The man's a double album in action.

Joseph Arthur writes more songs than you, all of your friends, everyone you’ve ever met and Ryan Adams combined.

The above paragraph is probably not at all true, but with the obligatory “Arthur is prolific” junk out of the way, we can tell you about his new tour. Two days before the release of his new album, Let’s Just Be, on April 17 (the first of two new records to be released this year), Arthur heads to Montreal with his band, the Lonely Astronauts, to kick off a 30 date tour with Stars of Track & Field supporting.

Arthur and the band will perform “Diamond Ring” on Late Night with Conan O’Brien Friday, April 13 to kick off the tour.

2007 Joseph Arthur and the Lonely Astronauts tour dates:

April
15 - Montreal, Quebec, Canada @ La Tulipe
17 - Philadelphia, Penn. @ TLA
18 - Cambridge, Mass. @ Middle East Café
19 - Brooklyn, N.Y. @ Southpaw
20 - Hoboken, N.J. @ Maxwell's
21 - Baltimore, Md. @ Sonar
22 - Cleveland, Ohio @ Beachland Ballroom
23 - Millvale, Penn. @ Mr. Smalls Theatre
24 -Cincinnati, Ohio @ 20th Century Theatre
25 - Chicago, Ill. @ Double Door
26 - Madison, Wisc. @ High Noon Saloon
27 - Minneapolis, Minn. @ Varsity Theatre
29 - Denver, Colo. @ Larimer Lounge

May
2 - Seattle, Wash. @ Neumo's
3 - Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada @ TBA
4 - Portland, Ore. @ Doug Fir Lounge
6 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Bottom Of The Hill
7 or 8 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ TBA
11 - Dallas, Texas @ Cambridge Room @ House Of Blues
12 - Austin, Texas @ The Parish
13 - Houston, Texas @ Engine Room
14 - New Orleans, La. @ One Eyed Jack's
16 - Birmingham, Ala. @ Zydeco
17 - Atlanta, Ga. @ Smith's Olde Bar
18 - Athens, Ga. @ 40 Watt Club
19 - Nashville, Tenn. @ Exit/In
20 - Akron, Ohio @ Lime Spider
21 - Washington D.C. @ 9:30 Club
23 - New York, N.Y. @ Bowery Ballroom
25 - Toronto, Ontario, Canada @ Mod Club

Related links:
Joseph Arthur’s site
Joseph Arthur on MySpace
Stars of Track & Field’s site

According to a new report at Billboard.com, Joseph Arthur plans to release two new albums in 2007.

The article reports that Arthur and his band, the Lonely Astronauts, recorded nearly 80 songs in recent weeks that will comprise two upcoming albums. Let's Just Be, due April 17, and Abwoon, out before the end of the year, will be released on Arthur's Lonely Astronauts label.

Arthur's last record, Nuclear Daydream was released last September. A tour is planned this spring to support Let's Just Be.

Related Links
Joseph Arthur's website
Lonely Astronauts' website
Joseph Arthur on MySpace

The multitalented Joseph Arthur (view his striking artwork at JosephArthur.com) is a metaphysician who fashions his complex interior monologues into deceptively simple pop songs. Nuclear Daydream, his fifth album, is post-apocalyptic religious music, endlessly ponderable and disturbingly beautiful. It opens with the piano chords, throbbing bass and tambourine of “Too Much to Hide,” introducing Arthur’s deadly earnest voice as he considers the secrets humans hide from each other within a lithe melody that lifts him to the edge of his aching falsetto. The following, “Black Lexus,” seems inspired by Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” sounding like something the former inhabitants of Earth might sing when their silver seed touches down on their new home atop the sun. The arrangement is distinguished by stacked chorus harmonies that hang glistening below the melody, like stalactites in a cavern. Then comes the New Order-ish “Enough to Get Away,” allowing the listener to take one last breath before Arthur begins his descent in earnest. The album becomes more intoxicatingly hermetic with each successive song, taking you as deep as you dare to go.

Singer/songwriter Joseph Arthur will launch a record label along with a new album on Sept. 19. Arthur’s fifth album, Nuclear Daydream, will be the first record on Lonely Astronaut, an imprint of Red/Sony.

“This one’s a little bit more stripped-down than my last album,” Arthur told Paste, on the way to the studio from his home in Brooklyn. “The songs are more traditionally songs.” Nuclear Daydream was recorded over the past two years in Los Angeles and Berlin.

Arthur decided to launch a label because it would allow him to record more freely and have more control over his music. “To have your own label seems liberating artistically,” he said. “You’re eliminating some of the cooks in the kitchen, which ain’t no bad thing.”

Eventually, the label will include other artists. “I have a lot of really talented friends,” Arthur admitted. “It’d be nice to open up somebody’s world a little bit.”

It’s Friday the 13th, and Joseph Arthur’s luck is holding out. He’s pedaled his bicycle under threatening skies all the way from his home in Brooklyn’s industrial DUMBO neighborhood to Manhattan’s trendy East Village. Just as he enters a tiny coffeehouse on Avenue A, the skies open up, pouring buckets. This is Arthur’s first interview since he finished his fourth album, the exquisite Our Shadows Will Remain (and this less lucky journalist just totaled her car driving from upstate New York to meet the singer/songwriter). Even if he’d gotten drenched, Arthur says, he wouldn’t have minded, because he loves the freedom his bike gives him. And freedom is what the 32-year-old musician’s life is all about right now.

After eight years with a label that was no longer interested in his work, he’s now found a new home for his gorgeous, dark melodies, dense sonic textures and poetic lyrics. And, even more important to Arthur, he’s freed himself from his demons. “I’m on a quest for personal liberation that I think is a direct result of growing up through a process of paranoia and weirdness in between every record I’ve put out,” he says. “When you’re dealing with a big company, it’s all about numbers, and if you don’t sell a certain amount of records, you’re not gonna get your phone calls returned.” Eventually released from his contract, Arthur signed with the independent Vector, home to Damien Rice and Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson.

On “I Am”—a strident, bass-driven track from Shadows—Arthur sings, “To find out what you really are / You must wake up from this long nap.”

“That’s the goal of my life,” he says. “That’s the way I’ve learned to deal with things—as opposed to overdosing. I’ve gone the other way. I’m a sober person now, and I’m into evolving, realizing myself.” It’s been seven months, in fact, since Arthur—a self-described binge drinker since his teens—has imbibed. And he even managed to stay off booze while recording Shadows in America’s most decadent city, New Orleans.

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.”

Distributed by indie label Caroline in the U.S. the album didn’t make much of a dent commercially, but garnered a rabid fan base that continued to grow as Arthur toured incessantly. Onstage, Arthur accompanied himself solely with his eye-catching, hand-painted acoustic guitar and recorders with which he taped sound loops and created textured layers. He stayed in touch with his audience via a website to which he contributed drawings and a daily poem called “Notes From the Road.” “It was just a desire to write,” says Arthur. “I don’t know where that comes from. I just realized I should try to write a poem every day to describe my day.”

His next LP, the more stripped-down Come To Where I’m From, was produced by T Bone Burnett. With radio-friendly cuts like the hook-filled acoustic gem “In the Sun” and the pop-rockin’ “Chemical,” Arthur’s sophomore effort was noticed by the critics. “It’s a totally different record from my first one, ’cause we were going for natural performances with no drum machines,” says Arthur. “It was like winning the lottery again, getting to hang with T Bone and [veteran drummers] Jim Keltner and Carla Azar. I just fell in love with those people. It was great chemistry.”

This time, Real World/Virgin released the album in the States, but when Arthur wanted to start his next project, Virgin backed off. But his overactive muse couldn’t wait for corporate support, so he jumped into recording regardless. Arthur ended up with Redemption’s Son, plus another two albums’ worth of songs, which were released over the course of four EPs called Junkyard Heart, 1-4 (available on his website and at performances). “I make three or four records a year, but I’ve only been able to get ’em out every two or three years,” says Arthur.

Eventually issued by Real World/Universal, Redemption’s Son received even wider acclaim, landing on several critics’ best-of-2002 lists. The delicious “Honey and the Moon” received frequent airplay on high-profile stations like Santa Monica’s KCRW and New York’s WFUV. Though Redemption’s Son is filled with buoyant melodies, lyrically, its mood is despondent. “I think aliens abducted me / I don’t wanna go outside,” Arthur sings on “I Would Rather Hide,” a number that would make Brian Wilson proud.

Meanwhile, Arthur says, “I got totally wasted for a while in New Orleans, then I went to L.A. and was going further that way, and I called up my friends in New Orleans and said, ‘I’m coming back and I have to straighten out and you have to help me.’” Staying sober, Arthur returned to his previous co-producer, Napolitano, and his French Quarter apartment/studio to make a more streamlined fourth album. “I started working on my new record and it became obvious that Universal wasn’t gonna sign me up again,” says Arthur. “They finally let me go, but it was a struggle.”

His travails made their way onto the masterful Our Shadows Will Remain.

“The record is largely about finding out where I’m at now,” says Arthur. “There was a lot of addiction and a lot of pain, and a lot of the songs are about that. When your life isn’t working out, you dig deeper into what’s going to satisfy you. If you become disillusioned, you start to get to the heart of the matter.”

With the album partially done, Arthur headed back to New York, crashing at drummer Greg Wiz’s Brooklyn apartment. There, he met the musicians who helped him complete Shadow. In addition to Wiz, they included vocalist Julia Darling, who adds her tender soprano to Arthur’s baritone on the transcendent “A Smile That Explodes.” Andrew Sherman wrote the song’s gorgeous string arrangements, and he and engineer Ken Rich secured the services of the Prague Symphony Orchestra by flying to Czechoslovakia on their own dime. “The way the record got made was pretty amazing,” says Arthur. “I couldn’t afford to send them over there, but they just went on their own. People were real generous with their support, and it came out sounding really expensive—though it was done on the cheap.”

Though Arthur says he’s in debt up to his eyeballs, it helped when the soundtrack producer for blockbuster Shrek 2 came calling, asking him to write “a strange love song” for the movie’s opening. The result was the fetching, “You’re So True.” “At first, I kinda felt weird about it,” admits Arthur, “like, ‘Is this selling out?’ But then I realized it was a great creative exercise because I was willfully trying to write something lighthearted, which was going against the identity I have of myself. I really like that song. Because I wrote from another place, it was actually liberating.”

These days, as Arthur pedals down New York’s mean streets, he literally and figuratively wears rose-colored glasses—rather than the black-lensed specs he used to sport. He’s earned the right to see things differently now and to accept his good fortune. “I can be really down and go to my guitar and write something, and it can elevate the situation,” Arthur says. “That’s such a wonderful gift. In and of itself, that’s enough.”

Joseph Arthur has had a rough year. After releasing three critically acclaimed albums on Peter Gabriel’s Real World, he discovered the label wouldn’t be around for a fourth. As if one big loss weren’t enough, Arthur gave up his apartment in New York City bouncing between Los Angeles and New Orleans before finally settling in the Big Easy to work with producers and musicians on what would become Our Shadows Will Remain, due out Oct. 12 on Vector Recordings.

While Arthur’s label dispute wasn’t as dramatic or publicized as the controversy surrounding Wilco two years ago, his new release could be a big breakthrough for him the way Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was for Jeff Tweedy and company. So it’s fitting that Arthur should support Wilco on five of its Southeast tour dates before continuing on his own solo tour of the Western U.S.

It’s the night of Sept. 23, at too-good-to-be-true venue the historic Fox Theatre in Midtown Atlanta, and Arthur makes his way onstage, opening with the gentle, acoustic “Echo Park.” Not one for between-song banter, he moves subtly into the dark, edgy “Devil’s Broom” before merging into his trademark loops and vocal layering on the haunting “Leave Us Alone,” about famed Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. Arthur is joined onstage by violinist Joan Wasser and Wilco keyboardist Pat Sansone who add near-perfect embellishments to the nine-song set.

Five gems from Our Shadows Will Remain grace the set, as well as his website only single “All of Our Hands,” the falsetto infused “Innocent World” (from 2002’s brilliant Redemption’s Son), and the Come to Where I’m From beauty, “In the Sun.” I’ve seen Arthur close to 10 times now and he’s never ended a show without “Speed of Light,” his love song to New Orleans. In some ways, his new release is full of New Orleans, too, where Arthur avoided the city’s decadence, pouring it instead into his songwriting.

Whether as a 45-minute opening act or a two-hour solo show, a Joseph Arthur performance is not to be missed. Even as a one (or three) man band, he’s able to match the rich production quality and sound prevalent on his albums. He blows you away with his superb songs and voice, floating from chest-rumbling lows to flawless, ethereal highs, or nonchalantly crooning apocalyptic truths—“…if you hate your life/just remember there used to be a time/when we could not feel a thing.”

Arthur lived in Atlanta in the early ’90s, and as he modestly exits the stage, I think about a humid, late-summer evening when as a struggling 20-something musician he might’ve breezed down Peachtree Street past the Fox Theatre, his mind far from this night, ten years later, winning over a full house, opening for Wilco.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA - With his full head of disheveled hair, his loose-fitting suit and his self-decorated acoustic guitar, Joseph Arthur exactly filled the role of an itinerant troubadour onstage at this legendary West Hollywood club. He also matched the profile of one who is singularly focused upon his music alone, as he said little to this full-house audience between songs. Singing from the perspective of a less environmentally-centered Karl Wallinger, yet remaining just as equally passionate, Arthur's songs are of a much more personal sort of spirituality than are World Party's largely universal themes. And unlike your typical Sunday sermon, this was a show filled with a lot of good questions, but few easy answers.

Arthur tends to bring language of the Spirit into everyday relationship situations, rather than trying to push any kind of a propagandistic agenda upon his listeners. "You Are The Dark," from his most recent release, Redemption's Son, for example, digs for evidences of good and evil within a lover. This starkly contrasts artists who might, say, attempt to explain learned religious principles through song. Like a master storyteller, Arthur many times puts himself into uncomfortable character situations, from being an unwilling Mexican revolutionary to speaking as a partner in a soured relationship.

This humble singer/songwriter initially looked mighty naked as he hit the stage with just an acoustic guitar and a few stray harmonicas as his tools. But he soon demonstrated technical skills far beyond those most often exhibited by your typical acoustic strummer simpleton. By pounding on the body of his guitar and inputting these homemade beats into a sampler box onstage, Arthur was able to transform himself into a one-man band. Such innovations served to change many of his simpler folk moments into creations much closer to ambient dance music, and also allowed him freedom enough to stretch out for a few extended, psychedelic guitar solos.

As with all true troubadours worth their salt, Arthur is more about the journey than the destination. And in concert, it was a joy just to be one of his fellow travelers.

"Pick-up laundry. Check. Buy bread. Check. Drop dog at vet. Check. Get Joseph Arthur’s latest CD…." Some items seem to stay perpetually on my to-do list. I still haven’t watched the entire Godfather trilogy, and I’m embarrassed to admit my lack of Wes Anderson knowledge. My Townes collection is still woefully small. The personal music and video collections have as many guilty gaps as guilty pleasures. What’s a busy, media-saturated boy to do?

Until recently, Joseph Arthur was on that list. Even after a couple of acclaimed T Bone Burnett-produced recordings, I knew his work by reputation only. Now I can replace "Get latest CD" with "Get back catalog."

On Redemption’s Son, Arthur delivers passionate excavations of the soul in an infectious potpourri of sounds. The comparisons run from Beck and Flaming Lips to Cohen and Jeff Buckley. Trampoline-era Joe Henry is perhaps the best comparison. While not yet possessing Henry’s lyrical craftsmanship, Arthur has infused traditional songwriting and themes that are both intensely personal and much larger-than-self with nicely variegated alt-pop-rock sounds.

What elevates this CD above his more experimental counterparts is his intense introspection. Arthur’s lyrics reflect a person scanning the horizon for any signs of life he can find. "Is there a chance to be redeemed?" he sings in the prayer "Dear Lord." The title song and "Blue Lips" deal with the aftereffects and existential implications of the deaths of loved ones. Bittersweet reflections on romance abound, and usually reverberate clear to the soul.

But Arthur can also revel in the joys, as in "Let’s Embrace:" "Come up to my place / And then let's embrace / And then let's replace / Our fear with our faith … I think the sun is shining on me / I can feel it / God's eyes are looking down on me / I will reveal it."

The album ends with a fitting mixture of despair and hope: "It's always hard to admit / Most days you feel like you don't exist / Temptation sneaks past your fists / Until the devil won't let you resist / Oblivion is what you want …But you've been loved / You’ve been loved."

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.