INTERVIEW : 2000-04-26 Joseph Arthur: Marking His Own Musical Path (by Paul Gangadeen)

Many great acts come and go, the lucky get noticed and the others simply fade away. There is an art, however delicate, to maintaining staying power once having pierced through the fickle membrane of the music industry and this is part of the ongoing process of rock 'n' roll's natural selection. Joseph Arthur is one of those rare artists who has managed to develop and progress while maintaining a certain level of obscurity in an industry driven by marketing images and four-minute pabulum pop.

It has been four years since the release of his critically acclaimed debut Big City Secrets on Peter Gabriel's RealWorld label. Since then, he won a Grammy award for best CD packaging for his EP entitled Vacancy, opened shows for Ben Harper and Gomez and has maintained an impressive, yet hectic residency schedule playing on both coasts. He recently recorded Come To Where I'm From, a beautiful, multi-layered release that follows up Big City Secrets nicely.

Joseph Arthur is not only a musician, he is also a sculptor and a painter, displaying his work on his album sleeves. During our interview, Arthur had been working on sketch for a fan. He explained that it allowed him to think with some clarity and it gave insight into how his creativity operates. You'd think such multi-tasking would make Arthur a risk for artistic burn-out, but it's actually beneficial.

"When you get burnt out on one then the other one can sort of take over and then you're not pressured. It's important to take the pressure off of what you're trying to do in a way because when you put all of your being into something, you suffocate it. If you put some of your love and energy, but not your obsessive energy, it can really grow. You have to step away from things and let them just take their time," says Arthur.

The key to Arthur's success is rooted in his own honesty and it appears through the purity of his music and voice, a blending of Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Karl Wallinger (World Party). It's this honesty which has helped him go from being a guitar salesman to a critically- and artistically-acclaimed professional touring artist.

"It's outrageous. It's starting to get more tripped out but I think I'm still connected with who I am," says Arthur. "I don't think it's going to my head any more than a necessary amount in order to do all of these things. It certainly isn't eating my humanity away. I think it's cool. I think it's healthy in that it's allowing me to expand in a positive way. I feel really lucky that I haven't achieved any real fame, being relatively unknown. I think that's like a real blessing because it's kept me hungry, it's kept me striving and it's allowed me to learn over three albums what keeps things vital. I don't want to lose that and I don't think I will."

It's a surprising and engaging experience seeing Joseph Arthur play live. On the stage he can be seen wearing dark glasses with his self-painted acoustic guitar and a harmonica neck stand. The surprise is in the sound coming from the speakers, an atmospheric blending of drum loops, bass lines, ghost vocal melodies with echo, delays and pitch-shifting. All of the sounds are sampled live and the audience is treated to witnessing the building or layering of textures evolving into a song.

"Human error needs to come back into music," he says. "It's as simple as that. I have a few drum machines, I do loops onstage. I like technology. I'm not like an old hippie that wishes it could be like it was in the old days. I'm just saying that what we have to do to make music interesting again now is to step away from technology. It's been overdone and I'm bored with it. I want something different and exciting."

Joseph Arthur will be performing residency clubs dates in Canada sometime in May. The show that he puts on is in fact, "different and exciting" and it is closer to performance art than merely a singer/songwriter waxing lyrical about love, social injustices and having a crappy 9 to 5 job. He'll captivate with his voice, his words, his songs, and most importantly, his honesty.