INTERVIEW : 2000.07.06 Young and looped (by Jackson Grifith)

Ace singer/songwriter Joseph Arthur aims for magnetic

Singer/songwriters are a dime a dozen-especially since the coffeehouse craze came and went, stranding late-night latte joints and way too many acoustic-strumming waifs and troubadours. Good singer/songwriters are less numerous, and occasionally worth noticing. Really good singer/songwriters you tell your friends about.

Joseph Arthur is a really good singer/songwriter.

Arthur, a 28-year-old with the kind of grainy, just-woke-up crease in his voice that gets him pegged as a young Leonard Cohen, is not just another twilight-dwelling tunesmith from Canada. For starters, he's not Canadian; he's from Akron, Ohio, although he now lives in Manhattan. But if you care to press the Canadian analogy ...

"Neil Young," he says. "That would be the comparison I would feel most comfortable with. And it's one that doesn't happen as frequently as Leonard Cohen; it seems like I get [that one] a lot. Which is a compliment to an extreme, 'cause I think Leonard Cohen is within the top-five of all-time songwriters, but it just doesn't seem that accurate to me.

"But, Neil Young does seem more accurate, because he…," Arthur pauses a beat. "One thing I love about him is that he experiments all the time, and he puts a lot of music out, and it's strong in different ways at different times, you know what I mean? Sometimes it's strong lyrically; sometimes the lyrics are in the background to the melody; and sometimes it's electric and loud, and sometimes it's just really quiet."

Arthur's new album, Come to Where I'm From (on Real World, Peter Gabriel and WOMAD's world-music label, released through Virgin), pretty much follows that dictum. Like his 1997 debut Big City Secrets, and a seven-song EP from last year, Vacancy, it possesses an uncommon depth that's rare today, balancing a well-crafted songwriter-pop aesthetic sense a la Cohen and Young with a penchant for off-the-cuff, one-take rants that owe more to punk tradition-if there is such a thing.

"I like a mix of some things more crafted than others," Arthur explains. "I get bored if nothing's crafted, if it's all just spontaneous, unconscious stuff. But there's a space for that, too-I get bored if it's all well-crafted and controlled as well. So finding a mix is what I try to do."

One common thread running through Arthur's music is the intense, confessional nature of his lyrics; it's often psycho-girl-magnet stuff. Musically, the disc-produced by Arthur with T-Bone Burnett and Rick Will-is quite eclectic, with crafted pop such as "In the Sun" on one end and sparse, elegant codas like "Speed of Light" at the other. In between lie surprises, such as the amazing "Creation or a Stain"-a train wreck involving Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and the Violent Femmes' "Add It Up," with a Velvet Underground subtext.

"I wrote that the night before we recorded it," Arthur says. "The words wrote that, and I just played two chords and ranted over it."

Arthur's current live set is solo; he loops his vocals and guitar parts to add texture and thickness. "I don't try to re-create the record," he says. "And, on record, I don't try to re-create live. It's different. Usually, people tend to like my live show better than my records, or at least that's what I hear."

Source