INTERVIEW : 2007-04-12 On his new CD and in life, Joseph Arthur advocates Let's Just Be (by T'cha Dunlevy)

"It's weird how slow time is moving."

Joseph Arthur sat across from me at Casa del Popolo on Monday afternoon, looking every bit the scruffy slacker, and talking like the world's biggest multi-tasker.

If time is moving like molasses for the New York-based singer-songwriter, it may be because he is finding ways to fill it with an inordinate amount of activity.

His last album, the beautiful and critically acclaimed Nuclear Daydream, was released in the fall. His next one, the rather rambunctious Let's Just Be, is due Tuesday. By the looks of things, he'll have another out by fall - all three on his new label, Lonely Astronaut Records.

There's more. "I've got a lot going on right now," confessed Arthur, who had just flown up for two days of promotion, before heading back to the Big Apple, then returning for a show at La Tulipe Sunday night.

"I'm moving. I live in Brooklyn, and I'm (uprooting) from my place of three years. I'm opening a gallery (the Museum of Modern Arthur, coming soon to Brooklyn). I'm ready to embark on a pretty extensive tour. And I've got a couple of records I'm producing - this kid Adam Masterson, and this woman Jenna Krausz (Jena Kraus); two really great singer-songwriters. There's just a lot going on lately. I don't know why."

Chalk it up to a restless spirit, an excess of inspiration, and a limited attention span. Arthur sketches as he talks; drawing abstract lines and faces on a piece of loose-leaf. Unable to play it straight in his solo shows, he is notorious for layering guitar and vocal loops into elaborate sonic backdrops for his moving folk-rock gems.

During an industry showcase performance at Mount Royal Ave. club O Patro Vys on Tuesday night, Arthur turned, mid-song, to a painting he had started before the show. With a looped groove running, he held a microphone in one hand, picked up a tube of paint with the other, and proceeded to sing and paint simultaneously, with equally captivating results.

He then sang a song he had performed last week at Carnegie Hall - Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. (at a star-studded Springsteen tribute concert), after which the Boss reportedly came backstage and commended him for pulling off a "challenging choice."

Tuesday night, it was obvious how he did it. Pardon the cliche, but Arthur made the song his own. He sang it as if he had written it, lived it. His delivery was fearless but unhurried, ragged and raw. In concert and in interview, he knows not of pretense, and loves a challenge.

"I like provoking myself," he said. "That's where art is, ... in the unexpected."

Let's Just Be is a dramatic turn for an artist who, since getting signed to Peter Gabriel's Real World label in the mid-'90s, has built a career on carefully constructed songcraft. It marks the introduction of Arthur's first real band, the Lonely Astronauts, under whose influence he loosens up, rocks out and indulges in at least one meltdown freakout - midway through the album, on a 20-minute opus bearing the name of his label and band. (Sense a theme emerging?)

"There was no time for any self-doubt," he said, of the album. "It was made with a blast of enthusiasm. It's confident, bold, unrelenting... It's 80 minutes long, and there's a song that's over 20 minutes long. Obviously, those are things that music critics can pounce on; but I feel like it's a record that pushes boundaries, or is attempting to. I think it's alive, because of the spirit in which we made it. We made 80 songs in three weeks, on 16 tracks to two-inch tape. And (the album) was Work CD One, exactly in that order."

The recordings from the sessions had been put onto four CDs, Arthur explained. When mastering engineer Fred Kevorkian passed him the first disc of songs to listen to, something clicked.

"I said, 'You know what, man? It just works for some weird reason. It's eclectic, it goes from one thing to the next. I just liked it. I handed it to other people in the band and said, 'Do you think this works as a record?' They were like, 'I think it does.' And I believe it more now than I did then. It grows on you.

"It goes with the title, Let's Just Be. The whole thing is about letting go, letting go of my own hold on my creative process... It's celebratory."