INTERVIEW : 2007-04-25 Joseph Arthur makes no apologies for his wildly eclectic songcraft (by Adrian Mack)
Vancouver encountered Joseph Arthur when he held down a two-week residency at the Railway Club in 2000. At the time, the Beatle-bobbed, New York–based singer-songwriter was working strictly alone, pitting his darkly personal songs against a battery of effects pedals, loops, and fractured electronic beats. The album that followed, Come to Where I'm From , produced with refreshing abandon by T-Bone Burnett, came with the endorsement of Peter Gabriel and was strikingly decorated with Arthur's primitivist artwork. The impression was of a cracked, poetical boho. In hindsight, the disc was something of a precursor to 21st-century freak folk.
Since then, Arthur has proven to be a restless and prolific artist with a number of incarnations, all of them converging on his sprawling new album, Let's Just Be . Recorded in three weeks with his new band, the Lonely Astronauts, the disc offers the recklessly experimental version of Arthur in the 20-minute "Lonely Astronaut" (which sounds like the frustrated black scribble floating above Charlie Brown's head when he's pissed off). Arthur the folksinger is represented by the wintry, hushed "Take Me Home", and "Wedding Ring" gives us the singer bent on adult-contemporary rock, complete with falsetto and keening Telecaster.
Predictably, critics have tended to focus on the record's multiple personalities, much to Arthur's amusement.
"One reviewer called it 'wildly uneven'," he says, speaking to the Straight while shopping for organic food in New York's East Village. "They were trying to insult it, but I take that as a big compliment. 'Wildly uneven' is, like, the best thing you can say about a rock 'n' roll record. If someone had that quote on the front of their record, I'd be interested to hear what 'wildly uneven' sounded like."
Weirdly enough, Arthur's previous album, Nuclear Daydream , was a straight-ahead affair made with a number of the same musicians. The kind of thing that could comfortably be filed between R.E.M. and Dave Matthews, its tone was considerably more consistent than that of the latest full-length, as was the critical reaction–the best of his career, in fact. "I actually did try to consciously make a more even kind of record," Arthur admits, with a self-satisfied chuckle, further allowing that Nuclear Daydream "follows all the rules, and even looks like a real record".
But finding himself with a permanent band, for the first time since he started recording in 1997, seems to have inspired Arthur to expand in all directions at once. The Lonely Astronauts actually put an incredible 80 songs in the can once they hit the studio.
"It's not a wild turn of events," Arthur argues. "It's fuckin' pop songs and rock songs. Weren't the Beatles as eclectic as fuck? Don't you remember 'Helter Skelter' on the same record as fuckin' one of those goofy Ringo songs? It's not that insane."
Concluding that "our culture really punishes risk takers," Arthur offers a final retort to critics who would prefer that his music stand still.
"There's a lot of 'wildly uneven' journalism," he snickers.
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