INTERVIEW : 2011-04-26 FasterLouder Interview (by Paul Busch)
Speaking to FL prior to leaving New York, Joseph Arthur is barely hiding a drop of pre-travel jitters and angst. “I am in Brooklyn right next to where my nephews are sleeping so I am trying to talk low. My brother in law is trying to install some things on my computer and I am attempting to get ready to go to China tomorrow and leave here for three or four months. Whereas I have one more evening to pack and I have not started packing and whereas I am stressed out complexly beyond all measure and I have five Australian phone interviews to do back to back, and that is how I am. Do you believe it? But I have accepted my fate and decided to be chilled for the next whatever period of time.”
In 1996, Arthur was signed to Peter Gabriel’s label Real World, becoming the first American onboard there. He has now released 7 studio albums and gaggle of EP’s and collaborated with many. His visit to Australia will be his first and will also introduce punters to Fistful Of Mercy, with Dhani Harrison and Ben Harper.
“I have known Ben for awhile,” Arthur explains, “I was playing on the West Coast and had two nights at The Troubadour. I was thinking I wanted to make one of the shows different than the other. So I called up Ben out of the blue and asked if he wanted to join me and he said ‘hell yeah dude’, and he ended up sitting in for both of the shows. I was like well, since you are here we should record something and he was cool with that. We got Dhani and we went into the studio for three days and we had nine tracks of great vocal harmonies. I like to say that we are influenced by the idea of Crosby, Stills and Nash. I have not listened to their music much but it was like that idea of male singers singing together all the time with great harmonies. A month or so after that we had the notion to call Jim Keltner, who Dhani had grew up around, and Dhani called him up and he played on the record and it was this magic unfolding.”
As I Call You Down, their debut album is a startling collection of nine tracks. Gorgeous harmonies throughout and each artist makes this ensemble very extraordinary. There are similarities to other 60-70s male folk/country artists that will cross your mind as you listen, and you should listen. Besides this collaboration, Arthur has a new album The Graduation Ceremony coming out very soon.
“I was working on another record for the past two years. It is kind of like a big concept album with big production and it ran away from me a little bit, so I made this record in response to that. I just wanted to do something simple and song based and I was fortunate enough to have Jim Keltner play drums on it and John Alagia [John Mayer and Dave Matthews] helped me produce it the rest of the way home over about a month in Los Angeles. It came out really well, so we decided to put it out before the big production record comes out. I was going to leave it like that and Jim came to work on The Ballad Of Boogie Christ. I asked Jim if I could play him some of this other stuff I had just recorded and he played on the first one. We ran down through the whole record and he played through each song and I was like ‘Holy Shit, we just got Jim Keltner to play on the entire record!’.”
Arthur keeps up a fairly busy touring schedule and is prolific with his writing, releases and his visual arts. Drop into his website and check out his poetry, his discography and drop into the virtual Museum of Modern Arthur to view his artwork. “It is always a challenge to get music out there or a series of challenges,” he says, “When I used to have record deals I was always working projects through a record company and I had to get them excited about it. This was a challenge when your sales history, like mine, is spotty. It is more difficult to push them through. Then when you have your own thing, and your own label and distribution, there is a different series of limitations and things to deal with. There is no EASY way as far as I can tell. To put something out there and to try and make people aware of it is the trick”.
“I don’t care if the social networking gets left behind at times and it is not a good career move. You get to a certain time in your own sanity and your own sense of humanity is more important than being connected. I am someone that invests a lot into this music stuff and career and everything, but I can only go so far with it. You have to put your spirit and humanity above it.”
