Joseph Arthur will be embarking on a tour of the U.S.and Canada. Check the dates to the right or josepharthur.comwhere new dates are posted as they are confirmed.
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AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY AT JOSEPHARTHUR.COM!
| This Special includes: |
| - | | Limited Art Poster of an original water color by Joseph Arthur |
| - | | 2 copies of the EP 'Foreign Girls,' one for you and one for a friend. |
| Shipping now! |
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 Joseph Arthur Hand Silk Screened Limited Edition T-shirts –Featured in Rolling Stone! Each t-shirt is unique and hand silk screened by Joseph Arthur.
Please note that the t-shirt you purchase will not look like the one pictured as they are all different. Quantities are limited!
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He's A Creative Force To Be Reckoned With
 When Joseph Arthur describes his Museum of Modern Arthur gallery in Brooklyn, it's hard not to wonder if he's not actually talking about himself as a kind of living art installation. After all, the "MOMAR," as he facetiously refers to it, is in fact his recording studio and gallery, where he creates and displays his art, both audio and visual. And like him, it is always moving in new directions.
Like the slew of albums and EPs he's put out since being discovered and signed a decade ago to Peter Gabriel's Real World Records label, what's hanging on the walls - giant canvases of cacophony and calm, brought to life by muted washes, angry spatters, or perplexing combinations of both - are reflections of a constantly questing artist.
"It's pretty much about having a playful attitude and just kind of following whatever inspiration comes - that's how I live my days," Arthur says casually on a recent afternoon in advance of his solo acoustic show at the Paradise Wednesday. "I was just working on instrumental music for film, right now when you called."
If and when he tires of working out new chords, he says, he can always move to a new canvas, both literal and figurative. Or go for a bike ride to clear his head and dream up new avenues of expression. "It's limitless what you can do and how deep you can get into things," he says. "It's up to you, really."
Lately, what Arthur has been getting deeply into is recording EPs and then releasing them at an astonishing rate. So far this year, he's issued four in five months. Even more astonishing is the fact that the quantity of production has not hurt the quality of the material whatsoever. Taken as a whole, the music zigzags from charming folk-rock to lo-fi bedroom pop to spacey orchestral maneuvers in the dark - often within the span of a single EP. Disparate elements, ranging from Elliott Smith and East River Pipe to Radiohead and My Morning Jacket, reverberate in a mix of material that never feels less than fully, vibrantly realized.
Arthur's lyrical preoccupations, meanwhile, remain - as always - subtly rooted in life's big questions: Why are we here and who, or what, is behind our existence? And how do our boundless capacities for love, greed, and war shape the world? This subject matter is something Arthur has always grappled with, leading some listeners to wrongly assume he's writing religious or "Christian rock" songs. Those suppositions, he insists, could not be further from the truth.
"I'm definitely not a fundamentalist by any stretch of the imagination - I believe in evolution," Arthur says. "But I also feel like, what are we if not on a spiritual journey here? I don't feel like I have the answer, but I definitely feel like there's a point to [existence]. I'm not a religious person, but I believe in a creative power. It's an intelligence that I can't understand or fathom." But he calls that consuming sense of wonder and curiosity "the crux of my expression."
"Here's a guy who's an artist through and through, in every sense," says Danny Clinch, a photographer and filmmaker who first met Arthur around 2001 while Clinch was shooting a concert documentary on Ben Harper and Arthur was the opening act. Clinch has since become a friend and occasional artistic collaborator. "He's a guy that I honestly feel should be much more recognized than he actually is. He's creating all the time, and he's not holding anything back. He's fearless."
Arthur has released each of his four EPs on his own Lonely Astronaut label, an arrangement that he says frees him up to act, unfettered, on his creative impulses. He's also just finished a full-length album, "Temporary People," that's coming out this September. This spurt - no, make that geyser - of activity follows a pair of albums ("Nuclear Daydream" and "Let's Just Be") that the Ohio-born singer-songwriter released back to back a mere nine months apart. And it's not the first time he's peppered the populace in this fashion. He also issued four EPs back in 2002 as a run-up to the release of his critically acclaimed album "Redemption's Son."
Clinch, who attended the New England School of Photography in Boston before going on to shoot iconic portraits of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen, among others, sees Arthur's sound and vision as inextricably linked. Some of that has to do with the fact that Arthur's been known to paint, as much as play, onstage.
"If you listen to his stuff, it's got a classic structure to it, but if you put it on headphones and really pay attention, there are all sorts of squirrelly, squiggly lines," Clinch says. "There's a lot of underlying information going on in the music, and certainly it's that way in his [visual] art."
Productive as he is, Arthur, who was nominated for a Grammy for best cover design for his 1999 "Vacancy" EP, seems to take his workload - his perpetual online album-in-progress, "Bag Is Hot," is yet another project - in easygoing stride. He sees the world through an artist's eyes, and it's a vantage point that comes naturally to him. That doesn't mean Arthur's antennae aren't always up, attuned to the next flash of inspiration.
"You look for those spots and those moments," Arthur says. "You look for the poetry in your life." - Jonathan Perry, Boston Globe |
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(unless otherwise specified)
Thursday, July 10, 2008 World Cafe Live
Philadelphia, PA
Friday, July 11, 2008 Bowery Ballroom
New York, NY
w/ The Lonely Astronauts
Saturday, July 12, 2008 Maxwell's
Hoboken, NJ
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 Troubadour
Los Angeles, CA
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 Anthology
San Diego, CA
Friday, July 18, 2008 Great American Music Hall
San Francisco, CA
Monday, July 20, 2008 WOW Hall
Eugene, OR
Monday, July 21, 2008 Doug Fir Lounge
Portland, OR
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 Triple Door
Seattle, WA
Thursday, July 24, 2008 The Media Club
Vancouver, BC
Saturday, July 26, 2008 Hillside Festival
Guelph, ON
  Joseph Arthur & the Lonely Astronauts 2007 European Tour Live shows now available!
2007 European Tour
11.30.07 Lleida, SPAIN
Cafe Del Teatre
12.01.07 Murcia, SPAIN
12 y Medio Club
12.05.07 San Sebastian, SPAIN
Gazteszena
12.06.07 Santander, SPAIN
Palacio de Festivales
12.07.07 Bilbao, SPAIN
Kafe Antzokia
12.08.07 Barcelona, SPAIN
Primavera Club
12.10.07 Paris, FRANCE
La Maroquinerie
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25 Jay Street - Brooklyn, New York
inquiries@museumofmodernarthur.com
www.museumofmodernarthur.com
www.josepharthur.com
Visit Joseph's MySpace site
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