INTERVIEW : Spotlight - Joseph Arthur (by Ryan Reed)

“When you have that real air of desperation, when you’re really on the brink, that’s when you reach for a song,” says Joseph Arthur. “At that point, the song becomes God—it becomes the only thing that can save you.”

At his lowest, Arthur bowed to the elusive deity that became “Come Back World,” the folky title track of his first solo LP in three years. It couldn’t have arrived at a more pivotal time. He’d been slowly rebuilding his career and rejuvenating his spirit—working with new management, nursing an injured shoulder, repairing the wounds of family turmoil and touring in rental cars as a support act to pay his bills. En route to Colorado during the 15th anniversary trek for his third LP, Redemption’s Son, he stopped in a small town and wound up “introduced” to the muse of a new record—the first tangible rung on his ladder to happiness.

“‘Come Back World’ was the first time the record introduced itself to me,” he says of the slowly crescendoing cut. “Certain songs have extra weight to them. My life had bottomed out in so many different ways, and the Redemption’s Son tour was me trying to get the ball rolling again. I was at this vulnerable point of rebuilding, being unsure of everything. It was a dark time. I was more isolated than I’ve probably ever been in my life.”

Arthur traces that seclusion back to his continuing battle with NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) abuse, a term he only pinpointed after Googling the behavior patterns of family members. “There’s a pathology of it,” he says. “A lot of us come from families that operate in these personality disordered ways. When you can identify how your life operates and see your place within it, that’s a mind-blowing revelation. I went, ‘Oh, I’ll start setting healthy boundaries, and my relationships will become healthy.’ That’s what my naïve head thought. The fallout from that was extreme. It amps up the behavior. It doesn’t tone it down. It sets off a powder keg, an explosion. I became estranged from my entire family of origin. It got so much weirder and darker than I ever saw coming.”

Determined to extract the toxicity from his life, the Ohio native cut off contact with certain family members altogether—a move he calls “an extreme and very tragic” solution. “It leaves you sort of orphaned in the world,” he says. “It’s not exactly a happy ending. You’re in the endless debate of what you allow and accept. But then you realize that what you’ve been allowing into your life actually dictates your trajectory and potential.”

“Come Back World,” and the songwriting flood it catalyzed, helped Arthur climb out of that downward spiral and into a healthier mindset. To give himself goals and structure, he started boxing, running and practicing yoga. “I really wanted to box professionally,” he says. “I was looking for a life raft in an ocean, and boxing became that. My life became some weird military boot camp in order to survive. I became really focused on athletics. I didn’t have any medical coverage or way to get psychological help, so I kinda had to heal myself.”

But despite the steps forward—and though he’s remained prolific over two-plus decades—Arthur was struggling to make ends meet. “I had no money at all,” he says of the time after the Redemption’s Son tour. He wound up finding another savior, R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, during a trip to Todos Santos, Mexico. He flew there to crash at a friend’s house and pick up a dobro he’d accidentally left behind—but he wound up hanging out with Buck, resulting in their collaborative 2018 LP, Arthur Buck. (They recently finished recording a second album, though they haven’t ironed out a release date.)


“That absolutely saved me,” he says of the project, which got him “out of the woods” financially. “The universe was throwing me a bone. But I was still fighting the good fight for that to happen.”

Newly Zen, Arthur knew he had to reapproach the darker, more ruminative songs he’d been saving for Come Back World. Ironically, songwriting helped him purge his demons, but he was no longer in that angsty place by the time he got around to recording them. “The early incarnations were too dark,” he says of the album. “I worked on it so long that my own personal evolution became a much more optimistic thing—even though these tragic things occurred. I made the conscious decision to put the light side into this without draining all the darkness out of it, to give a real assessment of where I’m at.”

Come Back World reflects that balance: The sleek surfaces of the gospel-folk sing-along “I’ll Be Around” and the chiming, lightly psychedelic “Tomorrow Today” radiate joy, even if the lyrics maintain an undercurrent of melancholy. While Arthur laments having to navigate a turbulent road to write these songs, he’s proud to have seized a pivotal moment of healing.

“[In desperation], you put so much weight into your art,” he says. “That weight is perceptible for other people. It’s like, ‘Don’t try to make yourself miserable in order to create great art.’ But that weight is undeniable when you get into those situations in your life.”

For Arthur, writing Come Back World may have been like conversing with a god. But it was also “like finding an old friend.”

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