Joseph Arthur - Secrets of Shadow and Redemption

Who you are and who you want to be are competing at opposite ends “I'm Peter Gabriel. I think you write great songs. I'd like to get in touch with you.” The answering machine stops with a metallic click. The tape rewinds with its screeching hiss. That voice again. Could it really be Peter Gabriel's? Joseph Arthur has been writing songs since he was thirteen. He started out strumming an electric keyboard within the walls of his home, then he picked up the bass and joined his first band: they were called Frankie Starr And The Chill Factor, and they even opened for Stevie Ray Vaughan a couple of times. His first passion was Jimi Hendrixthen his sister played him all the records by Bob Dylan. And he soon realized that he could never be content with life in Akron, Ohio, spent dropping acid, kicking flaming tennis balls around and listening to Bauhaus with friends in a ghost town. So, once he finished high school, Joseph immediately seized the chance to leave home and moved to Atlanta to follow a funk-rock band called Ten Zen Men, soon replaced by the sturdy grunge outfit Bellybutton. The answering-machine recording echoes once more through the silence of the room, before the sudden intrusion of the beep comes to break the spell. To make ends meet, Joseph started working in a music-instrument shop, selling guitars, strings and picks to people who as in only ever wanting to try playing "Smell Like Teen Spirit". After a few years of activity around Atlanta, Bellybutton eventually broke up, and with them the dream of becoming a rock star. All that's left for Arthur are the records of Neil Young and an acoustic guitar to vent all his aspirations and the bitterness of an ever more burning dissatisfaction. "I felt isolated and fragile, like an egg clumsily rolling in circles on itself until it starts to crack," he recalls. "With Bellybutton I was becoming more and more technically skilled, but less and less sincere. Then I started to understand that the simpler I kept a song's structure, the more I could express through melody and lyrics. So I just started writing simpler songs." As if caught in a dream, the young man sitting in his room can't stop replaying that short phone message, straining to catch the nuance of every syllable and every breath. The first demos he sent out to record labels all inevitably came back to sender without much ceremony. He had also recently released a four-track EP, Cut & Blind, for the small local label Sell My Soap Records. Meanwhile, though, through some unfathomable twist of fate, one of his cassettes ended up in the hands of a collaborator at Real World, the label of world music Peter Gabriel, and from there straight into the hands of the former singer of Genesis himself. Yes, that voice on the answering machine really is Gabriel's. And Joseph Arthur's life is about to change forever. The first meeting with Gabriel takes place at a club in New York, where Arthur is set to perform live. The tension is palpable, and the fear of falling short of expectations makes the anxiety even more suffocating. As if that weren't enough, Gabriel has decided to bring along Lou Reed, armed with a tape recorder to capture the evening. "I ran to the bathroom, got down on my knees and started praying," Arthur recalls. "By the end of the show I felt like I was daydreaming, sitting in a restaurant next to Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed and Dolly Parton..." It's done: Joseph Arthur becomes the first American artist to sign to Real World. Chaos and beauty trying to stay together on a razor blade   It's the summer of 1996, and Joseph Arthur is about to turn twenty-five when he leaves his small apartment in Atlanta to follow Peter Gabriel to England and join the traveling Womad festival (World Of Music Arts And Dance), where he performs alongside the likes of Joe Strummer. Barely having time to realize what's happening, Arthur finds himself in Real World's English recording studios alongside producer Markus Dravs, already at work with none other than Brian Eno, ready to make his first album: it's inevitable that he'd feel out of his depth in a situation like that. Joseph's reverential awe thus leaves Dravs free to dress the young songwriter from Akron's songs in a style unmistakably marked by Peter Gabriel's elegant, tailored touch. "I had the feeling I was working at McDonald's: I was always just following orders," he recalls with a hint of bitterness. "I was trying to stay true to Peter Gabriel's philosophy, to make a neat, proper record." Big City Secrets, Joseph Arthur's debut album, released in spring 1997, is a work dense with layers and painstaking detail. Joseph's deep, metallic voice and the framework of his acoustic guitar are wrapped in a refined weave of rhythmic inlays and synthetic filigree, while a sizable cast of guest musicians takes turns on more exotic instruments, from the Venetian xylophone to thehurdy gurdy all the way to the caxixi and the berimbau of Brazil. “There was a lot of boldness and experimentation, it was like an exploration," Joseph notes, giving himself the label of "experimental songwriter." Some even go so far as to compare him to Mr. Beck Hansen, the indie figure of the moment in the late Nineties, but Arthur laughs off the reckless parallel invented by the press: “I like Beck, but my music has nothing to do with his. When I read someone writing ‘It's like Beck!’ I think ‘Ok, this guy hasn't even listened to my music’." The circular arpeggio of “Big City Secret” opens the album with its vivid, visionary imagery: “You bounce against my rectangular light/ I fall asleep inside your spherical night/ And dream about coming together again”. Then the harmonica Dylan-esque of “Mercedes," with Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno on backing vocals, gives rise to the first landmark of Arthur's repertoire, while the guitars of “Haunted Eyes” and the electronic rhythms of “Birthday Card” head down more immediately pop-leaning paths. Amid the smoky, nocturnal swirls of “Crying Like A Man,” the voice of the songwriter American grows even more cavernous, as if chasing the ghost of Leonard Cohen alongside a trombone with jazzy inflections. Big City Secrets alternates between oblique, restless moments, like the electric surges of “Daddy's On Prozac” and the tribal rhythms of “Porcupine,” already present on the EP Cut & Blind, with episodes more overtly suited to Arthur's singer-songwriter vein, where on "Good About Me" and "Bottle Of You" he immerses his gaze in the arc of relationships fatally destined for defeat. Big City Secrets finds more favor in Europe – and especially in France – than in the United States, even though Alternative Press magazine goes so far as to hyperbolically call Arthur "one of the last true artists left in the world". Joseph tours Europe and the United States for the rest of 1997, laying the groundwork for his reputation as performers magnetic and compelling: making use of a sampler JamMan and other technological gadgets, Arthur begins honing his original technique of recording vocal parts live on stage, loop guitar and beat assorted, to use as backing tracks for his own songs. The effect is that of finding oneself in front of a full-fledged band, while the songs stretch out into long, hypnotic improvisations. At the end of 1997, a tribute to Lady Diana, who had recently passed away, is released, featuring the usual lineup di rock star. For the occasion, Peter Gabriel records a cover of a new Joseph Arthur song. It's called "In The Sun", and it's easy to guess that this is a song destined to leave an indelible mark. Caught in between all I wish for and all I need After living in London for a year, in 1998 Joseph Arthur decides to head back across the Ocean and moves to New York, continuing to pile up new material for his second record. In the meantime, he contributes to the soundtrack of Tony Cinciripini's "Hell's Kitchen", also appearing in the film with a brief cameo, playing guitar alongside lead actress Rosanna Arquette, who lends her voice to his new song "Invisibile Hands". Arthur also takes part in a tribute to Bob Dylan, recording a cover bare and bewitching version of "Up To Me". With T-Bone Burnett producing, Joseph Arthur records a substantial amount of material in California and starts planning the release of a double album. But the record label puts its foot down, so Arthur decides to put out part of the new songs as an EP for the small label of Portland Undercover. Vacancy, released in May 1999, serves as a substantial preview of the new record Arthur is working on, given that the seven tracks on the EP (plus the inevitable ghost track) are drawn from the same sessions sessions used for the upcoming second album by thesongwriter American. “To me Vacancy is a real album,” Joseph proudly declares. “It's an album in the good old-fashioned sense. On “Raw Power” by Iggy And The Stooges there are only eight tracks, just like on Vacancy: I had to add a ghost track because if there had been seven tracks it would have been considered an Ep.” The distance from Big City Secrets becomes immediately evident, signaled by the pursuit of a rougher, more direct sound, made up of bare-bones guitars and dry drum accents. “After feeling the personality of Peter Gabriel and his team almost oppressively present in my first album, this time I tried to have total freedom,” Arthur states. “I feel a bit like I killed my father…” he adds, with a mix of irony and guilt. From the caressing desolation of “Making Mistakes” and “Bed Of Nails”, also included in the soundtrack of the blockbuster “The Bone Collector”, to the enveloping whispers of “Vacancy” and “Toxic Angel”, Arthur's inspiration reaches the peak of depth. “Prison” is clothed in a dark electricity, allowing Joseph's voice to venture with its vibrant falsetto into a disturbance of hallucinated reverb, while “Crying On Sunday”, featuring Joan Osborne on guitar, immerses a jukebox Fifties melody in biting distortion. To return the favor, Arthur will be featured by the blonde singer-songwriter on several tracks of her album “Righteous Love”, released the following year. Theartwork di Vacancy, curated together with his friend Zachary Larner, for the first time centers on Arthur's paintings, which will constantly accompany the songwriter American's record releases. A passion for painting that has always rivaled music among Arthur's interests, so much so that it led him to decorate even his own guitar in a thoroughly personal way. Vacancy This earned him a nomination at the Grammys for “Best Recording Package”: Arthur and Larner show up at the awards ceremony feeling out of place, but five minutes after it's announced that they haven't won, they decide to leave and go get dinner at a Mexican restaurant without waiting any longer… For the release of Joseph Arthur's new album, there's still almost a year to wait: Come To Where I'm From finally hits stores, again under the Real World banner, only in April 2000, rewarding the wait with a handful of songs that rightfully place themselves between the introverted poetry of Elliott Smith and the restless rawness of Mark Lanegan. T-Bone Burnett's production gives Arthur's music a more tangible, grainy quality, pairing the chiaroscuro of Daniel Lanois with the dust of Counting Crows e Grant Lee Phillips, even if the underlying structure is no less complex than that of Big City Secrets. The guitars have a palpable density, over which the drums echo solemnly and the vocal layers stretch out with conviction, dominated by Arthur's charismatic baritone. An essence sublimated by the notes of “In The Sun”, which with its perfect melodic instinct and aching intensity digs into the soul until it bleeds, immediately establishing itself as a classic. It's translated into images by none other than Anton Corbijn, the photographer and director famous for his work with rock star as U2 e Nirvana, who directs a video in which Arthur wanders the streets of the Big Apple with a pair of angel wings on his back. The harmonica on “Ashes Everywhere” hits like a knife to the heart. The bitter sway of “Tattoo” draws in every sigh. And venturing through the piano chimes of “Eyes On My Back” is like taking a photograph through frosted glass, like trying to reach your own shadow as it fades away. Starting with its title, Come To Where I'm From is an invitation to discover one's own roots. The presence of a veteran drummer like Jim Keltner is eloquent proof of this, but Arthur isn't interested in revisiting the past for its own sake: “rereading folk isn't my mission, my dream is to achieve what Jackson Pollock managed to do with painting: lose control.” The rigorous selection of tracks and the care taken in refining every detail, together with T-Bone Burnett's touch, help give the fullest expression to the music of the songwriter from Akron. While tracks like “Chemical” and “Exhausted” openly declare their pop lineage, there are also moments when Arthur takes bigger risks, like when on “Creation Or A Stain” he has a worn-out Beastie Boys rewrite “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “the hip-hop version made by a white kid who doesn't try to sound black,” he bluntly calls it. The gripping “History” is nothing but the definitive version of that “Pick Up The Phone” which had already appeared on the Ep Cut & Blind, as well as in the early demos that had made Peter Gabriel fall in love, while amid the jagged guitar edges of “Cockroach” drummer Carla Azar, singing for the very first time in her life, offers a fragile duet with Joseph Arthur. In the ghostly air of “Invisible Hands”, Arthur's shadowy whisper seems to suggest that the fabric of reality is woven from some mysterious essence: “There are things we cannot know/ Invisible hands which guide the show from up above/ And sometimes you are forced to go/ Far away and shut the door/ On the one you love”. The only hope of not being crushed by the awareness of one's own betrayal then lies in the cry of a final plea for forgiveness: “Now Jesus he came down here just to die for all my sins/ I need him to as back here and die for me again/ Cause I cannot forgive myself for what it is I’ve done”. The echo of this cry runs through the whole horizon of Come To Where I'm From, until the image of the heart's insatiable hunger, destined never to be quenched until the dawn of judgment day, leads the farewell of “Speed Of Light” to take on the twilight tones of an apocryphal page from Dylan of “Oh, Mercy”. I was born to be redemption's son Nonostante Come To Where I'm From receives wide critical acclaim, so much so that Entertainment Weekly names it album of the year, sales still aren't smiling on Joseph Arthur, who continues to lead a penniless bohemian perennially on the roadlife. While Come To Where I'm From it was also released in a limited edition, with the addition of two bonus tracks (the skeletal “Ski Or Snowboard” and the nocturnal “Cocaine Blind”), the songwriter American opens for Ben Harper, of David Gray and by Gomez, together with whom he records the fiery antimilitarist outburst “I Donated Myself To The Mexican Army”, destined to become one of his live staples. An unmemorable instant-song inspired by the drama of 9/11, “Build Back Up”, is also published by Arthur in the compilations "Wish You Were Here – Love Songs For New York". Meanwhile, Arthur keeps writing at a relentless pace, finding himself at the start of 2001 with more than 70 new songs on his hands. Once again, though, the record label keeps throwing up obstacles and difficulties to releasing the material Joseph has composed: faced with the recurring requests from the label to work on refining the new compositions, he simply responds each time by presenting an entirely different batch of songs, drawing from an archive so vast that the only real problem is choosing… "I think I belong to the old school, when you wrote something and put it out right away," Arthur repeats bitterly. "I don't understand this need to wait two or three years between one album and the next. If I could, I'd put out a record every nine months." Once again, the natural outlet for such an abundance of songs is the EP format: but this time there are a full four EPs, totalling 19 unreleased tracks, only four of which will end up on Arthur's third album. The four volumes of Junkyard Hearts, released in early 2002 and sold through Arthur's official website and at his concerts, represent one of the moments of greatest creative freedom and experimental drive in his entire career. In this scrapyard of hearts, then, one finds dusty fragments of priceless gems and rusted remains of sunken treasures, from the dark electronic pulses of "The Coldest Sea" and "This Heart Will Swallow Us" to the rustic flavors of "Bill Wilson", from the intimate confession of "Tiny Echoes" to the reverb-rippled mirror of "Crackerjack Box". The new album, on the other hand, sets aside the more eccentric side of Joseph Arthur, explored in all its many facets on Junkyard Hearts, in favor of the pop attitude of the songwriter American. Pop in the noblest sense of the term, of course, meaning an unmistakable knack for finding the simplest (though not necessarily the easiest) way to get to the essence of things. "I think quite a few of my songs are pop songs," he himself admits. "I don't write them with that intention, but I'm a fan from pop music, so I guess I really do write pop music”. Redemption’s Son, released in Europe in May 2002, is then the album that most immediately captures the substance of Arthur's sound, even if it doesn't quite match the precious rough edges and poetic peaks of Come To Where I'm From. Tchad Blake's production, having previously worked alongside, among others, Pearl Jam e Lisa Germano, helps faithfully convey the approach Joseph had developed on stage, as shown by the beat that accompany the fragile "Innocent World": "Tchad brought me back down to earth," Arthur admits, "he gave the whole project a cohesion it didn't have before, since I'd recorded the tracks over a span of two years in a number of different places." Even so, the record's biggest flaw lies precisely in its excessive length and the sheer quantity of ideas packed into it. The spare folk-rock rigor of the previous album gives way to an interweaving of sounds that ranges from the vibrant psychedelic forays of "Nation Of Slaves" to the funky accents of "Buy A Bag", passing through the straightforward rock of "In The Night" and the acoustic and synthetic swirls that envelop the more than nine minutes of "Termite Song". The heart of the record, however, lies in the alluring ballads among Ed Harcourt e Damien Rice like "Honey And The Moon", "September Baby", "You Are The Dark", "You've Been Loved" and "Favorite Girl", dating back to the sessions di Come To Where I'm From. "Honey And The Moon", in particular, soon becomes one of the most widely heard songs in Arthur's catalog, helped along by its inclusion in hit teenager and the teen drama “The O.C.” and the comedy “American Pie: The Wedding,” to the point of being reissued as a single in 2007 for the British market. As in the past, also in Redemption’s Son the protagonists of Joseph Arthur's songs are lost angels, intoxicated by their own desires, who recount their dreams with a shadowy romanticism steeped in biblical symbolism. "Each of us is the product of redemption, a child of redemption," says Arthur. "The more you feel the need to be redeemed, the more vital what you express becomes. In a sense, the more desperate you are, the more powerful your work is." "If there's a purpose to life," he adds, "it has to do with who created us and our relationship with him." And so the whisper of “Favorite Girl” struggles within the urgency of a need measured against infinity: “My heart’s been dying of starvation and I need/ Somebody who will feed me/ And if salvation only comes when you fall/ Oh Lord/ It’s so hard for me to believe/ Oh Lord/ I’m still waiting for you to call”. Redemption’s Son reaches the United States only in November. In the American version of the album, besides the use of a different and more fitting artwork, “You Could Be In Jail” and “Buy A Bag” are replaced by the sparkling “Let’s Embrace” and by “Dear Lord,” a shimmering ride that unleashes an organ and harmonica worthy of “Blonde On Blonde”. Meanwhile, “In The Sun” is included in the soundtrack of the film “The Bourne Identity” and is used for the commercial TV commercial for a perfume, helping to bring Joseph Arthur's name to wider attention beyond the circle of fan. Arthur goes back on tour not only in his usual modern one man bandguise, but also accompanied on a few dates by Johnny Society and by the rhythm section of Kula Shaker. Besides distributing his collections of verses and travel notes, “Notes From The Road,” through his official website, Arthur starts selling at the end of every show the recording soundboard of his own performance, captured and mastered in real time. In the following years, Arthur's live recordings would also be offered on his website, through download a paid service. In 2003 an impromptu side project also sees the light of day under the name Holding The Void, in which Arthur has fun playing the part of the frontman and guitarist of a fiery garage-rock trio with Pat Sansone on bass and Rene Lopez on drums, who had already appeared in some episodes of Redemption’s Son. The album, dominated by the riffs abrasive edges of tracks like "Candy Store", "Blue Jays And Honey Bee" and "False Colored Eyes", is nothing more than a carefree, noisy release - but all in all an enjoyable one. Arthur also tries his hand as a producer on the debut album by New York singer-songwriter Tara Angell, "Come Down". It's an experience he'll repeat in 2006 with Greg Connors' "Here, There And Anymore". Our shadows will remain even after we are gone Disillusioned by the troubles surrounding the making and release of Redemption’s Son, in 2004 Joseph Arthur decided to leave Real World behind and, turning his back on the lights of New York, ventured into the thick, decadently mysterious air of New Orleans, relying each time on the help of friends willing to put him up. The new album, Our Shadows Will Remain, released in the United States by Vector Recordings in October 2004 and only distributed in Europe starting the following summer, is built around a core of songs that grew on stage during the previous tour. The sound is fuller than ever, rising up to fill out the record's spaces with the support of a supple, flexible drumming, letting the guitars share the field with strings, piano, keyboards and electronics. After the brief, rarefied elegy of "In Ohio", as desolate as a lament by Damien Jurado, it's the physical impact of rock that first emerges on listening, with the guitar wall of the chorus of the single "Can't Exist". But it's the pull towards Eighties sonorities that is the common thread running through the musical choices of Our Shadows Will Remain, from the keyboards of "Devil's Broom" to the slightly cloying autumnal synth-pop of "Wasted", right through to the brisk rhythm of "Puppets", which seems lifted from the most frivolous Cure . It's no surprise, then, that the dark and splendid "Leave Us Alone", placed significantly at the close of the album, is presented by Arthur as a track inspired by the tragic memory of the frontman of the Joy Division, Ian Curtis: "Like a ghost without an atmosphere/ His voice sang without a song". Adding further richness to the musical fabric of Our Shadows Will Remain is the presence, on four tracks, of the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, which lends a majestic dramatic quality to "Stumble And Pain" and gives "Echo Park" the same airy grace as the string arrangements written for Nick Drake by Joe Boyd, taking on a pop lightheartedness amid its urgent twists and falsetto black of "Even Tho". The risk, however, is that Mike Napolitano's production ends up weighing down songs that don't actually seem to need overly glittery trimmings to shine. It's then in the collaboration born almost by chance with New Zealand singer Julia Darling that the album finds its most dazzling moment, "A Smile That Explodes", which pierces through with its stark perfection: the keyboards hover like the echo of a distant ocean and, as an arpeggio floats in mid-air, the piano barely grazes the shore, leaving Joseph Arthur's voice stranded in an almost Radiohead-esque, until it intertwines with Julia Darling's delicate counter-melody. The bleak X-rays of pain traced by Joseph's figures, which once again make up theartwork of the album, paint a sense of precariousness and the fleeting nature of existence that permeates the record's atmosphere. The abrupt awakening described in “Devil's Broom” is that of a man confronting his own ontological fragility, face against the pavement, everything he owns stuffed into a garbage bag. Yet in the same way that an unexpected patch of sky breaks through the leaden tones of the album cover, there's something in man that, however fleeting and shadow-like it may seem, is destined to last forever. “Our shadows will remain/ Even after we are gone”, sings Joseph in “Even Tho”: the search for that shadow which cannot be erased is the meaning of the whole album. Not included on the record, however, is the apocalyptic “All Of Our Hands”, bonus tracks offered in download free on the official website of the songwriter and later also released as a single. Yet it's an essential piece for understanding the spirit of Our Shadows Will Remain, with its bitter reflection on the barren wartime climate of the new millennium's early years: when everyone seems ready to shout without hesitation that evil lies elsewhere (in Bush's America or in Islamic terrorism, depending on which side you're on), Joseph Arthur isn't afraid to state that evil lies within each of us, that it's the fruit of our own bloodied hands. In the summer of 2004, Arthur, like many other American artists, backed the electoral campaign of Democratic candidate John Kerry, offering on his own website the chance to download a concert held in support of him in New York. Arthur also lends the playful, radio-friendly "You're So True" to the soundtrack of "Shrek 2" and lends his voice to Faultline for a cover of "Wild Horses" by the Rolling Stones", included on the album “Your Love Means Everything”. He then goes back on tour together with singer and violinist Joan Wasser, better known as Joan As A Police Woman", who will also host him on her debut album, “Real Life”. The pairing of the two artists on stage represents one of the most fascinating experiences live of Joseph Arthur's career: their splendid cover of the masterpiece by the Smiths, “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”, can be heard on a compilations sold in Starbucks coffee shops, albeit in a less effective version than the one performed live. As usual, one album isn't enough to contain Arthur's overflowing compositional vein. So, at the end of 2004, a new EP arrives, And The Thieves Are Gone, featuring material from the same sessions di Our Shadows Will Remain, with the exception of the raw “Papa”, dug up from the days of Come To Where I'm From. “My Home Is Your Head” seems to emerge directly from the crevices of Big City Secrets, while the pliability of “Saviour Of The Sun” and the catchy emotiveness of “Real As Rain” go by without leaving much of a mark. What really sticks, instead, is the enveloping rhythm of “Glass Pipe” and the liveliness of “Anywhere With You”, in which Arthur reels off his lyrics over a shimmering organ drone that gradually gives way to a carousel of digital inserts and sparkling guitars. Meanwhile, Dan The Automator produces a remix of “Even Tho” and Our Shadows Will Remain is put up for sale on iTunes with the forgettable addition of two new tracks, the ballads “You May Go” and “And The Night Goes On”. Rounding out the picture, the b-sides of the single “Can’t Exist” offer up the softness Springsteen-esque of “More To Give”, once again the fruit of his collaboration with Julia Darling, and a spirited “Jump Out Boy”. In the mirror everything’s reversed   Joseph Arthur's schedule grows ever more frantic. Between late 2004 and early 2005 he plays to crowds far bigger than he's used to, opening on numerous dates for concerts by the R.E.M.. Peter Buck joins Joseph on guitar for a poignant version of “In The Sun”, which would also be released on a compilations given away with Uncut magazine. And at the end of their shows, the R.E.M. invite Joseph to join the band onstage for a few encores, including the carefree rock 'n' roll of “Permanent Vacation”, one of the first songs written by a young Stipe. Michael Stipe is bowled over by Arthur's talent, so much so that in 2006 he spearheads a charity initiative to raise funds for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, dubbed the “In The Sun Foundation”, producing an EP of cover of “In The Sun” featuring, alongside the Athens band's singer, also the frontman of the Coldplay Chris Martin and the popstars Justin Timberlake. “It must be a song with a charitable heart,” Arthur remarks with a touch of irony, recalling that “In The Sun” had already been covered by Peter Gabriel in the 1997 tribute to Princess Diana. The project also spawns a documentary, and ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) awards Arthur the College Vanguard Award specifically for "In The Sun". Back on tour as a solo artist, Joseph Arthur begins introducing a painting sessions into his concerts on stage, painting a new canvas every night while singing "Crying Like A Man" and "Invisible Hands". "At first I felt really vulnerable," he observes. "It's like being isolated from the audience, but it's also a way of communicating on a different level. A level audiences aren't used to seeing used for communication." In February 2006, Arthur exhibits his paintings - steeped in a bleak, urban primitivism somewhere between Basquiat and De Kooning - for the first time in a London gallery. A selection of works is also released a few months later through the official website of the songwriter in the limited-edition volume "We Almost Made It", to which Arthur attaches an instrumental record titled The Invisibile Parade, suspended between indietronic digressions and ambient suggestions. Also on his own website, Arthur offers download a previously unreleased track, "Last Train To Ithaca", which again tackles the subject of Hurricane Katrina. On the collection of sea songs "Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys", put together to coincide with the release of the film "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest", Arthur can be heard performing "Coast Of High Barbary" disguised as Tom Waits, while a cover of "Look At Me" by John Lennon is included on a compilations bundled with Q Magazine. In the summer of 2006, Arthur is invited by the Barefoot Workshops association to take part in an arts festival in Uganda, and for the occasion he writes a new song, "A River Blue", which he records with a choir of around a hundred African orphans. "I wrote the song before going to Uganda," he recalls, "but I felt embarrassed singing it with those kids, because I could never fully grasp the depth of their situation. During the trip I was more interested in their songs, their drawings and their incredible beauty." That same year, Arthur also collaborates with the Twilight Singers on the album "Powder Burns" and on the subsequent EP “A Stitch In Time”, as well as with the psych-rock band Y and with singer and multi-instrumentalist Caroline Glass. As if that weren't enough, Arthur decides to launch his own record label, Lonely Astronaut Records, in search of an artistic expression completely free of outside constraints. In the midst of such creative overload, September 2006 sees the release of the American singer-songwriter's fifth proper studio album, Nuclear Daydream. Recorded between Berlin and Los Angeles over the course of a series of sessions which were originally meant to give birth to two different albums, Joseph Arthur's new work abandons the dense rock register of its predecessor, relying instead on a more stripped-down acoustic atmosphere. On paper, the ideal setting for the chiaroscuro of his compositions: yet something doesn't quite seem to click. Despite the quality of the performances, Nuclear Daydream it suffers from an all-too-conventional production, to the point that songs already showcased live in previous months end up feeling less striking in their studio versions. The cleanliness of the sound seems to smooth out all the rough edges: "it was kind of like saying 'this time let's do something truly user-friendly'", Arthur himself admits. The result ends up resembling a stripped-of-emphasis version of the Richard Ashcroft solo artist rather than the icon of Jeff Buckley. It's no coincidence, then, that the song chosen to preview the album is a single built on buoyant melancholy and a longing for escape, "Enough To Get Away", which could easily have as from the pen of Stuart Murdoch. Nuclear Daydream sets off right from pop territory, with the plastic rhythm and Roy Bittan-style piano of "Too Much To Hide", before moving on to play with guitar yowls and falsetto in the style of Prince on "Slide Away". The wave di Our Shadows Will Remain touches only return in the pronounced strokes of synth on "Automatic Situation". What dominates are classically structured ballads like "You Are Free" and "When I Was Running Out Of Time". "Electrical Storm" floats on an arpeggio streaked with howling radio waves, while "Don't Give Up On People" stretches out over a piano with a Lennon-esqueflavor. But it's in the folds of the album's less flashy moments that Joseph Arthur's compositional vein remains intact: the bare acoustic chords of "Black Lexus", a direct relative of the old "Mercedes", allow the dark hues of Joseph's voice to venture into a dimension of desolate estrangement, where reality seems to blur with a mirror in which everything is reversed. And the inlays of the title track, brushed by a veil of keyboards, settle onto the piano notes with a sense of bitterness Dylan-esque, which painfully caresses the strings of the Stones on "Wild Horses". That of Nuclear Daydream is a dimension made of relationships consumed in the ashes of their own embrace and of illusions lost on a journey with no destination, along the borderline between possession and detachment: "Don't tell your eyes are mine", Joseph proclaims, "Jesus loves you more than you know". In the end, the feeling is that in more than one episode the album suffers from writing that's overly predictable and instinctive, especially considering the large number of new compositions showcased live in previous years that were left off the record. A bit more deliberation would probably have benefited the overall balance of Nuclear Daydreammoments of charm are not lacking, but as a whole the album doesn’t seem to fully live up to Joseph Arthur’s talent. The album will be reissued in Europe in 2009 by the French label Fargo with the addition of no fewer than six bonus tracks, presented as “Side Three”. Between the fullness of “Moon In The Skull (Long Way Down)” and the jabbing accents of “Flashing Lights And Cockfights”, what really stands out are the bass pulses and synth of “My Eyes Follow You” and the bare voice-and-guitar simplicity of “Can’t Let You Stay”: not just a collection of leftovers, then, but a genuine crowning touch, able to deepen the substance of an album that could have expressed a rather different potential. Trying to avoid the truth of who you really are At the end of 2006, Joseph Arthur puts together a genuine backing band to accompany him on the tour supporting Nuclear Daydream: the group, christened Lonely Astronauts, features Kraig Jarret Johnson, already a member of the Jayhawks, on guitar and keyboards, and Greg “Wiz” Wieczorek, by Arthur’s side since the days of Redemption’s Son e Our Shadows Will Remain, on drums, alongside Jennifer Turner on guitar and Sibyl Buck on bass. After a couple of months of touring, the band goes into the studio in Los Angeles to record over eighty songs in one go, a dozen of which are immediately offered as a free download on Arthur’s official website. If things had stayed at the stage of a handful of demos given away for free to fan or if it had simply been a side project like the Holding The Void, the whole thing could have been dismissed with a shrug. But the fact that Arthur decided to turn a project like this into an official album, released in spring 2007 under the name “Joseph Arthur & The Lonely Astronauts”, inevitably forces the question of whether the songwriter from Akron hasn’t lost sight of his own muse. Indeed, the intoxicating freedom granted to him by now having his own personal record label seems to have led Arthur into a compositional bulimia worthy of the worst Ryan Adams. And the comparison is anything but incidental, given the way the new album, titled Let’s Just Be, rehashes the clichés of a conventional brand of rock. “The idea was to record all these new songs straight to tape, using only 16 tracks: a sort of back to basics that's how the Stones o Neil Youngused to record," Arthur notes. And indeed, the raw, dirty sound of Let’s Just Be is definitely the best part of the record, along with the usual care put into theartworkwhich, in the album's limited edition, features new lithographs and original drawings by the American artist. The fact is, in most cases, the songwriting (not coincidentally co-credited in more than one track with Kraig Jarret Johnson) is so predictable that it barely seems possible it really comes from the pen of one of the best songwriter of his generation. The opening track, "Diamond Ring", is presented as the best song the Rolling Stones never wrote for "Exile On Main Street", a tribute to a band Arthur has never hidden loving, to the point of recalling that "Tattoo You" was the first record he ever bought. But did anyone really feel the need for this dutiful rewrite of Mick Jagger and co.'s golden years? The hysteria à la Iggy Pop of "Cockteeze" and "Shake It Off" might work at best as a gag in a Jack Black movie, while the clattering hard rock of "Good Life" sounds all too predictable. So, between the riffs -soaked "Cocaine Feet" and the preciousness of "Precious One", the newfound devotion to the Stones and to early Bowie ends up slipping into mere formula more often than not. Compared to the demos on the album, the one thing you'll really miss is the absence of "Famous Friends Along The Coast", one of the few songs that redeemed the version of Let’s Just Be put out online by Arthur earlier. And "Lonely Astronaut", which stood out live as one of the best compositions written by the songwriter American, dating back to the days of Our Shadows Will Remainis drowned out by a coda of over a quarter of an hour, capable of exhausting with its rambling nature jam sessions even the most devoted of admirers. "The title was inspired by a scene from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'", explains Arthur, "when one of the astronauts is cast adrift in space, destined to die in the deepest solitude". Squandering the potential of a song like this in such a way really does seem like a suicidal choice, especially since it lacks the subversive force that Arthur would like to attribute to it. The hazy psychedelic trips of "Star Song" and "Spacemen" - the latter reportedly written by Arthur under the hallucinogenic influence of the antimalarial drugs he took during his trip to Uganda - certainly don't help matters either. Once again, what saves the record are the ballads better suited to Arthur's sensibility, from "Lack A Vision" to "Take Me Home", which wouldn't have been out of place on an album like Redemption’s Sonright up to that "Chicago" which had already been showcased live since 2004. The Joseph Arthur of Let’s Just Be, in short, really does as across as an unrecognizable caricature of himself. "Bullshit King" was how Juliette Lewis bluntly labelled him in a song on the second album under the name Juliette & The Licks, apparently dedicated to the end of her fiery relationship with Arthur, which had put the couple under the spotlight of New York's gossip scene. And it's not so much about him showing up with a different look from his usual image: it's more that he had abdicated his own personality, reducing himself to an imitation of a rocker like so many others. The painterly side of things, on the other hand, has taken on increasing importance in his quest for artistic expression, so much so that it led him to open an actual art gallery in Brooklyn, "Momar" ("Museum Of Modern Arthur"). The experience proved short-lived and led Arthur to favor selling online his works, including the coloring book "Colour Me Courageous". Hanging out with the temporary people   "My ideal is Andy Warhol's artistic approach: make art, and while people are deciding whether they like it or not, make even more art". For Joseph Arthur this seems to have become a personal challenge: to experiment and see just how far absolute artistic freedom can take him. So, before releasing his second album with the Lonely Astronauts, in 2008 the songwriter American released no fewer than four EPs in quick succession, following the same model he'd used in 2002 with Junkyard Hearts: a collection of twenty-six songs, probably too disparate to be gathered into a single record. The surprise is that the first chapter of this latest creative outpouring brings Arthur back to a level not seen since the days of Our Shadows Will Remain had no longer reached. Could We Survive, the Ep chosen to open the series, takes as its starting point a folk-pop sound in the style of Nuclear Daydream to tell the story of America in the days of the Iraq war, with a "Rages Of Babylon" saved from rhetorical overindulgence only by its usual metaphorical tone. If the melodic openness of tracks like "Shadows Of Lies" and "Walk Away" brings to mind the atmospheres of Redemption’s Son, the "raw and atmospheric" approach of "Morning Cup", as Arthur himself defines it, turns back the clock all the way to the days of Vacancy. With the second Ep, Crazy Rain, the sound shifts to something harsher and sharper, built on guitars and drum machine: the mood is set by the opening "Killer's Knife", a live staple since 2004, with Arthur's metallic voice cutting through blasts of guitar and keyboards wave. Arthur describes Crazy Rain as a work that's "almost techno and wonderfully chaotic": in truth, the pulsing rhythms and obsessive drive of "I Wanna Get You Alone" and "I Come Down", together with the voice of guitarist Jen Turner accompanying that of the songwriter American, bring to mind more than anything the dirty, abrasive blues of the Kills. Halfway between the atmospheres of the first two Eps, Vagabond Skies confirms Arthur's feverish creative streak: not content with the sheer volume of new releases, he also launches a blog, “Bag Is Hot”in the meantime, to share further photos, paintings and unreleased tracks. On his most natural ground, that of pop ballads, the songwriter American moves with his usual confidence, but also without any real flashes of inspiration: on the Ep's most anticipated track, "She Paints Me Gold", Arthur's dreamlike falsetto sours into a psychedelic-tinged guitar digression, but the result doesn't quite live up to the fluid version of the song recorded in 2005 with his friends in the American band Y. The final chapter, Foreign Girls, proves to be the sunniest of the four, with a handful of songs full of freshness, even if often barely more than sketched out. It's the title track that offers the most effective melody, with backing vocals from Arthur's French girlfriend, Cerise Leang, emblematic of the foreign girls of the title and immortalized time and again in the pages of “Bag Is Hot”. Overall, though, the final balance of the four EPs doesn't always feel equally inspired, alternating some of Arthur's best songs with moments of obvious predictability, in which the songwriter American seems to be running on autopilot. Joseph Arthur doesn't take the pans collected by Let’s Just Bewith much self-criticism: in his “Notes From The Road” he lashes out without mincing words at the “Boston Globe”, guilty of having branded the record as “wildly unfinished”. So, when it comes time to present himself again over the long haul, the songwriter American can't resist the temptation to claim revenge, determined to redeem the drubbing taken by the first record with the Lonely Astronauts. Temporary People, which saw the light of day in the autumn of 2008 (after a brief series of solo acoustic shows), does indeed display greater care and deliberation. The garage rough edges are smoothed out, the fabric of the songs is enriched with detail: credit also goes to the unmistakable contribution of Garth Hudson's organ from the Band, a guest on nearly half the tracks on the record, as well as to Kenny Siegal's production. But it's not enough to make it a record worthy of the American songwriter 's past: the Lonely Astronauts remain, even in this second incarnation, a far too ordinary band, and the songs Arthur writes alongside them continue to as across as predictable. The core of the album pulses around a handful of vigorous electro-acoustic ballads, already well road-tested live, from “Drive” to “Sunrise Dolls”, by way of the acidic guitar of “Faith”. At the opposite extremes, the riffs and the moves in the Mick Jagger style of “Winter Blades” bring back the mood of Let’s Just Be, while the bare-bones delivery of “A Dream Is Longer Than The Night” is framed by jagged electricity. Arthur's voice is dry and scratchy, and in the outburst of Dylan-esque of “Dead Savior” he delivers the lines with a more mocking tone than ever. “The album's title refers to the fragility of the human condition, which is the underlying theme of the record”, says Arthur. “The best things, the truest things, are born out of need, out of necessity. I approached the recording of this record the way a castaway lost in the middle of the sea would cling to a scrap of floating wood”. A sense of transience that emerges above all in the melodic folds of the farewell in “Say Goodbye”, even if the spiritual tension of his earlier lyrics is found only in the record's most pop moment, “Look Into The Sky”. “There must be twenty-five different people / Living inside me”, Arthur proclaims in “Temporary People”. Multiple personality syndrome, however, has its drawbacks: Arthur-the-rocker confirms he doesn't have the same talent as Arthur-the-singer-songwriter. The Lonely Astronauts once again look to the lessons of Seventies rock, between the black shades of “Heart's a Soldier” and a “Turn You On” with Hudson's organ more prominent than ever. But if Let's Just Be deserved a failing grade, Temporary People, while being more concise and focused, doesn't rise above the threshold of mediocrity. Arthur goes back on tour in solo mode (including a few dates supporting Tracy Chapman), appearing on stage with just guitar and harmonica, without the usual loop and pedals. For the first time, a collection of live tracks from the songwriter American... is released digitally on iTunes: Live From Montreal, recorded on the occasion of the performance at the Apple Store in the Canadian city in October 2008, suffers from the predominance of tracks drawn from the records with the Lonely Astronauts, which nonetheless manage to gain greater depth once stripped down to the bone. Alongside a couple of glances back at the past (“Birthday Card” above all), it's mainly the two unreleased tracks in the set that fascinate: on the storytelling “All The Old Heroes” Arthur once again shows off his more Dylan-esqueside, while “Face In The Crowd” paves the way for the solo comeback album, The Graduation Ceremony, which will see the light of day in 2011. Also documenting the live experience comes Arthur's first DVD, “Live In Philadelphia”, recorded in December 2009: an essential piece for fan, featuring classics such as “Vacancy” and “Honey And The Moon” and another unreleased track destined for The Graduation Ceremony, “Watch Our Shadows Run”. Meanwhile, Arthur collaborates with the Gutter Twins di Mark Lanegan e Greg Dulli and takes part in the tribute to the Afghan Whigs “Summer's Kiss” with a cover of “Step Into The Light”. In “Big Blue Ball”, a collection of Real World recordings from the early Nineties, Arthur takes part in the Celtic-flavored journey of “Altus Silva” and in the classic funky excerpt in the style of Peter Gabriel of “Exit Through You”, while on “Canon”, the first anthology of Ani Di Franco, he joins the Buffalo singer-songwriter on the notes of “Napoleon”. And at the Canadian festival “Pop Montreal”, a documentary about the songwriter American is premiered, made by Bryan Johnson, “You Are Free”, featuring interviews and songs from a 2005 concert at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Friends with whom you belong It all starts with a text message. A message with which Joseph Arthur invites Ben Harper to join him onstage at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, where Arthur has a concert scheduled. The two, friends since the early Nineties, had never found the chance to collaborate together: but that night it's immediately clear that the right moment has finally arrived. Something is still missing, though, one last piece to complete the mosaic. And Harper remembers a guy he had met while doing skate: Dhani Harrison, the son of the great George. Armed with a ukulele, Dhani shows up right on time at the studio, candidly asking which songs they're supposed to learn. Arthur, sitting in the middle of the room fiddling with his instruments, smiles at him: "Oh, we haven't written them yet…" Improvisation, instinct, sharing: that's how Fistful Of Mercy came together in 2010, an unprecedented band in which Joseph Arthur joined forces with Harper and Harrison. Three days spent playing together within the walls of the Carriage House in Los Angeles, nine tracks (one of them instrumental) written in an aura of artistic communion. At the start there's just one line: "You love like I love". A sort of manifesto of elective affinity, which became theopening of "As I Call You Down". From there on, the music began to take shape with a naturalness that surprised even its own creators. "As Lester Bangs used to say, rock 'n' roll is not having the slightest idea what you're doing": that's how Arthur sums up the spirit of spontaneity and surrender behind Fistful Of Mercy. Despite the enthusiasm, though, the results aren't quite as memorable: the formula of acoustic ballads and vocal harmonies shared, without too many surprises, by all the tracks on As I Call You Down, released on the album, inevitably calls to mind the imposing model of Crosby, Stills & Nash. But the songwriting too often suffers from incompleteness and flatness, giving in to the classic "supergroup syndrome". Ben Harper's stamp is most evident in the soulful vigor of "As I Call You Down", while Joseph Arthur lends his spiritual yearning to "Fistful Of Mercy", the song that (taking its cue from Sergio Leone's "Per un pugno di dollari") gave the band its name. To add some pop heft to the trio's initial acoustic recordings, Dhani Harrison calls on an old family friend, drummer Jim Keltner. Between highly sentimental melodies ("In Vain Or True", "Restore Me") and weaker moments ("Things Go 'Round"), it's the peppy, countrified blues of "Father's Son", with its handclaps and Harper's guitar pyrotechnics, that livens up the mood. "This album is the sound of a friendship developing," Arthur reflects. "It's the documentation of a group of friends becoming brothers." Because being friends, as "Fistful Of Mercy" suggests, means sharing the deepest desires of the heart: “Maybe it comes from where we are / Land of the thirsty / And the hungry”. Friends like that are what you need to get through life, and the closing chorus of "With Whom You Belong" sounds like a wish for everyone to one day find them. A fistful of mercy is all it takes. Also in 2010, Arthur once again pays tribute to the Rolling Stones with a cover of "Sweet Black Angel" for the French magazine "Eldorado", and takes part in the debut album of English singer Gary Go (real name Gary Baker). The unreleased "I'm In Your Life" finds a home on the compilations "1% For The Planet: The Music (Vol. 1)", while American singer-songwriter Reni Lane gives an early rendition of "Call", which would appear the following year on The Graduation Ceremony. The most significant collaboration, however, comes from the renewed partnership with Joan As A Police Woman, who on her successful “The Deep Field” gives Arthur's voice a prominent role on several tracks. I won't run away anymore   The last glimpse of a love coming to an end. It seemed to have been held between his fingers, to have grasped that secret correspondence. And instead it slips away like a shadow at first light. "Here comes the sun, watch our shadows run". Joseph Arthur's songs have always dealt with the shadows of love, but never, as on The Graduation Ceremony had the chiaroscuro felt so personal: a diary, a confession, a blank canvas on which to sketch the blue of distance. Songs that need solitude, something that hadn't happened in years for American songwriter . Not the rock 'n' roll of the Lonely Astronauts, not the choral sound of Fistful Of Mercy. A return to the solo format able to give Joseph Arthur back that inspiration which, at least since the days of Our Shadows Will Remain, seemed to have dissolved into a kind of permanent extemporaneity. The Graduation Ceremony, released at the gates of summer 2011, is an essay in the material most congenial to Arthur: the ballad in the nocturnal, trembling style of the most intimate moments of Redemption’s Son. A single sessions at Sheldon Gomberg's studios in Los Angeles, a handful of songs in acoustic dress, far from backing band and supergroups. Something remains, though, of the experience with Fistful Of Mercy: the idea of bringing in, once again, the legendary Jim Keltner on drums. The same pairing that had given rise to Come To Where I'm From. Nothing more would have been needed to erase the missteps of the recent past. But Arthur gives in to the temptation of entrusting the recordings to producer John Alagia, known for his work with names like Dave Matthews Band e John Mayer. The final result, as has happened before, inevitably ends up suffering from a few too many smoothed-over edges. Not enough, however, to betray the spirit of an album with clean, cohesive lines. Arpeggios that cradle regret, brushstrokes of strings spreading over the melodies: from the opening "Out On A Limb" Arthur immediately reveals the essence of The Graduation Ceremony. An album that favors simplicity, the bond with the singer-songwriter soul, so much so that "Horses" pushes to the brink of self-plagiarism of an old-repertoire classic like "Honey And The Moon". The romanticism becomes more defenseless in the folds of "Love Never Asks You To Lie", previewed last year in the guise of demos as a Valentine's Day gift. "This Is Still My World" unfolds amid digital flickers and keyboard contours, "Face In The Crowd" dresses itself in soft drapery thanks to Jessy Greene's violin. And even the usual recourse to falsetto, from "Horses" to "Watch Our Shadows Run", once again takes on ethereal shades. There's no shortage of songs that sat in the drawer for a long time, tributes to that genuine parallel discography built up over the years through the live recordings Arthur has posted on his official site. Such is the case with "Someone To Love", dating all the way back to 1997, and "Almost Blue" (spoiled in the chorus by a pop emphasis in the Coldplay). Time goes back even further, to the desolate Ohio landscape where Arthur spent his childhood, and the voice of guest Liz Phair accompanies the backing vocals of "Midwest" amid handclaps and electric forays: "There's nothing to do in the Midwest but dream". The end of a love is losing a part of yourself. "Homeless in my home", as Arthur sings in "Horses". His is a frank account, at times all too conversational ("Call"). "The whole album is about a long relationship", he explains. "Recording this music was cathartic and therapeutic: art is the best medicine for turning the bitterness of the heart into innocence, but accompanied by wisdom. To be innocent and wise is to be enlightened". Enlightened by a glimmer of truth that not even lovers' lies can deny: "You were as close to the truth as anything ever was", whispers "Love Never Asks You To Lie". The promise that seems betrayed is not a lie: it's a vanishing point that neither the purity of love nor its fragility can contain. A hard-won graduation ceremony, the sign of innocence regained. A few months after the convincing solo return of The Graduation Ceremony, here comes a surprise appearance on the official website of songwriter American, a new album in download free (with the option of a donation). A double album, no less. Twenty-four songs, plus a further batch of bonus tracks destined to be added in the vinyl edition. The gesture itself, from Radiohead onwards, is certainly nothing revolutionary. In Arthur's case, however, it is emblematic of a very specific philosophy: “I'm not subject to any rule or obligation to conform to any particular form,” he states firmly on Twitter. “Free Freedom,” in short, as proclaimed by the title of one of the album's tracks. But freedom alone, as we know, is not enough to make an album work. The underlying idea of the album, titled Redemption City, is simple: set to music the poems through which Arthur has always given vent to his more explicitly literary side. Poems free-form, meant to flow out as an unfiltered stream of consciousness. Poems that take the form of an urgent spoken word, backed by beat pounding and by choruses heavily marked with emphasis. The formula is not lacking in courage, but Arthur's songwriting comes out of it hopelessly weighed down. And, on an album of this length, it soon starts to wear thin. Work on the tracks, which began back in 2009, took place entirely in Arthur's studio in Brooklyn. “It's the only record I've made where I took care of everything myself,” he explains. “I played everything that makes noise, drums, bass, synths and guitars, I produced it and I mixed it.” A thoroughly solitary effort, then, one whose keyboards on “Wasted Day” and jagged electric textures on “Mother Of Exiles” evoke the wave tones of Our Shadows Will Remain. But even the best ideas (“Yer Only Job”) end up smothered by an overblown arrangement, leaving the album's more atmospheric moments out in the cold. The streets of the city of redemption are steeped in a neon night. Snapshots of metropolitan life with a flavor of Lou Reed-esque that scatter across the backdrop of “I Miss The Zoo,” electronic pulses dancing in the dark to the rhythm of “There With Me.” The faces that cross through the darkness stay out of focus, features of a dream fading before it can imprint itself on memory. “I may have a purpose/ But it's mysterious to me,” Arthur murmurs on “Fractures.” “In moments of strength or weakness/ I ask God for forgiveness and guidance/ Then I fall asleep/ And meet him somewhere along the fractures”. Redemption hides in the cracks of the city. But it's easy to lose your way, chasing freedom through this long night. Also in 2012, Arthur picks back up the thread of his more genuinely rock-oriented calling, through his involvement in a new supergroup. Alongside bassist Pearl Jam Jeff Ament and former Fastbacks drummer Richard Stuverud, the songwriter American gives life to yet another side project, christened RNDM (read “Random”). Arthur and Ament's paths actually first crossed in the late Nineties, when Arthur had opened a Three Fish concert (a band that, at the time, featured both Ament and Stuverud). Arthur later appeared on Ament's second solo album, “While My Heart Beats”, and the two had shared a stage for Pearl Jam's twentieth-anniversary festival. The idea of working together, in short, had been in the air for a while when, in April 2012, Ament decided to invite Arthur to his home in Montana, to have some fun recording a few tracks with Stuverud in his personal studio. A collaboration that began, then, with no thought of forming an actual band. And the relaxed, improvisational spirit of their sessions comes through clearly in the twelve tracks of Acts, the first album released under the RNDM moniker. Arthur writes most of the songs himself, stamping his voice on the overall tone of an album that leans more than ever into pop-rock immediacy of the U2. Among the riffs of “Modern Times” and the funky stride of “Williamsburg”, Arthur reserves his most inspired writing for the acoustic epilogue of “Cherries In The Snow”. In the city there is grace   Boogie Christ, who was he? Perhaps a prophet, perhaps a tempter. A mystic and a rocker, a saint and a sinner. Or maybe just Joseph Arthur's own reflection in the mirror. Ambition has certainly never been lacking in songwriter American. But, for chapter number ten of his torrential career, The Ballad Of Boogie Christ, Arthur decides to aim even higher: a double album richer than ever, through which he retraces the milestones of his existential journey. Not just any record, then, but a work built and chiseled over the years, with an unusual degree of deliberation for an artist as prolific and instinctive as Arthur. “It’s the album I’ve been waiting years to put out,” he states firmly. “A big production, complete with horns and brass.” So much so that The Ballad Of Boogie Christ also marks Arthur’s return to the ranks of Real World by Peter Gabriel after a decade now. The first act of the work saw the light of day in the spring of 2013, and from the very first notes the declared aim is to wrongfoot the listener, with a "Currency Of Love" that presents Arthur in the unprecedented context of Roy Orbison-style orchestral pop, marked by a performance vocal delivery more incisive than ever. “I have no real currency, but the currency of love/ I have no one to trust, but the Lord up above”, he sings, slipping into the role of the crooner. And it's precisely the words that take center stage in The Ballad Of Boogie Christ, drawing on Arthur's more distinctly poetic vein: "It all started with words and poems," he explains, "like seeds that blossomed into songs." The same writing process already used on the previous Redemption City, with a stream of consciousness barely contained within the boundaries of the songs. Musically, though, the parallel between the two albums doesn't go beyond the beat not too pronounced ones of “Saint Of Impossible Causes”: the dividing line is marked by the reinterpretation of “I Miss The Zoo”, which with its acoustic scaffolding and its solemn organ drone takes on a new depth compared to the version included on Redemption City, stringing together in the manner of Lou Reed-esque the regrets of a life spent on the wild side   The long gestation of The Ballad Of Boogie Christ gives fans a few tracks already well road-tested live over the years, starting with a pair of solid ballads in Arthur's typical style like “Still Life Honey Rose” and “Famous Friends Along The Coast”. Likewise, the record's long list of guests (from Garth Hudson to Jim Keltner, from Juliette Lewis a Joan Wasser) is the result of a series of recording sessions that essentially sum up the recent career of the songwriter American. But the personality of The Ballad Of Boogie Christ lies in the desire to expand its sounds and ambitions, in pursuit of a soul-rock canon that doesn't shy away from excess, somewhere between the shapeshifting of David Bowie and the Dylan feverish quality of “Street Legal”. A formula sealed by the final crescendo of “All The Old Heroes”, an overflowing, fabulist anthem celebrating the farewell to the idols of adolescence in a triumph of strings and choirs. Track after track, the figure of Boogie Christ begins to take on increasingly defined features: “Christ would eat pizza and cut blackjack decks”, Arthur proclaims in the song that gives the album its title. It's not a simple provocation on his part: because why shouldn't a God who agrees to mingle with human flesh also have something to do with pizza or playing cards? “Christ would be savage, but Christ would be true/ He’d say if you want him then look inside you”. Truth is something that lies dentro things, not aboveat the heart of reality. The ballad of Boogie Christ, then, is nothing but the path of this search: “It's the story of someone who could be enlightened or crazy or a mix of both”, Arthur reflects. Life is a continuous alternation of revelations and silences, of light and darkness, he seems to suggest in the folds of “I Used To Know How To Walk On Water”: always suspended between the vertigo of awareness and the nagging worm of doubt. “I could give riches to the beggars/ And give love to the one who hates”, he sings amid the scattered notes of the piano and the gleam of a trumpet, a faithful disciple of the apocryphal gospel of Nick Cave“But now I watch with awe and wonder/ Doubt has now befallen me”. All that remains is a solitary voice, like the dissolving of a stripped-bare gospel. It's the voice of Ben Harper, longtime friend and travelling companion in the Fistful Of MercyHe is entrusted with the task of gathering the words that throb behind the mask of Boogie Christ: “I am here/ And I am humble/ For I know not which way to go”. The words of someone who has left everything behind, except the humility of the question. The second act of The Ballad Of Boogie Christ, released in the autumn of 2013, begins with a defeat: a robbery gone wrong, the shattered mirage of a different life. A tale with cinematic tones, sketched over the taut, direct folk-rock of “Blue Lights In The Rear View”. This is how, after a first chapter defined by the grandeur, Arthur picks up the thread of his Boogie Christ story once again: with a leaner, tighter approach, able to offer a convincing confirmation of his renewed inspiration. The whole album plays on parallels with the first part of the work. Once again there's an acoustic reworking of an episode from Redemption’s City (“Travel As Equals”), which gains new power in this reinterpretation centered on piano and guitar. Once again there are poems free-form set to music, as shown by the wordy unspooling of “Whisper Of Whispers”. There's the memory of childhood, which in “Akron Skies” creeps in with the oblique atmosphere of certain pages by Come To Where I'm From. Above all, there's that fusion of the carnal and the spiritual that marks the hallmark of the fresco painted by the songwriter American in his double album, and which resurfaces in the provocative questions of “Maybe Yes”. Between perdition and salvation, the unwinding of memories is transfigured into a universal parable, in search of a point of truth behind disillusionment, love, betrayal, hope. “In my hopes and dreams forgiveness will be the only memory”, Arthur sings over the synthetic pulse of “House Of Your Love”, building one of his finest ballads of recent years. There are two ways to face life, Terrence Malick argued in “The Tree Of Life”: the way of nature and the way of grace. One obsessed with possession, fatally turned in on itself. The other open to reality, free from self-satisfaction. Joseph Arthur's Boogie Christ has no doubts about which to choose: “In The City There Is Grace”, the album's closing track proclaims decisively. Accompanied by the voices of Jenni Muldaur (daughter of the more famous Geoff) and soul singer C.C. White, Arthur creates a sort of triumphant folk-gospel hymn, between horns and electric flourishes. “Give away your hunger, give away your pain/ Keep with you the wonder that saves you here again”: when grace walks the streets of the city, wonder is the only way to recognize it. New York City man   At the end of 2013, Arthur loses one of his greatest points of reference: Lou Reed, who over the years had become not just a hero to him, but above all a friend. In his memory, Arthur writes an article for “American Songwriter”, which immediately gives Bill Bentley of Vanguard Records the idea of suggesting he record a Reed cover. At first, Arthur is reluctant: “It's strange to dance around death, even more so when it's the death of a legend. You never know what's appropriate and what isn't, what to share and what to keep to yourself”. Then, left alone in his Brooklyn apartment after months of touring, he starts trying to play “Coney Island Baby”, always one of his favorite Reed songs. And finally all the emptiness, pain and regret held back until that moment begin to dissolve into the music. While outside the snow piles up along the streets, Arthur stays shut in his apartment for ten days, immersing himself ever more deeply in the songbook of his old friend and mentor. In the end, instead of a single cover, he has an entire album ready, which he decides to simply title Lou. Two microphones to capture the warmth of the moment, guitar and piano weaving the fabric, the voice caressing every line as if wanting to reveal its secret: that's the whole heart of Lou. “I gave myself a rule”, Arthur explains. “No drums or electricity. Lou was electric. The only way I knew to give new life to something as full of life as Lou's songs was to approach them in a completely different way”. The life of the Big Apple's underbelly, sung by Reed in his most celebrated songs (from “Walk On The Wild Side” to “Satellite Of Love”), takes on a tone of nostalgic sweetness in Arthur's version. Making each song his own without betraying its spirit: this is the key that allows him to venture into even the less obvious corners of Reed's songbook. Tracks like “NYC Man” or “Magic And Loss” could as straight from The Ballad Of Boogie Christ (not by chance the most Lou Reed-indebted chapter in Arthur's discography), but with the dry, essential spirit usually displayed live by the songwriter American. That's why “Lou”, far beyond being a simple tribute album, proves to be one of the finest records Arthur has released in recent years. Just listen to how “Sword Of Damocles”, drained of every trace of emphasis, keeps its melodic ideas intact, transfiguring itself into a trembling parable about the approach of death. There's no better closing track, then, than the song from which it all began: “Coney Island Baby”, whispered by Arthur like a kind of urban hymn to the “glory of love”. The love that sees right through you, until it discovers who you really are. The love that survives even the tearing of goodbye. Of Arthur's next album, Days Of Surrender, only a single copy is pressed on CD in 2015. And it's sold inside his old tour van, which in the meantime had been turned into a sort of a fresco on wheels“A living artifact of my small journey across the borders of rock ’n’ roll,” he calls it. “I’ve always had the sense of being engaged in a mission. This van, for me, embodied the spirit of that mission.” But while the CD is reserved solely for the lucky buyer of the van, Arthur also comes up with some decidedly unorthodox ways to spread his new work to everyone else: on a USB stick, once again customized in his now-unmistakable painterly style, or alternatively on the tape of a good old-fashioned cassette. In short, right from its presentation it's clear that Days Of Surrender is destined to occupy an unusual place in Arthur's discography. A deliberately minor episode, conceived more as a gift to fans than as a true successor to The Ballad Of Boogie Christ. Setting aside his more ambitious productions, this time Arthur opts for minimalism, with a record made almost entirely alone and in a thoroughly homemade fashion. From the opening “Pledge Of Allegiance” – still one of the best things here – a wooden-boned drum beat props up the songs, while the guitar scatters electro-acoustic splinters along the edges. “It's almost a return to the way I used to write in the past,” Arthur reflects. “The songs are more unconscious and free: sometimes they don't quite hit the mark, but that's fine.” And that's exactly the point: the songs on Days Of Surrender are almost never fully in focus, and the project's overall coherence isn't enough to make them truly memorable. Brief sketches like “Come Back When You're Poor” and “If I Could I'd Get Out” have the charm of incompleteness, of creativity captured songwriting live. But if the yardstick is the best chapters of his catalog, this time around Arthur's appointment with greatness is postponed. In 2016, Arthur renews his partnership with Jeff Ament and Richard Stuverud under the RNDM banner. The second record credited to the side project, Ghost Riding, aims to explore new territory compared to its predecessor, but ends up sliding into a pop-rock superficiality (with heavy electronic touches) from which there's little worth salvaging. Endless mercy   Once upon a time there was a piano. A 1912 Steinway Vertegrand, noble and austere like the one that once presided over the studios of Abbey Road. For a century it belonged to the same family, in a house somewhere in Connecticut. Joseph Arthur buys it from a restorer in Brooklyn, has it brought to his studio, and saves it from the floods when Hurricane Sandy hits New York. And as soon as he starts playing it, the songs of The Family begin pouring out like a river in flood. “It's as if these stories had been waiting there for me,” he says. “Maybe they were locked inside that piano. Or maybe writing on that instrument was like a kind of liberation.” Whether it was redemption from the frustration of childhood piano lessons or the echo of ghosts hidden inside the old Steinway, one thing is certain: Arthur's muse once again finds its voice. Taking on a theme that's anything but simple to tackle: family. Or, in his own words, “the way family dynamics shape us and make us who we are.” While the piano notes define the bare bones of the songs, the sonic dressing around them leaves no empty space, between round rhythms, electric scratches, and vocal layering. All handled personally by Arthur, who for this record literally took charge of every element himself (from guitars to keyboards and drums, not to mention piano and voice, of course). Behind the mixing desk is Tchad Blake, just as was the case back in the days of Redemption’s Son, but the record's full-bodied sound brings to mind more the atmospheres of Our Shadows Will Remain. With the icon of Lou Reed always firmly in view (see the opening “The Family”), the songwriter American stamps his mark on an album with a compact structure, where the songs shift mostly through details (from the pop leanings of the single “Machines Of War” to the brisker pace of “Hold On Jerry”, by way of the heightened beat synths in “When I Look At You”). Arthur's family album has a choral ambition, in the manner of the saga told by Ben Cooper in his Radical Face trilogy, “The Family Tree”. “There's nothing on this record that comes from passing judgment on others,” he explains. “It's made of stories told by different voices and mysterious timeframes, which I hope can resonate with any family, anywhere.” It's thanks to a trio of ballads, however, that The Family connects back to the most intense moments of Arthur's discography: "You Wear Me Out" is the first song written for the album, the catalyst around which the whole project took shape; "Wishing Well" is an anthem to the dreams and hopes of adolescence, abandoned like coins at the bottom of a shopping mall's wishing well; "You Keep Hanging On" is a love letter written in the ink of everyday toil, unfolding over an acoustic weave propped up by percussion. "All happy families resemble one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", reads the quote from "Anna Karenina" that Arthur places at the start of the record. The Family is the family you'd only want to flee, as in "They Called Him Lightning", and at the same time the family always ready to welcome you back into its embrace ("Endless mercy/ Hold me now", pleads the litany at the close of " title track"). Above all, it's the place where sacrifice reveals itself as the only way to love fully: "You say love is a church and a crucifix/ It will kill us in time after saving us", Arthur reflects in "You Keep Hanging On", and perhaps that's precisely the heart of the matter. "Love and loss. Dysfunction and surrender. Hopelessness and violence. And what sometimes allows us to transcend all of that. Letting the things that at some point broke us down become the very things we can draw our strength from."   In 2019, with Come Back World, Arthur reaffirms all his craft as a songwriter, surprising those who had lost track of him along the way and reassuring those who had followed him more or less faithfully all along. Amid the familiar arpeggios of the title track and the vaguely gospel choirs of "I'll Be Around", through the pop vibrations of "Streetcar" and "Tomorrow Today", Come Back World sounds like a new compendium of Arthur's most classic songwriting, almost a more extroverted and optimistic version of Days Of Surrender. What's truly memorable, though, is perhaps only the umpteenth ode to the Big Apple that unwinds between the harmonica and guitar embroidery of "Mayor Of The Lower Eastside". The album presents itself as a new beginning, a restart full of hope. And yet, paradoxically, it is destined to mark the end of a long chapter in Arthur's career.   For a new Arthur album we'll have to wait until 2026: from songwriter hyper-prolific to a genuine ghost, the step can be shorter than one might think. Sometimes, leaving the spotlight seems the same as disappearing. For Arthur, the spotlight goes out with the 2020 pandemic: a new love, fatherhood, the move to Arizona, spiritual searching… and a kind of bizarre no-vax anthem titled "Stop The Shot", which earns him a gradual ostracism from the record industry. No more albums, no more tours. But he never stops writing songs. Peter Buck of the R.E.M. is one of the few who stay close to him even in difficult times: together they release two albums under the name "Arthur Buck". Until Arthur announces a new trilogy: "You're Not A Ghost Anymore" (a title already emblematic in itself), which presents, in its first chapter, a decidedly challenging central theme: faith.   "It's a three-part work written over six years, through collapse, recovery and return," Arthur explains. "These songs trace the long arc from disorientation to incarnation, from losing the thread to picking it back up with both hands. It's an album about staying when disappearing would be easier. About choosing presence over numbness. About returning to the body, to the voice and to the world". Above all, You're Not A Ghost Anymore: Faith is the testimony of a conversion. A radical conversion, in the manner of Dylan-esquethe fight against sin, the redemption of the cross, the surprise of grace. More "Saved" than "Slow Train Coming", to keep up the comparison, but in this case without any "gospel turn". A self-sufficient, essential production – guitars, keyboards and drum machine puts the focus on Arthur's magnetic voice and the backbone of the songs: songs that are more direct and explicit than ever in conveying their evangelical message (you can tell just from titles like "Hey Satan", "He Died" or "Holy Spirit"...). What the apostolate of Faithlacks, however, is the musical depth of the best pages in Arthur's discography.   The Desert Fathers sketch out a dance on the pop melody of "Demons" ("The battleground of this war is in our heads/ The Devil tricks us with what we think we need"), Reinhold Niebuhr inspires the quick-hitting chorus of "One Life" with its famous "Serenity Prayer" (“Grant us the peace to accept what we can’t change/ And the courage to change what we can/ The wisdom to know the difference”). Out of focus when chasing funk suggestions ("Bear Your Own Cross") or when trying to measure up to flow di Redemption City ("Thank You Is My Mantra"), Arthur once again finds his most congenial dimension when the shadows prevail: the reflection in slow motion of “In The Shadow Of The Cross” and especially “No Weapon,” a return to his roots that urges us to break the spiral of hatred and resentment. “No weapon they’ve used against you will matter/ No weapon formed against you will prosper,” Arthur announces in his most prophetic tone: because in the battle between light and darkness, one can only enter unarmed.   Joseph Arthur is an eclectic artist and a captivating performers, capable of condensing the density of experience into the throbbing image of a line of verse or the clotted color of a brushstroke. His greatest weakness is the temptation to let himself be swept away by a wave of frenetic creativity: but when substance has prevailed over instinct, as in his masterpiece Come To Where I'm From, he has given shape, like few others songwriter of the new millennium, to the cry of redemption that rises from the depths of the soul. His remains an invitation that loses none of its allure: as and discover the place I belong to.