If you were ever called upon to argue the case for popular music as art, a Josh Joplin Group album would make a solid Exhibit A.
Joplin started out more than 30 years ago as an aspiring folksinger and teenaged busker, graduated to solo coffeehouse gigs, assembled a trio, and made a series of indie albums in the ’90s. A major break came when fellow Atlanta singer-songwriter Shawn Mullins—in the process of breaking nationally himself—agreed to produce and release Joplin’s 1999 album Useful Music on his SMG label. Whereupon Artemis Records swooped in to repackage and reissue Useful Music with a sparkling new track produced by the Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison: “Camera One.”
“Camera One” became the first independent single in the history of the AAA chart to hit #1, sending Joplin and group on a rocket ride around the world and onto Letterman. However, when Useful Music’s follow-up, the witty Elvis Costello-influenced The Future That Was, failed to deliver a hit single, a familiar story played out: Artemis dropped them, and the Group broke up.
That was hardly the end of the story, of course, because songwriters who’ve earned that label have this funny habit: they keep writing songs. Working with various configurations of friends, collaborators, and labels, Joplin would release four more albums over the next 20-plus years: Jaywalker (2005), Among The Oak & Ash (2009), The Devil Ship (2013) and Figure Drawing (2023).
Still, his primary focus across those two decades was on fatherhood. With his daughter Lomie now a college graduate, Joplin returns to music full force on GpYr, delivering a rangy and powerful set of typically artful songs with support from a number of familiar faces from Useful Music / The Future That Was days (Geoff Melkonian, Allen Broyles, Eric Taylor, Ani Cordero), joined by longtime friends and supporters like Grammy-winning producer Lorenzo Wolff (Taylor Swift), guitarist Wes Langlois, and, for one track, Lomie herself.
GpYr opens strong with the punch of “Colored Copies,” whose hard-strummed verses charge ahead to this exuberant chorus: “And if you insist / How can I resist? / Love is like nothing else is.” The latter being the first in a series of mantra-like observations embedded in these songs, reminders to self and others of what’s really important in life. It’s an evolution that we hopefully all go through over time, that acquisition of perspective.
The rambunctious breakup song “That’s It! You Ghosted Me,” besides its witty title, features another mantra: “When it hurts you, it hurts me too,” a chorus that feels almost like an invocation. Then “One More Someone” offers a poignant, wistful tune directed to “One more someone I’m gonna miss.” It’s an elegy of sorts, about the crossroads you sometimes find yourself reaching in life when you’ve been really close to someone, but your paths are about to diverge.
The album’s first single “Goodbye Berlin” is a driving number harnessing the visceral thrill of first experiencing that unique city, a 21st century nexus for modern art of all kinds. In places this wonderfully thrummy rocker calls back to “Camera One” in its sense of space and drama and urgency. If that wasn’t enough, Joplin anchors the chorus on this brilliant rhyme: “Arrivals, departures / It doesn’t matter whose heart hurts.”
In our recent interview, Joplin admitted that even he isn’t entirely sure what “I’m With Gorillas” is about, but it feels both impressionistic and specific in the way it evokes regret and loneliness. The sense of a clever, restless artist at work is only furthered by “Upstate,” a progressive pop song that opens in waltz time with an arrangement that sounds like The Doors, before a sax comes in at the second chorus, blowing open a bridge that abruptly shifts into a new gear for an extended Motown-fantasia outro, led by a chant of this tune’s piercing mantra: “Love doesn’t ever look down.”
The spoke-sung poem “The Ice Age Is Over” has a sort of hypnotic, theatrical quality to it that’s accented by reverbed guitar and the outro’s crashing cymbals and luminous harmony vocals. The final note has barely faded when “Before The Light Takes Us” offers a jolt of adrenalin with its pushing beat and twin guitars, one played by Lomie, who also doubles Josh’s chorus vocals. It’s a wailing siren of a song that warns “There’s no one here that I can trust.”
The steady, earnest “Seely’s Song” offers perhaps the clearest evidence of the unfinished musical that was the original source for a number of these songs (Seely being a character name that appears in several tracks). It features a brain-teaser of a mantra (“The more that we are, we’re not”) as well as a bridge that turns the song inside out, soaring through a silvery, lush dreamworld before circling back for a reprise.
“Predator And Prey” is a gentle anthem to resilience, a number that feels like it addresses the fraught moment that’s upon us in America, closing out the album with this simple affirmation: “We are the ones, the ones who survive.”
Joplin’s music has always had a distinctive character: literate and quirky, witty and earnest, dark and light, and frequently both unconventional and respectful toward its own stylistic roots. All of which feels like it makes Josh Joplin’s voice an important one to have back in the mix in this particular moment. As it charms with melody and mantras, GpYr urges us to go all in on the only thing that can really save us in the end: our connections with each other.