Features

Josh Joplin: The Daily Vault Interview

by Jason Warburg

“This is what I am. This is what I do,” says Josh Joplin of his return to making new music after a period that saw him focusing more of his time and energy on parenting and producing independent films.

As a teenager, aspiring folk singer Joplin played hundreds of coffeehouse gigs, and that earnest commitment to his art carries through today, but like all of us, he’s been through some things along the way. A late-’80s wander across America ended in Atlanta, from which base Joplin issued half a dozen indie albums of cerebral folk-rock, first as a solo singer-songwriter and then as frontman for the Josh Joplin Band, featuring Geoff Melkonian on bass and Jason Buecker on drums. In time the trio added Allen Broyles on keys, and not long after that fellow Atlanta singer-songwriter Shawn Mullins signed the band to his house label SMG and produced the original 1999 version of the band’s album Useful Music.

Useful Music then caught the ear of Artemis Records, home to the likes of the Pretenders and Warren Zevon, which would reissue it 20 months later with one new and a couple of rerecorded tracks. Produced by Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads, the new track “Camera One” would become the first song issued by an independent label ever to hit #1 on the AAA chart. The song sent the band—rechristened the Josh Joplin Group and now featuring Eric Taylor on drums and Deeds Davis on lead guitar—around the world, while also setting commercial expectations high for its follow-up.

The Future That Was (2002) was in fact a brilliant follow-up, one of the finer albums to slip through the mainstream’s copious cracks that year, but once its singles failed to gain traction at radio, the outcome was the oldest tale in the rock’n’roll storybook: Artemis dropped the band and they broke up. Joplin returned in 2005 with the solo album Jaywalker before reorienting his priorities for much of the ensuing decade and a half.

An interesting adventure during this period began in 2009 when he teamed with alt-country singer-songwriter Garrison Starr and the Nashville-based rhythm section of Brian Harrison (bass/production) and Bryan Owings (drums) to make haunting, traditionalist country-folk under the moniker Among The Oak & Ash. That group issued two albums, Among The Oak & Ash (2009) and The Devil Ship (2013), and co-producers Joplin and Harrison had begun work on a third (A Skeptic’s Gospel) when Harrison died suddenly and the project was abandoned. A number of those songs would resurface a decade later on Joplin’s 2023 album Figure Drawing.

The new album GpYr (“Gap Year”) represents a full return to and embrace of the Josh Joplin Group aesthetic, which features a shifting collective of players including a number of familiar faces from Useful Music / The Future That Was days (Geoff Melkonian, Allen Broyles, Eric Taylor, Ani Cordero) as well as many other friends and collaborators, most notably Grammy-winning producer Lorenzo Wolff (Taylor Swift), longtime guitarist Wes Langlois, and Joplin’s daughter Lomie, who plays and sings on one track. The album will be released on April 4 on NarrowMoat/Missing Piece Records.

“Love is the glue that holds these songs together,” said Joplin during an in-depth interview conducted two days after the presidential inauguration, just one indelible moment in a wide-ranging conversation that encompassed everything from music as a form of transcendence, to parallel parking in New York City, to the brilliance of noted Josh Joplin soundalike Michael Stipe. Enjoy the ride—we sure did.


THE DAILY VAULT: A new Josh Joplin Group album is something fans have been dreaming of for a long time. What made this feel like the right moment for you to revisit the Group?

JOSH JOPLIN: In a sense the Group has never not been present; they’ve been on every album I’ve released to some degree. The Group right now is a manifestation of all the people that have always helped me, including members from the original Group—Geoff Melkonian and Allen Broyles and Eric Taylor—as well as people like Wes Langlois who I’ve played with for years and years. I have a kinship with folks I’ve been playing with for a really long time—there’s a certain shorthand you share. Lorenzo Wolf, who co-produced the new album with me, has been a friend for a long time as well, and it was really helpful to have the ability to communicate what things were so easily, especially after taking some time off from playing music professionally.

What was the point of origin for this set of songs? And how did they develop?

Many of these are songs that I first worked on when I was 19 or 20, that I’ve reimagined. At that time in my life, I was playing around and trying to do something different. I had been writing a story—either a musical or a play—and some of these songs were making their way into it. And I had people including Lorenzo, who was working with me, say “You know, in a musical, your songs have to propel the story.” And some of these songs don’t do that.

Eventually Lorenzo and I had a conversation and he said “We should just record these songs, because they’re standalones and they might do what they need to in terms of telling a story on an album.” And for me, there is a narrative component from the beginning of the record to the end. I like to say it’s like a concept album or a photo album. So that’s the genesis of it.

Could you expand on that idea of a concept album or photo album? Do the songs feel more like chapters in a story, or vignettes? How do you see them?

It definitely feels like there’s a set of characters, but I don’t have a name for all of them, except for Seely. They’re songs about some parts of my formative years and how, with the eyes of age, you can look back and really feel the arc of an event or a chapter in your life. There’s a thread in the songs that seems to be, for me at least, about liberation and acceptance and thriving.

In the 2000s, I gave up on touring—I never gave up on songwriting, but I gave up on touring and looked at different ways to make a living in music. And even though I did take time off from playing music professionally, my identity is wrapped up in being a musician. For the first few years it was a struggle, and I started to make excuses to people who asked what I did for a living. It almost felt like going backwards to times earlier in my life where I might have done the same thing, because I hadn’t found out what I am yet.

There was a connection between those feelings and making this record. Calling the record GpYr is about recognizing that time is this flexible and inflexible body and we are all behind us and in front of us, in the future and in the past and in our present, and I think we can only figure ourselves out, in some ways, in retrospect. I’ve never been more who I am than right now, and I think that’s the gift of getting older, of just recognizing, “Oh, this is what I am. This is what I do.”

Though I took a lot of time off, I never stopped writing songs, so returning to it and making this record was rather cathartic, especially doing it the way we did it. That’s another reason why I wanted as many of my friends and bandmates on there as wanted to participate in it.

What are the most meaningful songs on the album for you?

Probably “One More Someone” and “The Ice Age Is Over.” I always tend to be a little bit more attached to the slower and more dirge-y songs. I have a lot of love for “Before The Light Takes Us,” both for the song itself, and because my daughter Lomie joined me on that tune and sang and played the lead guitar. That was a full circle moment: here I am returning to music and here she is beginning in music. That was really special for me. It was amazing that she was willing to participate at all, and to have her be a partner in the way she was, was really, really nice.

Lomie really wants to do it—to be a musician—and it takes a lot of fortitude to want to actually go out and make your presence known to an audience. I’ve tried to be respectful of her having her journey be her own; I don’t want to overstep my role. When she was learning how to play guitar, I could have said “Oh, you might want to improve your G chord this way, instead,” but I remember all of my discoveries very well. There was all of this sensation that belonged to each discovery I made and I didn’t want to take anything away for her. I would just say “If you like this, you might like this.” And then a couple of months later, finding that she’s discovered the Talking Heads, or some other artist, was just fun, because it allowed her to have that moment of discovery.

I tried to walk a line; I’m sure I’ve crossed it several times. One of them was when I said “I’d love for you to participate [in this album]—but you don’t need to. If you want to, this is the song. And you know I can’t play lead guitar, and you can, so that would be amazing.” And she was really great, and happy to be asked, and that meant a lot to me.

Let’s dig into the songwriting on GpYr some more. One thing I noticed is the way certain lines almost feel like they’re mantras, observations that are repeated that feel both simple and profound. To be specific, in “Colored Copies: “Love is like nothing else is.” In “That’s It, You Ghosted Me”: “When it hurts you, it hurts me too.” In “Upstate”: “Love doesn’t ever look down.” Please talk about those and your approach to writing lyrics.

I love that you unlocked that. Those are a little bit of what I’ve lived by—and also, “The more that you are, you’re not” [from “Seely’s Song”]. That for me really is so true—the more that I think that I’m one thing, I’m likely not that thing, and the more that people see me as that one thing, I’m probably not that.

As a songwriter, I definitely come from the school of “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.” I also tend to have an image or an idea that I want to get across, and for me it tends to be about transcendence, but not just spiritual or religious… it’s none of those things and all of those things. Love is the glue that holds these songs together. For some of my favorite thinkers and writers, love is so profound and primal and necessary. At the end of the day, love is absolutely paramount for our survival.

It was for me. I left home when I was 16 and was in an adult world. I had adults who loved me, but I also found adults who loved me as well as other people my age. And that kind of necessary support at such a young age had a tremendous effect on me.

It also had a tremendous effect on my songwriting, which I’m a lot more careful about than I used to be. It used to be that if something just felt right for the cadence, I might just leave it. It was more visceral. I think a lot more now when I’m writing than I used to. I’m not Bob Dylan, who can write for 15 minutes and come up with “Blowin’ In The Wind.” I’m more Leonard Cohen, who takes 15 years to write “Hallelujah.” [laughter] I used to say I’m more of a song editor than a writer.

I’ve had so many conversations with musicians where transcendence enters the conversation as part of the goal.

I think that’s part of the attraction for musicians; it’s what bonds us to what we do. It’s like the relationship a chef might have with food. I think chefs and musicians have a lot in common that way because we have this sense of a time in our life when we had that first emotional bond with the thing that was eaten or the thing that was made by Grandma, or the thing that was written or the thing you heard on the radio. That is all transcendence. Those things can bring you right back to your childhood, or your wedding night, or whatever it is. It’s like time travel! And I think that’s why musicians are so stuck on it, because they’re constantly rediscovering and reliving that emotional connection to a memory.

One of the best tips I picked up along my own path as a writer is that the biggest sense triggers for memory are smell and sound.

There you go, exactly. I also feel like this time around I felt more liberated than ever to just say the things on my mind. As careful as I feel like I’ve become as a songwriter, that care is also a liberation of saying things more as I’d want them to be said or I feel them to be, and not holding back or being self-conscious.

To get back to the songs that I really connect to, “One More Someone” or “The Ice Age Is Over” and actually “Colored Copies” too, because it was the first of these songs that made me think, Oh, this feels like a newer place for me.

Let’s talk about “Colored Copies,” which opens the album. There’s always a moment when you listen to an album for the first time and sort of gauge where the artist is, because those first 60 seconds tell you something. “Colored Copies” comes charging out of the gate with a sense of urgency, and I’m curious if the arrangement went through an evolution before ending up there.

It didn’t go through too much of an evolution. That was one of the songs that came fast, more of a “grab it out of the air” kind of song. It was more stream-of-consciousness than anything, and I was trying not to let myself get in the way of that one and let it go where it was going. I remember finding the melody and then the song just sort of took shape. I did want to have some image of preparing for a journey and that one hit that note for me. At the same time, I don’t know what it’s entirely about. [laughter] It just sort of flowed through me.

That’s the beauty of a song, that everyone can interpret it through their own filter.

It’s true—that’s another aspect of songwriting I absolutely love.

The single “Goodbye Berlin” has the urgency of an anthem, but the lyrics have a dreamy, almost surreal quality. I wondered if you could talk about the song and its inspiration.

It’s a love song to Berlin. I love that city and I loved my experience in that city. My first trip there was when I was dating my future wife and there was a lot of energy and excitement about experiencing this new place that had always felt distant and kind of foreboding. You and I both grew up when there was still a Cold War and Berlin was in the heart of that, and Berlin and the German people were always seen in the light of World War II and the Holocaust. And then you saw the Berlin Wall coming down and all that joy and celebration. There aren’t many examples in recorded history of the kind of jubilation we saw with the wall coming down.

I’ve been to Germany enough now to know that exuberance is not always on display from your everyday German. And when I was there, there was this dynamic of being in love with my girlfriend and wanting to being home with her, while also being in a city that I had fallen madly in love with and never wanted to leave. I think it was extra powerful because Berlin was a place that on some level, I feared might not be a safe place for me. And then to feel that it embraced me so completely… It was the strongest feeling I’ve ever had about a new place and I sensed “This place isn’t over for me.”

Nice. Now, “I’m With Gorillas”—a great title and another song that feels both impressionistic and very specific in the way it evokes regret and loneliness. Two questions. How do you do that? [laughter] And would you like to explain what you think the song is about, or would you rather leave us to reach our own conclusions?

I don’t know entirely what it’s about, but “Gorillas” is kind of an ode to shyness and to being a bit of a wallflower. I have one friend in particular who was always so far ahead, who knew where underground parties were going to be and what the next big thing was, and I was never that kid. I was barely holding on to pop culture in the moment that I was living in it, you know? And they were already into the next thing. It was also just being a bit nerdy while other kids were experimenting, and being lonely in a room full of people—I excel at that.

You're talking my language. [laughter] I love the way “Upstate” feels almost like a progressive pop song with three distinct segments. To me, the arrangement and the sax in the second and third parts almost have a Motown feel, which kind of felt like new musical territory for you.

Probably. Much of what I’ve been doing in writing is trying not to overthink it, changing time signatures and so on, but that happens in that song; it goes from a waltz to a 4/4 ending. It’s really a nod to “Young Americans” and Bowie and his love for Motown—and also my love for Motown.

Sax is something I probably would have never experimented with coming up in the ’80s, when sax was everywhere and Wham! had such a huge moment with “Careless Whisper.” I think I felt like at the time, as much as I loved Bowie and sax, the horn sound of Stax and Motown felt so unto itself and like it didn’t suit me.

But now it suits me fine! Plus, I wanted to invite all of my friends to participate, and that’s what I consider the Group to be, now. There’s a core Josh Joplin Group who have played more or less on every record, while the rest of the players may change from album to album. This time we added Kevin Joaquin Garcia, who plays drums on the record and is an amazing player and also an amazing human being. I’ve always wanted to play with him, so he’s new to the palette, if you will. And I’ve known Randy Leago, who plays the sax on GpYr, forever.

It feels to me like all I’m doing is expanding—not that anybody’s empowered me to make them a part of the Group, but they just become a part of it as far as I’m concerned. The Group live will be several of those musicians, including Wes Langlois, who’s been playing live with me for a long, long time, and Geoff Melkonian or maybe somebody else who’s played with me for a long time, like Lorenzo, on bass.

Watching the news this week [our conversation took place two days after the inauguration], I looked at the lyrics to “Predator And Prey” and thought it might be an allegory for what’s going on in the country right now.

Yeah. I think it was.

It also has the mantra “We are the ones / The ones who survive.” What are you hoping listeners take from this song in this moment?

That’s one that I felt like was going back to my folk singer protest role, when I would allow myself to speak freely about how I felt. I want people to understand that it’s on us to love one another. We’re not going to get that from anyone else and it’s going to become far more apparent as this country goes deeper and deeper into an oligarchy, if that’s where it’s headed, or into a kind of quasi-Christofascist direction. We’re going to have to rely on one another and we’re going to have to recognize that we’ve gone too far and our corruption is going to finally catch up to us.

We have to have that capacity for empathy, even with people we disagree with. I have tremendous empathy for the people I disagree with. I’m not a troll and I don’t want to be one. I want to be somebody that can show appreciation for where people are coming from, but also disagree with those people. And sometimes, I’m going to realize that some of our disagreements are so fundamental that we’re going to have a hard time getting to a place where we can “agree to disagree.”

The place we’re heading right now doesn’t feel entirely American. It feels like a place where the wealthy are getting what they want, while a population that’s overwhelmingly working hard is being squeezed medically, financially and with their housing. And it’s not sustainable. You cannot have this many wealthy people and this gap between the wealthy and the poor, and think that this is going to be a healthy place to live. And what we’ve done is to amplify that and celebrate it, and that will be at our peril.

Having said that, I’m hoping that we thrive nonetheless. I’m an optimist to the nth degree, I really am, I just can’t help myself, even though there are moments where it’s tough to go to that well.

I feel that every day. On a happier note: what are your plans for touring the new album?

The idea is to go out and play these songs rock’n’roll old school with my electric guitar. I’m happy to pick up the acoustic as well, but electric guitar, bass and drums, with Wes on guitar, too, and really go back to my roots as a rock musician. And have the ability to look over my shoulder and have a bunch of people that I love playing with me and say “Yeah!”

Some of the guys will join me from the original version of the Josh Joplin Group and some people will be from other versions, when it’s necessary for us to do something slightly different. I’m never uncomfortable doing something that’s more solo/acoustic or a little bit more broken down, but if I had my druthers, I’d want to play this record loud.

Let’s turn back the dial to those teenage years for a minute. You started out as a folksinger and fan of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. And I’ve got to know, have you seen the new Dylan film, A Complete Unknown? And what did you think?

I did see the new Dylan film and had a great conversation about it with my friend John Keegan. John is a student of film and he and I came to different conclusions. We both thought the film was about the desire for people to have ownership not only of the art, but the artists themselves, and to have some way of making that ownership personal, so that it served their personal needs or ambition in some way.

John felt that was achieved in the movie, but I didn’t. I wanted it to be something to that effect, but I felt like it went into a lot of music biography movie tropes. I met Pete Seeger a couple of times, and had some real experiences with him, and I know that Pete probably did want Bob to lead a new generation of young people in an idealistic, Woody Guthrie sort of political direction. I felt like Ed Norton got Pete Seeger just right.

But the Johnny Cash piece was really hard for me to watch. My friend John thinks that I just know too much about the real story, and that if I didn’t, I probably would have caught on to the story they were telling. That could be true.

Anyway, we had a really nice conversation about it, and it’s funny because at the end John said the only thing he didn’t believe is that Pete Seeger was folding chairs after the Newport Folk Festival.  And I said “No, actually, that, they got right! That is something Pete Seeger definitely would have been doing.” Because Seeger, although he didn’t necessarily want to be hugged and wasn’t a warm and fuzzy person, he definitely never saw himself as being above anybody else. He always put the work in.

What did you think of it?

With Dylan, it’s one of those situations where I totally respect his work and what he represents and the quality of his writing—I just don’t enjoy his music all that much. That said, I thought the performances in the film were uniformly terrific. And I love that, for whatever tropes they did fall into, they didn’t fall into sanitizing Dylan. I think at least twice, other characters say to him, “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.” And in the movie, he is. He’s a brilliant asshole.

I agree. They never tried to sanitize him, and I loved the whole idea that he just rides off into the sunset as kind of an asshole.

That reminds me to ask: Josh Joplin is a stage name. What inspired you to adopt that name?

[laughter] Well, it’s really silly. Way back in the beginning, I went to an open mic and I was in line to have my name announced and my given name is Josh Blum. And when my turn came around and they said “Okay, next up is singer-songwriter Josh Blum,” it just felt like it had no reverb, no pizzazz. It just landed with a thud and I wanted to make it more musical.

So I went to my friend and said I wanted to come up with a stage name. And I tried out two on him: Josh Nixon or Josh Joffee. At the time I was dating a girl I was completely obsessed with whose last name was Joffee. And my friend says, “So you’re going to take your girlfriend’s last name as your stage name. That is the most ridiculous, desperate thing I’ve ever heard.” [laughter] So he talked me out of Josh Joffee. He thought Josh Nixon was okay, but that I could do better. And that was the moment when I said, “What about Josh Joplin?” And he said “The alliteration, that’s cool. And it’ll make people wonder if you’re related to Janis… I think that’s the one.”

I changed my name at 16 and I’ve been Joplin for a really long time. I also thought maybe that was something you had to do to be in show business. It wasn’t Dylan-inspired, per se—it was just that Blum has one syllable and Joplin has two, and seemed a little more dashing.

And there’s Janis and also Scott Joplin, if you go back farther. It’s a name with a good musical pedigree.

Yeah, exactly.

[At this point in our Zoom chat I showed Josh my copy of the “Camera One” CD single in advance of asking a question about the song. He jumped right in with an explanation of the single’s cover photo, a close shot of him behind the wheel of a car, looking over his shoulder as he backs up.]

[laughing] I love that picture because I’m parallel parking in Chinatown, in New York City, in a big old 1960s American-made boat. I was so proud of myself because the photographer couldn’t get it into the parking space. That picture is not staged, it’s really, truly me parallel parking!

Well done! So: Useful Music had two lives, coming out originally on Shawn Mullins’ label SMG and then getting picked up by Artemis and being partially re-recorded. What was that experience like, of having an album out there and then reworking and reissuing it? How did that feel?

The feeling that sticks out to me for that record is twofold. One, I know now with great clarity just how difficult it was for Shawn to leave all that was happening in his life at that point, around his big hit song “Lullaby,” and say to his people “Hey, I’m going to take a week off and go make a record with someone you’ve never heard of, because I promised I would.” It’s just so remarkable and meaningful to me that he took that time and dedicated that much energy and talent to my life. Knowing what I know now, having not even achieved the kind of hit status that he did, how much pressure there was on him to stay focused on promoting his own record. To put all of that aside to help me, that’s incredible. If he and I never spoke again, he would be endlessly appreciated by me just for having kept that promise and doing something that he really had no business doing.

The other great experiences with that record were making a record I was proud of with my friends, and meeting Jerry Harrison. He was so kind and just brilliant. The hard part was, when Artemis signed us, to accept that the record wasn’t done. Artemis is a legendary record label, and I’m really proud that I was on a label that had, you know, Pretenders and J Mascis and the Baha Men and Warren Zevon and so many fantastic artists. But they wanted to put “Camera One” on it because [Artemis executive] Daniel Glass had heard it live.

If I were to do it all over again, I would try to talk everybody into just waiting on “Camera One” and letting it be on the next record so that we could get down to business. But who knows? Maybe there wouldn’t have been a second record without “Camera One.”

I have a lot of good feelings about the song. One of my very good friends, Ray Di Pietro, was the promoter who promoted that record at radio; he’s now a photographer and I’m really proud of him because he’s dedicated his second chapter of his life to art and to taking photographs in Nashville. Ray and I share this experience of him being on one side of that song and me being on the other side of it.

I’m really hoping one day Ray and I will write a book together. If I had made it big, the story of how we did it would be sort of legendary. We went around to every single office in every single state, along with Daniel Glass from Artemis, and sat down and played the song for people. We did that over and over and that’s just not how the business works anymore. I feel like maybe I was the final chapter of those kinds of stories, because shortly after “Camera One,” there’s Napster and a whole other evolution as music travels from the radio onto the Internet. It will never happen that way again, and I’m immensely honored that I was able to have this wild experience that so many of my fellow travelers had before me.

I want to read that book.

Yeah, alright. I’ve got to convince Ray to write it with me. I’ll let him know we have at least one buyer. [laughter]

Absolutely. I wanted to ask specifically about “Camera One.” It’s one out of maybe a hundred songs that you’ve written, recorded and released in your career. But for quite a few people out in the world, it’s the four minutes of music that defines your art in their mind. And it’s a song that, as you said, changed your life. How did you feel about the song when you wrote it, and how do you feel about it now, 25 years later?

It’s not a static feeling, it’s changed of course. But I’ve never resented being a “one-hit wonder.” I know where I am in the world. Globally, most people who have heard my music, heard it on aisle nine while they were shopping for groceries. And then there are folks who heard it on the radio, or as a video on VH1.

For me when I wrote it, it was one of those songs that arrived in a rush. Those songs tend to have energy attached to them, a different kind of excitement. I get excited every time I finish a song, but the ones that come fast, you just want to play over and over again. The ones that you’ve worked on for a long time and really chiseled away at, it’s almost like, “If I don’t ever play this again, at least I’m glad I finished it….” It has a very different kind of effect.

I think the hardest point in my relationship with “Camera One” was the exhaustion I felt while we were out there working it. And it never totally crossed over [to pop radio], which I can understand; it was a very strange song for the time. This was pre-Coldplay, but not by very much. There weren’t a lot of bands doing a melodic sort of Brit-pop or pop-rock at that time. I was in the company of a lot of boy bands, and then Limp Bizkit and Korn, and a few women, like Nelly Furtado. And then there was this more intimate singer-songwriter thing, too. It was an odd little tune to be out there in that world.

With the benefit of 25 years’ perspective, what I think is “Boy, I’m glad that happened to me. That was great.” I do realize that it’s not always easy for artists to have that relationship with one song and I’ve met some of those people and I really do understand that it’s not easy to feel like, “Well, you like this (my hit song), so why don’t you like this (the rest of my music)?” The experience I had with “Camera One” doesn’t affect me in the same way. I just feel really, really honored that people responded to it and got it. I say to audiences all the time how lucky I am to have been able to get on the back of a song and have it take me around the world several times and allow me to be able to do this for as long as I have.

Like many music writers, but maybe not enough music purchasers, I loved the follow-up to Useful Music, The Future That Was, I wanted to ask, first, what are your thoughts on it now? And do you have any stories about recording at Adam Schlesinger and James Iha’s studio?

Thanks for asking about that one. I didn’t know what was going on in the background at Artemis at the time when we came to The Future That Was, but I think I have more clarity on it now. We wanted to go back to Jerry Harrison to make that record, but for some reason it didn’t work—maybe it was timing or maybe it was money, I don’t know. The next person we thought to approach was Adam [Schlesinger, of Fountains Of Wayne]. Adam was so awesome, I loved him, and he had me come to the studio multiple times to play the songs for him and then record and talk about the songs with him. We were gathering steam.

And this is the part where I’m speculating a little bit, but if I’m wrong someone will correct the record. I think that at that moment, Artemis may not have had the money to say “Okay, do a full-on production.” Or maybe Adam said, “I need to focus on Fountains Of Wayne.” At that time they were working on Welcome Interstate Managers and he was also doing music for Crank Yankers on Comedy Central. Who knows? It might have been a combination of both.

In the end the album came together in a different way and it was great. I approached my friend Rob Gal, who had done records in Atlanta and who I had done a lot of recording with before, and we worked tremendously well together. I hope to release a lot of the demos and recordings we made for The Future That Was when the 25th anniversary edition comes out in the fall. It just felt natural to ask Rob if he wanted to come to New York for a couple of weeks and make a record with us. He came through and it worked; he brought an engineer, John Holbrook, and then Rudyard Lee Cullers, who was Adam’s engineer, assisted.

It's interesting because when The Future That Was came out, Artemis didn’t seem to have enough steam in their engine anymore to do what they wanted to do, but they were also still beholden to what people were doing at that time in the record business. Personally, I would never have hired people to do special mixes; we knew we weren’t Maroon 5 or John Mayer. But those weren’t my decisions to make, and that’s okay.

I really, really love that record. I was just talking with Rob about it, and he said “I think we set forth to express all of your influences on that record. We captured your love of post-punk and Elvis Costello and garage rock.” And he’s right. I’m glad you liked it!

Over the next decade you released the solo album Jaywalker [Yep Roc, 2005] and two albums with Among The Oak & Ash [Verve, 2009, 2013]. Please walk us through that period.

The story of Jaywalker is that Dan Zanes [of the Del Fuegos] was my neighbor and he used to play for kids literally on the stoop in front of his brownstone in Brooklyn. It looked like Sesame Street, and that reminded me so much of the music that I loved. I came up as a busker, singing on the street, and for me there was something incredibly liberating about seeing Dan do that, and then finding out that he wasn’t just this funny, wonderful neighbor that I had, he was Dan Zanes, this rock star. At that time he was putting together albums of children’s music, great records, and the songs he was choosing were folk songs.

Jaywalker was a very spontaneous, “Let’s go into the studio” album. My friend Issa Diao, who was the first person to ever put out my records when I was a teenager, produced it and most of it was recorded live. It was about putting down one guitar and picking up another and playing the next song and attempting to make a very “one room / one group” kind of record. Where Rob and I were trying to embellish, using all of my inspirations, Issa was very much about stripping it all away. In some ways, that record sounds the most present, in the sense that it has not aged. Some of the ideas on Useful Music and The Future That Was, with drum machines and all of those things, turned them into time capsules. Drum machines were big at the time; Shawn had drum machines on “Lullaby” and brought that into the mix. I think of Jaywalker as having kind of a classic indie-rock record sound.

The Among The Oak & Ash records were maybe a bit of a continuation of that idea, getting back to playing folk songs that I really loved and doing something more in that vein. It could just as easily have been a new version of Josh Joplin Group… we just had a notion to play it as another thing. That album was specifically inspired by my best friend’s college band Hurricane Sadie. They would play some of my songs, but in kind of an Appalachian bluegrass style and they played traditional folk music. It was led by a woman named Cari Norris, who became a very close friend of mine, along with my best friend John Smith, who was the guitarist and one of the songwriters. The band was pretty magical and I have one of the 200 cassettes they made of their album. They went to Earlham College, and I would go see them and stay at Earlham quite a bit when I was living in the van.

Cari plays on the first Among The Oak & Ash record and a little bit on the second one. We stayed very close and she was always kind of a north star for me as far as music goes, and so was John. I continue to want to put out the one record they did, somehow. We recently got the master cassette, so we’re getting steps closer to making it happen—that’s how important that record was to me.

Figure Drawing [2023] is an album with a complicated back story. Please tell us more about the journey with that set of songs.

Figure Drawing began when Brian Harrison—who produced all of the Among The Oak & Ash music—and I decided to make another record. At that point I wasn’t on Verve anymore; they had done their best for us and that’s okay.

When we first signed with Verve, I was working with Garrison Starr and it was really supposed to be not so much a specific duo, but things evolve. Garrison was kind enough to do that record with me, and make it a part of something that she was doing for a while, but it was never meant to be a Garrison Starr and Josh Joplin duet record. It was just supposed to be this moment.

The second record [The Devil Ship] had a little bit of Garrison and was a lot more true to my original intention, which was to have it be a collective like the Group, but a collective of musicians from a certain background who play this traditional style of music. And so it was folks who play rock, but it was also Lucy Wainwright Roche and Cari Norris and a lot of other people that stepped in to play on individual tracks.

When I started working on the third record with Brian, I was already thinking “Maybe this isn’t an Among The Oak & Ash record, maybe it’s a Josh Joplin record. These songs are just extensions of me and all the music I like.” And Brian thought that was a good idea, but unfortunately, Brian died suddenly, of a heart attack. I had left his studio and driven back to New York City and two days later I got a call from our friend John Jackson and ended up going right back to Nashville.

That took the wind out of what I was doing and I felt kind of lost until Wes Langlois, who I’ve played with for a very long time and known forever, said “You know what? We need to go finish that record. We only ever recorded demos for it. Let’s finish it.” And he really encouraged me to get folks back on board, including Brian Owings, who was always the drummer on the Among The Oak & Ash records, and then few other folks. Wes was responsible for saying “Stop all this madness. Get back to Josh Joplin Group. We’re all a part of the group anyhow and it’s confusing for everyone. This is all insane. You’re insane.” [laughter] Wes is the one who stopped the madness.

Other than that first record that still remains out there as Among The Oak & Ash, they’ve all now fallen under Josh Joplin Group because what Wes said is true, we’ve always played with the same wonderful set of musicians, and they’ve always been a part of it. Some of them go out with me live, some of them have just been in the studio. Some people are new, a lot are old. I’m glad he did that—it feels good, even if it was slightly embarrassing in the moment.

To close this out, there’s a question I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time. On The Future That Was—and I love that you just put this out there—you sang that you “sound like Michael Stipe.” Which so many writers have commented on over the years, but what I’m curious to know is, have you ever met him? Because I just love the image of the two of you hanging out, talking about songwriting.

[laughter] Oh, yeah! We’ve never had any deep conversations, but I’ve met him—it’s just been more like in passing, backstage somewhere. It’s funny because, although I definitely love R.E.M., they weren’t one of those bands I followed really closely. I know others that definitely did, while I was more into The Kinks and The Smiths.

At a certain point I realized that’s what people were saying about me, and I was never going to get out of it, and, you know, it’s Michael Stipe. So I just decided to put it out there [in the song “Happy At Last”] because it’s something that’s funny to me.

You might as well own it.

Yeah, exactly. I just embraced it. I do wonder what it would be like if I was one of those musicians who absolutely loved the music of someone who I sounded just like. That might bother me more. I think because R.E.M. wasn’t a big part of my musical background, I always was able to just find it fun. I’m probably more happy when people compare me to the people I grew up being influenced by, because that feels like “Oh, you get it.” But I completely understand why people would say I sound like Michael, and it’s fun, and Michael Stipe is brilliant.

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 Thanks to Sonny Bailey-Lemansky of Missing Piece Group and David Miller for arranging this conversation.