Indie-folk favorites Joseph talk new album, power of therapy and choosing to be more
In the parking lot of a burger joint in northern Oregon, the Closner sisters laid their cards on the table. For nearly a decade, Natalie, Meegan and Allison had been grinding on tour and in the studio, building their band Joseph’s reputation as a three-headed indie-folk devastator, teeming with impassioned lyrics, arena-ready hooks and towering harmonies.
But through years of tirelessly cultivating their sound and fan base, the women had never stopped to have a candid conversation — was Joseph a forever sort of project? Or would the band at some point run its course? The pandemic gave each sister plenty of time to reflect. So, in that burger lot in 2021, the Closners gave each other the chance — to speak their mind, to step away and to say “I’m done.”
Though in that moment none wavered. Everyone wanted to make another Joseph album, something even bigger and better than their 2019’s Good Luck, Kid, which already saw the sisters shirking some of their folk roots in favor of ‘80s pop glamor. Suddenly the jangle of their 2016 breakthrough single “White Flag” seemed lifetimes away.
The Sun — the band’s exhilarating fourth LP, out today — offers a new inspiration: therapy, and each member’s journey to self-care and greater realization.
“We all had different bears to tackle,” Natalie tells AltPress, on a recent Zoom call with her sisters.
“This album is you realizing that you are more than you think you are,” Meegan adds.
Ahead of the band’s most intimate and cathartic work yet, as well as a headlining tour kicking off later this month, we caught up with Joseph to unpack their path to power, defeating anxiety and still choosing each other after all this time.
So much of this album is about taking control of your life. How does that message factor into your lives?
NATALIE: There’s a lot of stories on it from each of us kind of recognizing in our own ways, and with our own personal narratives, our own value beyond what different circumstances have told us, or how it felt, mine really being highlighted and “Waves Crash.” And I think Meegan’s on “The Sun” and Allison’s in “Nervous System.” They are different points of, ‘OK, what if this limiting belief that I’m having about myself isn’t the whole story?’ And I think that’s due in large part to a lot of the therapy that we all did over the pandemic, which was a blessing and just a lot of personal reflection that was really fun to put toward these songs.
Let’s talk about therapy. How were your individual experiences a catalyst for this album’s development?
NATALIE: My best friend is a therapist, and she recommended this person to me who did somatic experiencing therapy, which is all about orienting around your nervous system and learning a map of, “OK, my body’s showing me something, how do I tend to myself?”
And that was extremely powerful for me because as much as I’ve thought in my life, “Oh, I’m this creative person, I’m very emotional, da, da, da” I realize that I’m really very cerebral and I’m really living a lot of my life through my mind.
It’s not about what I achieve or accomplish or do. And the therapy was really all about rewiring that messaging for me through somatic experience.
MEEGAN: For me, I think that for whatever reason, maybe part of the way we grew up and the religion we grew up in, I kind of have this bent in life, that I am not good enough. herapy was like gaining my ground back again, gaining my own sense of self. “The Sun” is all about that experience. It’s just not about somebody else telling me how good I am and that I’ve achieved goodness. It’s about the fact that I already have it.
ALLISON: “I hope that therapy becomes more accessible to everyone. Because I think it’s so important and I think for each of us, and I know for so many of our friends, it’s really helped them. It helps us calm ourselves and find some sort of inner peace and find a better way to sort through the world.
There’s a greater pop sensibility on this album. Was that a conscious choice in the studio?
NATALIE: We don’t usually go in with a major precise vision. We are sort of like “These are some inspiring things. Let’s see where the songs take us.” And then they end up shaping themselves and becoming something.
ALLISON: On the song “The Sun,” it can be seen as a really heavy song. There were some people around the song that were like, “We should make this like part two of ‘Revolving Door‘ from our last album, which is just an intense ballad.”
Leggy Langdon is the one who produced that one. And we walked in and he was like, “OK, I’m going to take this a totally different direction than you might think.” And we all were like, “Holy shit.” We started crying.
Let’s talk about some specific tracks, beginning with “Waves Crash,” which does indeed hit like a 100-foot tsunami. How do you build your epic harmonies like these?
NATALIE: We switch with all the harmonies and everything, sort of the way we usually do it is whoever is leading the song, they’ll just start singing it. And then the other two will just find whichever one feels the most natural first, and then you just stay in that. There’s not a lot of method to it, it’s just intuitive, whatever works.
NATALIE: That song specifically is really just, again, how do I get out of my head and into my physical being? That song really culminates with this yelling moment.It just was this sort of primal moment of just an assertion of, “I am OK, I’m just a thing that’s alive and I’m not defined.” That all these other things in nature are just being, and nobody’s telling them they’re a piece of shit.
Onto the single “Nervous System,” which has the best line in “No, it’s not selfish if you save yourself,” which should be a T-shirt!
ALLISON: That specific line … that idea came from something I heard a long time ago, that if you see that somebody is drowning, you have to be really careful about how to save them and really know what you’re doing because they can end up drowning you in the process of you trying to save them.
And I was seeing this thing that was happening with me and another person, and I was like, “I feel like if one of us tries to jump in and save the other person, we’re both going to go down.” And so it was that idea of just how do we both exist in our own feelings, but both be OK on our own?
I’m sure you’ve been asked a million times what it’s like to be in a band of sisters. But I am curious how your relationships have evolved over time, working together for a decade and being siblings as well as colleagues.
NATALIE: We’re closer than we’ve ever been. I think a lot of that is just because we have been through so much having done this for 10 years, and we’ve put in the tough moments to have conversations sometimes of like, “Hey, are you still in this?” In the beginning, it could be really limiting for each other to be like, “OK, well you’re my sister, so I can’t become something in front of you.” But then allowing each other to grow and change can be something more than just the roles that we played in our nuclear family, our family of origin.
MEEGAN: With our last album, we had this moment of, “All right, really, is this too much for us? Is this too hard? And is this good for our relationships?” But between that album and this album, we had this moment during the pandemic years. Then we had this pretty big moment where basically we all just put the choice on the table where we’re like, “Hey, you know what? Actually, we can take the elephant out of the room.” It was so risky and vulnerable because it was kind of the first time anyone could actually say, ‘Yeah, I’m done.'” Collectively we were all like, “OK, I want to make a choice to be in this and let’s choose another album.”
With all of this, what do you hope listeners take away from this record?
NATALIE: Just a companion in their effort to recognize their own “moreness,” and just so many moments to be able to find your way to that and then to celebrate it once you’ve found it.
MEEGAN: I think often we’re very limiting to ourselves. And I think just imagining, “Oh, maybe I’m more,” it’s just extremely powerful. What can you do then, you know?
