Joseph Arthur & the Lonely Astronauts

Let’s Just Be

[3.5/5] One day, Joseph Arthur will have an incredible autobiography. The Akron, Ohio-born, Brooklyn-based troubadour already has sections for his encounters with Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed and Michael Stipe and yet, at 35, there’s still much left in this man’s think tank. The latest chapter in his ongoing life and times is also one of its highlights. Backed by his band of solitary spacemen (Golden Smog fixture Kraig Jarret Johnson and former Honorary Title drummer Greg Wieczorek among them), Arthur jumps from meditative mind-rock to rippin’ jams with reckless charm. “Cockteeze” sounds like classic Mick Jagger while “Chicago” plays like the drunk cousin to Sufjan Stevens’ last term paper. And though it’s hard to locate a centerpiece on a disc as eclectic and varied as this, “The Lonely Astronaut”-a seizing post-folk freak-out that eventually settles on gentle strumming after roughly fifteen minutes of semi-conscious campfire outbursts-comes mighty close to capturing all of the album’s best attributes in its 20-plus minute run time. All told, Let’s Just Be is a diverse collection that often has a life force all its own. It could surely benefit from more scrupulous editing, but with a sister album due before year’s end, we get the feeling that Arthur’s audiobiographies aren’t much interested in that. (LONELY ASTRONAUT) Tristan Staddon

ROCKS LIKE:

The Pink Mountaintops’ Axis Of Evol

Wooden Wand’s Harem Of The Sundrum & The Witness Figg

Mick Jagger’s Wandering Spirit

IN-STORE SESSION WITH JOSEPH ARTHUR

You’ve mentioned you’re more comfortable playing with the Lonely Astronauts than solo. How come?

Approaching something you’ve been doing for a long time from a different angle reinvigorates it and allows you to discover new things. There’s more space to fill when you’re up there by yourself, so you find different characters within yourself to facilitate each domain. I had been playing solo for so long that I just found [the band] totally liberating. I became new at it again.

I’ve heard rumors that you wrote 80 songs in three weeks. Where did it all come from?

The whole vibe of writing had an energy to it that was kind of like writing in your first band. Like, “Oh, my God, we could write this and we can write this!” We just spun off of each other in a really creative way. We didn’t come up with all 80 songs because I had a bunch of old songs I hadn’t recorded yet. But we recorded something like 80 songs.

“Lonely Astronaut” is 20 minutes long and only has one overdub. Why did you want to keep the production so sparse?

We wanted to record it to tape and the studio we were recording in had a 16-track tape machine, so we only had 15 tracks to work with. That was part of it. And then I had a “No Reverb” rule. The idea was just to keep it somewhat minimal. Johnny Leckie, the guy who produced [Radiohead’s] The Bends and [the Stone Roses’] Stone Roses, told me a long time ago that “The more you get down of what actually makes the final record of a song at one time, the better.” I sort of listened to that philosophy on this.

You took a humanitarian trip to Uganda last year. How much did that affect the music you wrote when you got home?
I’m still kind of figuring that out. It’s hard to put it into words, really. It has such a deep impact on you. We brought over painting supplies and showed the kids how to use them in a basic kind of way. And it was amazing. It’s certainly something I want to pursue as time goes on, looking for ways and means to help out using art. Something like that you can’t leave alone. You can’t go once and then do nothing because it’ll eat you up. I was really kind of scared to go over there, for obvious reasons, but then once I was there, I felt something I hadn’t ever felt before. I didn’t want to leave. -Tristan Staddon