Name: Joseph Arthur
Nationality: American
Occupation: Singer, songwriter
Current Release: Joseph Arthur's new album You're Not a Ghost Anymore: Heart is out via Lonely Astronaut.
Hometown Recommendation: I’m out in the Scottsdale, Tempe, and Apache Junction area of Arizona, and the desert itself is the real recommendation. Get out past the edge of town at dusk, when the light turns the whole landscape a color that doesn’t have a name. It puts most rooms full of art to shame. Camelback mountain as well. Show up there around 4am and make it to the top for sunrise. No better way to start a day.
Things that I am really passionate about but rarely get to talk about: The visual side of what I do, the painted jackets, the large scale canvases, the whole ghost imagery running through the album art. It grew out of the music but it’s become its own language for me, and I could talk for hours about how a painting and a song end up saying the same thing in different materials.
Outside of art I would say Yoga, cold plunge and meditation. Meditation is similar to songwriting in that it’s a form of communion with the mysterious
But mostly, being a single father shapes almost everything I make now, more than people realize from the outside. It’s not something that comes up much in music interviews, but it’s the quiet engine behind a lot of the recent work, including songs people assume are only about something else. People may roll their eyes when parents go on about their kids. But on a playground with innocence chasing freedom the cliches are irresistible.

If you enjoyed this Joseph Arthur interview and would like to know more about his music and stay up to date with his live dates, visit his official website for more information. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, and bandcamp. 



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in writing lyrics or poetry? How and when did you start writing?

I think it started before I could name it as writing.

Music was the first place I felt like a private thought could become something shared without losing what made it private. I was drawn to instruments and to words around the same time, and it took a while to realize they were the same pull.

In the early days I was mesmerized by the honesty in John Lennon’s solo stuff. And the carnival of imagery Bob Dylan curated. And my earliest memory of being blown away by a lyric was Jimi Hendrix. When he sang

I don’t live today
Will I live tomorrow?
Well, I just can't say
Will I live tomorrow?
Well, I just can't say
But I know for sure
I don't live today

It blew my ten year old mind.



Entering new worlds and escapism through music and literature have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to writing?

I’m drawn to writing as a way of naming things that don’t have names yet. Feelings that are half formed until a line catches them and holds still.

The ghost imagery that runs through my work isn’t really escapism so much as a way of making the invisible visible. Grief, faith, the parts of a life you carry but don’t display.

Mostly it’s a conversation with an unknown entity. Transcribing a spiritual patron whispering stuff from another dimension.

What were some of the artists and albums which inspired you early on purely on the strength of their lyrics? What moves you in the lyrics of other artists?

What moves me most in other people’s lyrics is economy. A line that does the work of a whole paragraph because it trusts the listener to fill in the rest.

I’ve always been drawn to writers who leave space in the language, who don’t over explain the feeling and let the melody carry what the words leave open.

And also honesty about the dark matter of being human. Kurt Cobain was a master of this and the spiritual son of John Lennon in my opinion.

Have there been song lyrics which actually made you change (aspects of) your life? If so, what do you think lent them that power?

Yes, though it’s rarely one line doing the work alone. It’s usually a lyric landing at the exact moment I needed permission to feel something I’d been avoiding.

I think that’s where the power comes from. Not the words themselves but the timing, and the fact that someone else had already survived saying it out loud.

Life changing in a way that introduces the shadow material to the light. Shadow work on the page.

It is sometimes said that “music begins where words end.” What do you make of that?

I’d push back on it a little.

For me words and music aren’t sequential, they’re the same gesture. A melody can carry a feeling further than the words alone, but the words are what let the listener locate the feeling. Neither one finishes the job by itself.

The music tends to suggest language. And they come together as a unified whole

I have always considered many forms of music to be a form of poetry as well. Where do you personally see similarities? What can music express which may be out of reach for poetry?

Both are compression. Poetry compresses meaning into as few words as possible, music compresses feeling into time.

What music can do that poetry can’t is arrive before you’ve decided how to feel about it. A chord change can move you before your brain has caught up enough to interpret a single word.

Nick Drake is a good example with a song like “Pink Moon.”



Neither the music or the words alone are that complicated and yet they speak to the human condition in a way that’s inspiring and complete.

The sadness and ecstasy of life moving through us in a way we can never really hold. It slips through our fingers and falls away when we clutch.

The relationship between words and music has always intrigued me. How do you see it? In how far can music take you to places with your writing you would possibly not have visited without it?

A lot of my writing happens inside live looping, building layers in real time, and that process finds lines I would never reach sitting still with a notebook.

The music leads and the words follow, almost like eavesdropping on myself or a spirit. Without the sound moving first, I don’t think I’d get to some of those places at all.

Songwriting is like a conversation between two enigmatic forces  that flow into each other and give each other new life.

What are areas/themes/topics that you keep returning to in your lyrics?

Faith, fracture, and repair. The three part structure of the new album, Faith, Heart, and Fight, is basically a map of the themes I keep circling. Belief under pressure, love as the thing that survives the pressure, and the fight to stay present through both.

Freedom as well comes up over and over again. Freedom from what is anybody’s guess. I guess we come into this world in a kind of cage that we spend years trying to release ourselves from

On the basis of a piece off You're Not a Ghost Anymore: Heart, tell me about how the lyrics grew into their final form and what points of consideration were.

“Simple Light” came together on the road, worked out at soundchecks over the course of about a month.

It started as a love song and grew into something with a second layer underneath it, written with my daughter in mind.



The consideration for me was keeping both readings true at once. I didn’t want to write something that only worked if you knew the private meaning.

“Cinders” came out in fifteen minutes complete.



It was written directly from an important relationship falling apart. I was writing about someone else but it could have been about myself as well.

Lots of songs are like that.

Do you tend to start writing with what will be the first line of the finished lyrics? The chorus? At a random point? What are the words that set the process in motion?

Usually a random point. A phrase surfaces while I’m playing and it isn’t attached to a verse or a chorus yet, it’s just true enough that I don’t want to lose it. I build outward from that one true line rather than starting at the top and working down.

Often throwaway lines that I’m sure I will change later become the best lines of the song. “In The Sun” comes to mind with the lines

“If I find my own way how much will I find?”



I didn’t get that line at the time but through the years it’s gained weight and meaning for me.

I’d love to know how you think the meaning or effect of an individual song is enhanced, clarified or possibly contradicted by the EPs, or albums it is part of. Does the song, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

Not consistent so much as in conversation.

“Cinders” sits in the Heart section of the record for a reason, its meaning shifts depending on whether you hear it after a Faith song or a Fight song. I like when a song can hold a slightly different weight depending on where it lands in the sequence.

But I’ve written concept albums like The Ballad Of Boogie Christ where the importance of the song’s relationship and interconnectedness are essential.



When you’re writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What’s your perspective in this regard of singing someone else’s songs versus your own?

Yes, completely. A word can look right on the page and still be wrong to sing, the shape of it in the mouth matters as much as the meaning.

With my own songs I can keep revising until the sound and the sense agree. Singing someone else’s words is a different discipline, I have to find my own way into a phrase that wasn’t built for my voice in the first place.

I would love to know a little about the feedback you’ve received from listeners or critics about what they thought some of your songs are about — have there been “misunderstandings” or did you perhaps even gain new “insights?”

I’ve had people tell me what a song meant to them and it was nowhere near what I intended, and more often than not their reading was better than mine.

I try to leave enough room in the lyrics for that to happen. A song that only means one thing feels finished too early to me.

A little ambiguity is great for songs. Like inviting someone into a room with no walls

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing song lyrics or poetry is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn’t or wouldn’t in more ‘mundane’ tasks?

I paint as well as write, so I think about this a lot.

Painting and music both let me say things I don’t have language for in conversation, contradictions that don’t resolve into a clean sentence. Music in particular can hold two opposite feelings at once without asking you to choose between them, and that’s not something I can do at the kitchen counter.

That said there can be layers in cooking a steak. The seasoning, the char, the rare internal.

I suppose we can connect the ethereal to the mundane. Especially when we’re hungry enough.