Joseph Biss – Interview – Thanks for Asking!

Joseph Biss – Interview – Thanks for Asking! – by Liam Sweeny.

RRX: Music genres are difficult for some artists. Some strictly adhere; others not so much. What is your perspective on the genre you play, or the genres you hover around?

JB: I loosely hang out around the “folk” genre and throw “psychedelic” on the front if feeling feisty. As a broad brush, I take “folk” as a “lo-fi approach to get a song out with the bare essentials.” (not lost in “overproduction”) In my case that is usually my old Martin, my calluses, and voice. I feel more often than not, people hear “folk” and except the same three chords, an airy voice, and large brimmed hat. So it is always a lovely surprise when they show up on the front step of my music and are hit in the face with jazz chords, slap bass acoustic, and post-hardcore/folk-punk lyrics.

RRX: Cover art is cool. It shows listeners what the artist thinks the album is all about. Because music can be felt visually. If you had to give the public a visual image that you think they would see and just “get” your groove right away, what would it be?

JB: A dandelion growing up through a crack in a concrete sidewalk.

RRX: With services like Spotify, streaming revenue can be pretty dismal. Without spilling secrets, do you have a promotional mindset or philosophy?

JB: May my secrets spill! My mentality on approaching promotion is the same way I’ve tackled all of my creative works over the last decade and that is consistency and transparency! Posting the work you do (that others don’t, won’t, or can’t do) is always a super productive approach to self-promotion. No one wants to watch a “musician/artist” make a video complaining about making a video! For me, this is posting a full set (45 min/1hr) set every single Wednesday and Sunday that I am not on tour, and keeping people in the loop with “work-in-progress” posts for everything from song writing to show poster creation. From those two former mention sets, I find I have more than plenty of material and content to pull those foolish little “shorts” and “reels”! Those short videos are what YouTube and Instagram/Facebook make their money off nowadays which I feel isn’t really “spilling secrets” as folks should find it terribly obvious from the notifications both apps send you when you open them. Turning on that camera for something you should be doing anyways (honing your craft) is an easy “two birds stoned at once”

RRX: We do this for the fans. For the blisters also, but mostly for the fans. Who’s one your best fans? Without necessarily giving their name, what are they like?

JB: My “best” fan(s) are what I call my “die hards”! These are the folks that have their notifications turned on for anything I post, they tell anyone who will listen about my work, they sell out my merch tables at shows, they know all the lyrics (even better than me!), and more importantly they are so very open in commenting (or saying to my face) what they take away from what I am putting into the world!

I’d be grateful to list just one person in particular that meets all of these criteria, but at this point this group of people has grown to a point, where mentioning just one would be a mistake! I can go a venue that is hours and hundred of miles away from home and still have folks singing back unreleased material to me! The attentiveness to even a short lyric passages, or “work-in-progress” song, demos etc does not go unnoticed at this point and that makes me gigglemug more than anything else!

RRX: What would you like fans to know before they come to see you play? (No basic stuff; get specific.)

JB: folks should know to bring a seat belt, as most venues do not have them, and you will most certainly need to buckle up for the journey i take you on at a live show! I can safely say most (if not all of my shows) bring folks to tears ( of both joy and devastation) as we leave no stone unturned and no emotion is left out to dry! For me there is nothing more satisfying than having an adult man come up to me after a show and tell me it was the first time he was able to cry in years! My music is written to let all folks know that are part of this, they are included in this, and these songs are just as much about them and their lives as it is about mine.

RRX: I know when pitching it helps to tell someone it’s “this meets that.” So let’s try that with you. If you had to give me two bands that meet each other in your sound, what are those bands? More than two bands?

JB: I happily tell folks my music is The Mountain Goats meets Pink Floyd! I’ll give you such a word heavy lyric that you will choke on it like the best of John Darnielle but you better believe when we get to that solo you are getting a David Glimour step-and-a-half down bend ripping from my Stratocaster (or my Jazzmaster with a Strat neck hehe) Almost all folks will have heard of Pink Floyd, but it makes my heart smile when a person gets the Mountain Goats comparison and even more so when they feel the same of the description I tag to my “sound.”

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