FT: You’ll be hitting the road again in a few weeks. Are you excited?
JB: Absolutely! It’s going to be awesome. Not so much the carrying of the Hammond organ in and out of 14 venues, but definitely the playing part! It’s been so exciting rehearsing the new material with the band and I genuinely can’t wait to get out there and share it all with audiences.
FT: This is tour is promoting an album you’ve been working on for years, how does it feel to finally get this music to where you want it and be able to release it?
JB: Satisfying, rewarding, a relief. All those things at once. I’ve got a pinboard where I pin up songs as I write them so I can group them. These have been glaring at me for over a decade so it genuinely feels like a huge weight has been lifted and I can move on with the next phase of my life. I felt like I owed it to my past self to make these songs happen and with everything I’ve learned since, they’ve turned out better than I could have hoped. More importantly, I think my audience will love this album and so I think I’m more excited than ever to see what people make of it.
FT: It’s quite a busy tour with dates in Europe and the U.K. What can your fans expect and if someone turned up who’d never seen Joshua Burnell before, how would you describe the experience?
JB: Storytelling, ethereal textures, stomping singalongs, bombastic guitar and keyboard solos. There’s prog influences but also some folk sensibilities. Anything that makes people feel like they’ve been transported out of this world and taken on an adventure to some other, more eccentric worlds for a bit.
FT: What can we expect from ‘Condor Keep & Other Stories’?
JB: I’m still searching for a word to describe this, but there’s something about a lot of early 70s folk, pop, rock and singer-songwriter records that has this cosy, acoustic warmth to it. I’m always craving a new album that gives that feeling so decided to make it. It’s very melodic, embellished with string sections, piano, synth pads made from acoustic textures, and each song tells a different story. There’s influences from folklore, mythology, fantasy but used in a way that reflects personal experiences and social politics. So although it has all those fantasy aspects, it’s not exactly escapism; just a different way of processing these ideas in a way that also triggers our imaginations.
FT: Will there be physical copies of ‘Condor Keep & Other Stories’ on sale at the shows, so fans can get it ahead of the official release date?
JB: There will be at certain shows. The official release date is 4th December. I’ve only got enough copies made so I’m confident they’ll all go soon.
FT: All summer you’ve been very prolific on social media promoting the tour and the album, how important is that interaction for an independent artist like yourself?
JB: Social media has become a necessary evil for any business; artists included. Apparently around 1% of a social media following actual interacts with an artist (e.g. listens to their song, comes to a show, buys an album) which means it has become a ruthless numbers game. This year I’ve been working extremely hard to try and crack it. At the moment, I’m in an experimental phase, trying loads of different formats out to find what people want from me. I’m not there yet, but I think it’ll become clear when I’ve am.
FT: Some of the posts have been hilarious, opening yourself up to requests was a brave move, did you enjoy that part of it?
JB: I think I’ll look back in the future and see that that idea actually made a profound change to my whole career. I decided to write a 30-second song for anyone who bought an album from my online store. It was exhausting and as we have a little girl, this meant getting up at 5am to go and sing on the allotment or quickly scribble down lyrics in 10-minute breaks at work.
Nothing made a big splash until someone – I think it might have been someone called Gerry – asked me to write a song about a coconut. Because I was in a constant flow of writing, my brain was making connections very quickly, and a few ideas clicked together in my head of what that song should be. Before I knew it, I had invented The Bard of Burnellington, had a coconut thrown at my head and 3.7 million views on YouTube. I haven’t replicated anywhere near that since, but it opened a door in my head that said, “you CAN do this.” Either that, or the coconut left lasting damage.
POLICE NOTICE: Please do not throw a coconut at Joshua’s head during a live show. It will be classed as assault. He was stupid enough to literally ask for it first time round, so the injury sustained was totally his fault.
FT: One thing I noticed about it was that you seem to have a core group of people out there who get your humour and interact well with you, almost like a community. Do you enjoy meeting these people both on and off the road?
JB: I love the community that is building around my music; we tend to be a friendly, welcoming open-minded bunch. Catching up with familiar faces at a gig is just the best thing ever. Interestingly, there seem to be two groups: those who come to shows but rarely engage online, and those who regularly engage online but never come to shows. I think once numbers start to go up, those groups will begin to merge.
FT: I recently dug out the vinyl of ‘Into The Green’ and reacquainted myself with it. One thing I noticed is that your vocal style on the record has changed, not massively, but more as if you have become more confident in your singing. Would you agree there’s been a change?
JB: There has definitely been a change. As a teenager, I sort of lost my voice – not literally (I was singing loads) but after my vocal register changed, I wasn’t sure who to ‘be’ as I sang. I developed what I now called the ‘Valénor voice’ which is this artificially low trying-to-be-grown-up voice which I used on an album with a band called Valénor when I was a teenager. It took a while to shift that voice and you can hear the lingering remains of it on Into The Green. With the exception of Willie Nelson, I think all singers’ voices evolve over time so I’m probably not at the end destination when it comes to my voice.
FT: At the moment it looks like your home show in Pocklington Arts Centre in November will sell out, how important is that fans buy tickets in advance of a show?
JB: It has sold out! Woohoo! How important is advance booking? It is one of the only meaningful ways you can vote for a band to keep doing what they do. Times have changed; very rarely do people just turn up to see a band for the sake of it. Music is now competing with more entertainment options than ever before. Venues and promoters at the grassroots level are closing rapidly, so they HAVE to book bands that sell. If a band is lucky enough to even get a gig and then don’t sell tickets, that’s a fast-track to not getting gigs any more and then the whole story comes to an end (unless you move to just working online, which is a viable option nowadays). There seems to be a misconception that a band you like can easily get a gig in your town because you’ve seen other bands play there before. If that venue books a band that doesn’t sell, that will have an immensely negative impact on their entire business. I’ve done this in the past and had to take a year out of touring just to save up so I could attempt touring again. Realistically, the bands who survive either have something really special, financial backing or a fanbase that is willing to travel. I’m grateful to have the last of those three.
FT: I should also mention that you’ve already sold out one European show at the beginning of the tour.
JB: In a CASTLE! Thank you to everyone who has booked – you’re the best!
FT: Thanks for your time, and I’ll see you on the road.
Thanks so much Gerry. Please don’t throw a coconut at my head.
Tickets for all of the upcoming tour dates can found online at joshuaburnell.co.uk