In downtown Seattle on an October evening, the Triple Door turned out to be perhaps the perfect venue for spiritualist neo-folk auteur Joseph Arthur. He’s a gifted guitarist and singer, able to muse about humanity’s fate and doomed, simple relationships by turns. It’s always been hard, for me at least, to place him. A New Yorker, he celebrates the grit of Avenue A with a rapping bravado, then sings about love and God (maybe) in a ghostly falsetto.
Luxuriating in the posh of the place before Arthur took the stage, I ordered some kind of elderflower-tequila cocktail and wondered whether this was the beginning or the end for him. I last saw Joseph Arthur in 2006, performing in front of a tight band before a packed house at the Crocodile Café. Supporting his “Nuclear Daydream” album, he was sassy in a jumpsuit and shades. Shimmying and ripping guitar leads, Arthur was Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. He even covered “Miss You.”
Now he’s playing in this subdued church of a place all by himself. The crowd is not young. There’s a canvas set up on a corner of the stage where the woman next to me says he’ll paint during the show. What’s he been doing all this time? Has he become a quiet recluse, a chamber rock god in the vein of Sufjan Stevens? Maybe in his lonely astronaut contemplations, he’s forgotten where the sweet spot is between the passion and profound, between the honey and the moon.
The alcohol starts to kick in and the lights come down. Arthur, with long hair and a beard (Jesus Christ, he looks like Jesus Christ!), strides onto the stage with his electric guitar and starts playing a rhythmic, repeating melody, while fooling with various foot pedals in front of him. He even raps the guitar to build and kind of drumbeat. It’s all being captured in a loop recording, over which he starts playing lead and singing. Arthur is promoting his first album in three years, Come Back World, set to drop tomorrow.
He sings the title cut, “Come back, world, or are you already gone.” Is he singing about what I think he’s singing about – naming the climate change apocalypse that haunts those of us who can’t make like ostriches? Maybe he’s singing about a girl. He plays achingly beautiful melodies, and evokes doom and heavenly transport with that elastic, knowing baritone.
Mike McCready, who needs no introduction yo, ups the ecstacy when he joins Arthur and plays these delicious guitar lines. I order another drink, a kind of Asian margarita, and the high builds some more. McCready brings his axe to bear, somehow over the top and understated at the same time, kind of like The Edge or Mick Taylor (Why am I referencing the Stones all over the place?). Arthur puts down his guitar and vaults into “I Miss the Zoo,” a nostalgic rap about bygone addiction. He draws on the canvas while he sings.
I I start to drift, ingesting the rainbow of stage-light colors, reaching for something the way the weird cartoon guy Arthur has drawn on the canvas is doing. An old girlfriend? A Bugatti sports car? A shimmering black and yellow fish in the Caribbean Sea? I feel a morphine bliss. I could have all these things and my sweet family life too. As Pablo Picasso would tell you, hard choices are for losers. Come to think of it, Arthur’s art does evoke some cheating, cubist perspective. You can see all the important sides at once.
Arthur is playing a lot of songs from the new record. They’re solid and earnest. The live treatment helps, with Arthur and McCready trading arpeggios that take those folk songs to electric ladyland. This place really is a church, in a good way. I feel transported as the high notes reach for the roof of the Gothic cathedral, leaving the flying buttresses behind.
To know joy is to know that joy will end. How much of my nirvana is chemically induced, I wonder. Oh, the rude ego barges in on the id in mid-swig! I miss the zoo and I haven’t even left yet.
Behold the official video for “Come Back World,” the title track from Joseph Arthur’s new album.
