Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Joseph Huber spent much of his time between 2004 and 2012 contributing to the bluegrass attack of Milwaukee’s .357 String Band. That group found success across the globe with its multi-songwriter approach and tight and fluid playing between members.
Since the band parted ways, however, Huber has come to realize he’s just as comfortable handling everything by himself, including instrumentation and production. With his third album The Hanging Road, his debut for Muddy Roots Records, he’s making just about every decision from start to finish.
“I’d rather have as much complete control as possible,” says Huber, who recorded in his home studio.
Usually Huber won’t show songs to anyone until they’re completed, even his new label. Sometimes, however, he looks to his father for ideas. For example, his father gave him a book on Southwestern Indian Americans that included the term “hanging road.” It’s an old term tribes used to refer to the Milky Way, a place where they believed their souls would go.
“My dad was like, ‘That’s a good image, you should write a song about that,’” says Huber. “I had this song melody in my head and I wrote the chorus a couple days later and then filled around it and it ended up being ‘The Hanging Road.’”
When recording the album Huber says he focused on creating songs that could stand as singles rather than forcing a central theme. Some of the songs are fairly recent while others are several years old.
“When the songs do come they feel more real to me; it’s like they aren’t mine and came from somewhere else. They feel more important to me than something I force,” he says. “I have four or five versions of it in my head until I decide on one. They feel realer, the ones that just pop into your head, so I try to wait around for those.”
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Some of the songs are personal like “Same River Twice,” a song about getting back with his wife after a tough seven months following their split. “It’s a song about us getting back together and it being a huge mistake the whole time we were split up,” Huber says. “I wrote this for my gal in saying, ‘Let’s fight the odds and get back together again.’”
“Shovel on Your Shoulder” is a song Huber originally wrote for .357 at the end of its existence. The three songwriters in the group were going to release a new .357 String Band album with those songs and three new tunes, but it ultimately fell through. “It kind of went to the wayside, and after a few years Derek [Dunn] released his album and Billy [Cook] released his album and used their songs so I was like, ‘I’m going to put this song on my solo album,’” he says.
In some ways, Huber’s carpentry and woodworking day job has helped him with songwriting. Both of his passions involve meshing old and new into something exciting and rewarding—musically, learning how to further his songwriting (and learn a new instrument like mandolin), and in his day job, creating things that serve a physical purpose for others.
“They complement each other in that my music is a mix of old and new and so is my furniture,” he says. “My furniture is a mixture of reclaimed and new stuff and my songs are a mixture of old-timey roots stuff and whatever new twist I put on it. If I’m not in that more abstract, intellectual sort of songwriting mode, I’ll go to my shop and I always have projects or ideas that I can go start at any time. So that gives me the freedom to do both.”
Joseph Huber plays the Anodyne Coffee Roasting Co., 224 W. Bruce St., on Friday, Sept. 12 at 8 p.m. with Jeff Shepherd and the Jailhouse Poets.
