Joseph Huber
Joseph Huber is in a bit of a conundrum regarding his latest album Moondog, which is out early next month. On one hand, he considers the songwriting some of his best to date. But it also features “some of the more questionable production and experimentation that I’ve done.” Songs such as “Found Penny” and “Centerline” almost didn’t make the cut for that reason, but he decided to include them at the last minute.
He attributes some of these mixed feelings and an “off-kilter album” as being the result of a tumultuous period of his life, which included the ending of a relationship.
“It’s been a very strange couple of years where I felt the writing was inspired and extremely well done, but also just working with more of a hazy mindset with other things happening in my life,” Huber says. “Where in the end I’m probably half and half on this album, where I’m half happy with it and half sort of apprehensive, but I think it’s perfectly fine to feel that way.”
Huber has slowly come to terms with the album’s place in his career. He views his fifth solo output as more of a “piece of biography that was necessary for the time.”
He explains that Moondog is mostly about love—“attempts to affirm it; feeling it slipping away; and in a very real way, eventually truly losing it; and then further accepting its loss. It represents a period of my life that I wish nothing more than to move on from, which causes a strange dynamic of proudly displaying new music while doing all you can to move beyond it.”
Much of songwriting inspiration comes from old poets. So, it’s little surprise that he adapted W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Wild Swans at Coole” for a song. He initially tried to write his own song envisioning “some sort of migratory bird in Wisconsin as a sort of metaphor for love flying away and leaving” the main character alone. But he ended up going with the poem since the melody fit the poem’s rhythm and pentameter.
|
|
“I sometimes question: Do I have more influence in my writing from songwriters and lyricists, or more likely the stuff that I’m reading of old, dead poets?” he says. “I could probably say the latter has more influence on where my writing ideas come from, and things that I enjoy riffing on is usually reading some of them and attempting to riff on it myself.”
On the album’s title track, which opens the album, Huber sings about “positively embracing this sort of a lifestyle that’s sort of topsy-turvy and all over the place as a musician and a traveler, a person who is gone a lot, and just doesn’t have a lot of balance. I was just thinking more about a person howling at the moon and kind of losing their self, it’s sort of a reference to that untamed lifestyle,” he says.
He envisioned the song as the start to something more lighthearted than his previous album, 2017’s The Suffering Stage. But personal circumstances changed the direction of the album.
“That first song is essentially embracing it in sort of a positive light, and I would say almost all of the rest of the album is a slow twist on that subject that actually is different various sobering takes on that lifestyle that show the more negative truths of what comes with that, eventually leading to loss,” says Huber. “So, you could almost say that the album goes from truly from the first song to the last song, from A to Z.
“I mean not completely, there’s a couple curve balls in there that are off topic. But for the most part, it kind of goes from A to Z of embracing the lifestyle positively and then slowly having the other negative truths of that lifestyle sink in.”
Huber plans to keep on working on new music, which could be out as early as next year. But for now, he’s excited to go on his longest tour in eight years and reunite with his former .357 String Band bandmate Billy Cook, who is flying out from Oregon to play with him.
Joseph Huber plays an album release show with Driveway Thriftdwellers at Anodyne Coffee Roasting Co. in Walker’s Point, 224 W. Bruce St., on Thursday, Aug. 1, at 8 p.m.
