by Daniel V. Garcia
Daily Lobo
There are various ways to write a song.
Typically, one starts with a melody and builds it up from there, or he or she writes out some lyrics and tries to make musical sense out of them. Songs are also written cooperatively when a band gets together and a member starts playing something that the other musicians respond to.
But Jerry Joseph uses an unusual method when he writes his songs.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
"I start with a list of titles," he said. "I just kind of write. I keep titles, and they sort of lead me into where I start writing from," he said.
The music on the Jerry Joseph and the Jackmormons album Conscious Contact - taken from an Alcoholics Anonymous term - is a rollicking blend of country-rock reminiscent of Steve Earle, John Cougar Mellencamp and a bit of Elvis Costello. Joseph's twangy guitar runs push the band into the territory of jam rock that feels post punk at times. This sound has been honed for several years.
"This is our 10th year together as a band. We started almost 10 years ago exactly," Joseph said.
The songs of the band are somewhat enigmatic. They range from personal accounts of love, loss, loneliness and heartbreak to tragic stories masked within the sonic framework of a happy-go-lucky ditty. They seem to deal solidly with particular people and specific situations, and not with generalities. This has an obscuring effect on the meaning of the songs, which can feature a gender perspective apart from his.
"It's fun to write different angles. Maybe the song is about some woman or friend in my life. It's like a parlor game. It's fun to keep people guessing about things like sexuality," Joseph said. "You want people to get what they want out of the songs. They should be about one's own interpretation. A lot of that stuff is in the eye or the ear of the listener."
Joseph has successfully battled a drug addiction that diminished his musical productivity several years ago. References to this occur in songs like "Fastest Horse" and "Ching-a-Ling."
"'Fastest Horse' definitely was about my battles with illicit substances. That was super clearly about that," he said. "'Ching-A-Ling' is about two things. It's a motorcycle club from Harlem. Also, in New York, the dime bags have names. Ching-A-Ling was a type of heroin, and it was a popular one, one summer long ago."
