Joshua Burnside
Many of the songs on Joshua Burnside’s “It’s Not Going to Be Okay” can disarm you or take your breath away from their very first lines. Burnside is the most consistently human and the most surprising of songwriters. Details spring out at you like spiders from the cracks between floorboards. Meteors and energy-efficient light bulbs, blackbirds and bears, spaceships and Peugeots. The profound and the quotidian occupy the same arena.
Joshua Burnside’s “The Last Armchair” opens with a brutal intimacy: “Oh, The last armchair you ever sat on / Before you overdosed / Is the one I sit in every morning / To eat my egg and toast;” the Belfast songwriter revealing how grief strips away every carefully constructed illusion of adulthood, that beneath mortgages and responsibilities we’re all still waiting for reassurance.
Joshua Burnside announces his new album, It’s Not Going to be Okay, releasing the poignant single and lyric video “Moon High.” Born from the grief of losing his best friend, the record is Burnside’s most stripped-back and unguarded work. It swaps his usual intricate production for tender, unflinching acoustic balladry, with each track serving “like an entry into a grief journal.”
Joshua Burnside shares his new single and video “Nicer Part of Town”–”a daydream song, following thoughts and memories around, some nice, some not so nice,” in which he heads back to a “childhood kitchen, and then up into the heavens on an old spaceship. We then sleep rough under a bridge, get blown up by a car bomb and end up in the garden of Eden.”
Teeth of Time, Joshua Burnside’s latest album, feels like a mid-career record: a precursor to middle age, to the wonders of parenthood, the mourning of what’s passed, and hopes for what’s to come. Christian Wethered caught up with him and spoke about folk, influence, and the world from which he writes. “I just try to write songs that feel honest to me.”