INTERVIEW : 2011-07-22 Critical fave Joseph Arthur ‘still swinging’ (by Mike Bell)

Singer-songwriter trapped in cult-artist status

Joseph Arthur is in a frustrating position — for believers and, to a lesser degree, the artist himself.

Taking a look at his stellar 15-year career, it has been filled with the kind of opportunities, accolades and brushes with breakout that speak to someone who should be a household name. That includes: his signing to Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records label in the mid-’90s, after the Akron, OH native’s demo tape landed in Gabriel’s lap; Gabriel covering his song In the Sun for a Princess Diana tribute album, and it later being recorded by Coldplay’s Chris Martin and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe as a charity track for the victims of hurricane Katrina; and the album he recorded with friends Ben Harper and Dhani Harrison under the moniker Fistful of Mercy.

Yet, despite those things, and seven full-length albums that have made him a critical darling, he remains a widely unknown commodity. Or, to put it another way, a singer-songwriter with the pedigree and skill of a headliner trapped in the perception of him as an opener, something the now New York-based singer-songwriter is of two minds about.

“I imagine it’s very human to oscillate between gratitude and ingratitude,” Arthur says. “I’m pretty normal when it comes to that.

“It’s interesting, because the other day I was just at a festival in Quebec City and I got to open up the festival, and it was still daylight out, but there were still quite a few people and I was on the mainstage, so it was cool,” he says noting the reception was good despite the crowd still filing in. “Then, later that night I sat in with Ben, who was headlining the festival, and we did Fistful of Mercy, the song, and I guess there were like 60-70,000 people there. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is nice.’

“But it ain’t over yet, I’m still out here swinging. So hopefully I’m on the rise, you never know.”

If there’s any justice in the world, the singer-songwriter’s latest release, the appropriately titled The Graduation Ceremony, should get him there. The album, one of the finest of his many, is one he describes as being effortless, growing out of a quick, stripped-down acoustic songwriting session into a record that’s pretty, lush and full thanks to production from John Alagia and extra instrumentation from such guests as Liz Phair and drumming legend Jim Keltner.

“I’m always aiming to make a solo acoustic record, like Pink Moon by Nick Drake,” Arthur says. “Like why can’t I make a record like that? I always have it in the back of my mind. . . . And, of course, this isn’t that record either, because it got produced. Some day I’ll make that record. But this record started out as an attempt to make that record. But I’m happy where it’s at, though.”

And while effortless is a word he uses to describe everything about The Graduation Ceremony — including the cover art, which was the first thing the accomplished painter randomly clicked on while searching through some of his old work — the emotions behind it were anything but easy.

It is what he calls a “long-term relationship ending kind of a record,” and features such songs with titles such as Almost Blue and the achingly beautiful Gypsy Faded, the latter of which contains some of the most nakedly honest lyrics of a breakup you could hope to hear. To Arthur’s credit, though, that song and the album in general manage to echo his description of that aforementioned Drake masterpiece, walking terrain by defined by “melancholy, but it’s beautiful and affirming.”

Perhaps, he says, that’s because instead of being made while in the midst of the love loss, the songs and the album were made from a safer distance.

“I was at the other end of it when I recorded the record, so it almost in retrospect. I wasn’t so into it that I couldn’t do it, though. And I like the title for that reason, because I feel like there’s a sense of optimism,” he says. “And it’s kind of rewarding because it’s like . . . you go through something like that and you don’t just come out the other side you actually get something out of it.”

Again, here’s hoping that also speaks to his career, and what Arthur gets out of it is so much more.