The question now is when and where those 35 solo tracks will be winnowed down into a single album and released, because the songs so far are stunning. “A River Blue” — the only one available for public consumption, streamed on josepharthur.com — hints at these tracks. It was recorded in Northern Uganda with 100 young people from a camp for the internally displaced; the idea was to raise awareness for a music-art-and-drama project there. Imagine the displacement of the rough-hewn choir that’s crowding Arthur’s reedy vocals — assuage your guilt by donating at ariverblue.org — and you get an idea of the twilit grandeur to come.
At his best, Arthur positions his songs in the narrow space between heartache and compassion, creating a broad canvas onto which you can splatter your own mess of an internal life. Except that, now, inspired by the band’s drawing out of his inner junior-high rocker, even his solo songwriting drives those sentiments through with melodies that would be big pop hooks if they weren’t in the service of something more obscure.
“This one is more a follow-up to Our Shadows Will Remain,” he says of the upcoming solo disc, “where Nuclear Daydream was a sidestep and Let’s Just Be was a sidestep too. Nothing to diminish the quality of those records, but I was going in a certain direction with Redemption’s Son and Our Shadows Will Remain, and this is more in keeping with that, in that it’s more meticulously produced with in some ways bigger productions, but I think there’s a lot of light in it. There’s lots of love. It’s one of those things that’s hard to talk about in music. I’m not trying to sound esoteric, but you’re talking about one of those things that’s innately esoteric. So it’s difficult to not go there.”
Playing with the Lonely Astronauts has been a revelation, both to him and his audiences. His solo shows held elements of performance art — pretty inescapable when you’re painting a huge canvas throughout the performance — but he was limited to what he could do with his voice and an inventive looping of his acoustic guitar. It was a neat trick, but the Lonely Astronauts, whom he put together to tour Nuclear Daydream, make him a rock star. Thank guitarist Jennifer Turner’s muscular leads in particular; the effect is like hearing Lou Reed’s rocked-up Velvet Underground songs on Rock and Roll Animal. Theirs is the rare show where it seems that anything is possible. When at the end of the Nuclear Daydream tour they began closing sets with the Stones’ “Miss You,” it felt less ironic than a celebration.
“It’s like a new inspiration, the band,” says Arthur. “It’s a genuine band that came together organically. It feels like a bonus to me, this chemistry that we all discovered. We started writing together, and there was this openness and a lot of fun, just a big spirit about the whole thing, which is what Let’s Just Be is all about, because we took all that crazy energy and went into the studio. That’s why we put that record out. And now we’re recording another band record, which I feel will be quite different.
