For episode 32 of the podcast, we chatted to Joshua Hedley about the inspiration behind ‘Mr Jukebox,’ touring the UK and the evolution of his music.
You’re less than a month out from the UK tour, are you excited to be back?
I am, yeah, it’s going to be fun, I feel like I was just there but I’m excited to be coming back.
Is it a big part of what you want to do, being over here in the UK and Australia, getting your music out there, rather than just in America?
Oh yeah, for sure, I want to play everywhere, I want to play Japan, I want to play India, I want to play everywhere.
I feel like we can’t really talk about your debut album, without a bit of context, so you first came to the industry for many years playing the fiddle, and playing the bar scene. Did you think for many years that that would sort of be it, or did you always think you’d release an album in your own right?
No, I was just going to play at Robert’s forever, that was my plan. When I moved to Nashville, I moved to Nashville to play the bars, and my plan was always to not have to have a real job, to make enough money just playing music and that’s what I was doing, and I was happy, and all of this sort of just fell into my lap…
You settled quite quickly into the Nashville scene, playing at Tootsies’s? How did that happen, given that some people struggle for so many years before finding their place? I know a lot of people sort of struggle for many years but you settled right in?
Yeah, I started visiting Nashville when I was 12 in the summertime, and I would get up at the bars in the afternoon and sit in with my fiddle. I met one guy who was playing at Tootsie’s, his name was Jessie Taylor, and I reckon I was probably about 15 or 16 and he said, ‘hey if you ever move here, you know you’ve got a gig,’ and I called him a few years later. I don’t think he thought I’d ever take him up on that, but he gave me a gig when I moved to town.
And I’m obsessed with the sound of your record, it’s really got that feeling of nostalgia. Do you sort of gravitate towards the older country music, is that something you grew up with or has it just always been that thing you naturally gravitate towards?
Yeah, I’ve always felt most connected to that sound and the subject matter of the songs and stuff. I grew up playing it and I think because I grew up in that bar scene playing those cover songs, that when it came time for me to write my own songs, that’s what came out because that’s what I had studied and I didn’t know anything else.
And I know people have defined your sound as ‘Outlaw Country”… do you like that definition or do you prefer just country? Because it is just country and I don’t know when we sort of erected these random boundaries?
Well, first of all, it’s like there’s no such thing as outlaw country anymore, except for Willie Nelson and Billy Joe Shaver and Bobby Bare, they’re still alive. Outlaw country came from rebellion, it came from artists like Willie and Waylen fighting for the right to use their own band in the studio and record their own songs and stuff, and I don’t have to make that plaint today because they already did it. I’m kind of making the same music that they were rebelling against, so it’s so funny to me to have my sound described as ‘outlaw.’ And I’m not an outlaw by any means, if I’m not on the road, I’m usually at my house smoking weed, that’s my life, it’s not very outlaw.
Going back to talking about your album, do you feel, because you’d had so many years in the industry and obviously made so many contacts, I know Skylar Wilson and Jordan Lenning produced your record… do you feel that you sort of knew, a. what kind of record you wanted to make and b. it was almost like you’d already created that network of people you knew would understand you – do you sort of count yourself lucky that it sort of came later, after you’d already had so many years in the industry?
Yeah, for sure, I was lucky enough to make a lot of friends playing, and Skylar is one of the first friends I made when I moved to town, so I’ve known him forever and we worked together with Justin Townes Earle. A lot of the band on the record is a band called Steelism, and it was just a bunch of us who like playing together, so when I made the phone calls I didn’t have to make too many phone calls. It was nice because I have some good friends.
Did you have a concept going into the record for ‘Mr Jukebox’, or was it just a collection of songs that summed you up, if that makes sense?
I have a full vision of kind of everything I want to do, I don’t know why, I don’t know how it happened. When I was writing ‘Don’t Waste Your Tears,’ I had the string part in my head while I was writing it, and of course, the first recording of that is on this EP I made for Australia. There’s no strings on it and when we made ‘Mr Jukebox’ we used that same track from the EP, but we added some strings to it, and remixed it and you know that was sort of the first time I got to see my vision played out. I know exactly what I want to do, I have a full, confident vision of what I want to do, so we’ll see how it plays out.
Yeah, a musical sixth sense… And you’ve said before that you kind of wanted to make a short and sweet record, why was that important to you not to have this mammoth collection?
Well I think country songs in general are just naturally short. That’s something Justin Townes Earle actually said to me a long time ago, when we were making ‘The Good Life,’ that record is also really short and he said he wanted to make a record that people could listen to the whole thing on their way to work, and that always stuck with me. When we had our release show in Nashville, I had a couple come up, they came out from Memphis, which is about three, three and a half hours away with stops, and he said ‘Man we listened to your record the whole way there, we listened to it like four times.’
And did you have a lot of the songs already in hand and was it a case of just filling it out, or did you have all the songs ready?
Erm, I had all the songs ready by the time we were going to record the record, but I wrote a lot in between the EP and the record, I quit drinking, and I just started writing, and by the time it came down to start doing pre-production for the record I had about twenty songs.
My final question was just, have you thought much about album two or what’s up next, or is it just a question of getting songs out on the road and seeing the response and then going from there?
We’re talking a couple of projects here, we’re actually going to get in the studio in a couple of weeks and start working on a new project. It’s not album two yet but it’s something that people are going to really like, like an appetiser for album two.