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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Josh Aran: A world-weary 27-year-old
Wednesday 28 July @ 16:53:02 |
 by Rob van Alstyne
The number of musicians who have mined captivating albums out of painful life experience in the annals of pop history numbers somewhere roughly in the tens of thousands. The Twin Cities’ own Josh Aran and his self-released sophomore release, Between Us There Arose Happiness, can now be added to that count.
Download Josh Aran's song High Like Atmosphere.
A meditation on love (searched for, found and subsequently lost), every minute of Aran’s lengthy album (which stretches to nearly an hour in length) is imbued with a world weary sadness one wouldn’t expect from a 27-year-old. As it turns out, far more than romantic matters were weighing on Aran’s mind during the album’s creation.
 “The record has a pretty sordid history because, over the course of recording and mixing the album, Justin [Korhonen, the album’s producer and drummer] went through a divorce and I lost my dad to cancer,” explains Aran. “So we both had a lot of things going on that kind of delayed the project for different periods of time. It took about a year to completely record because of all those things going on in our lives.”
Recorded in spurts during the midst of this personal turmoil, Between Us There Arose Happiness is a palpably dread-filled record. It’s easy to be fooled by Aran’s rich smooth voice and the stately adult-rock arrangements of the album (a close companion to the work of critical darling artists like Josh Rouse and Ron Sexsmith), but underneath all the bells and whistles is a singer desperately searching for meaningful connections … and rarely finding them. Amidst the slick beds of various warm keyboard beds and deftly played acoustic guitars usually lurk disturbing sentiments (“I awaited heaven and you were just a girl … when we make love you say we fuck / what do you want?”).
It’s a great trick, and one for which Aran and his host of studio collaborators (which includes Erik Appelwick of Vicious Vicious and Olympic Hopefuls on bass/keyboard duties) deserves serious credit. Finding the right balance of sounds on the sonically rich Between Us… would ultimately be Aran’s most difficult task.
“I really think taking the times to revisit things and laboring over them was key to the record,” admits Aran. “The important thing is being able to recognize that gut instinct of when the song is finally complete. Because I don’t really have a band per se it’s very much a songwriting process of figuring out what layers to place on the songs. I really think to do it right you have to revisit it from time to time. You want to listen to it in the studio, you want to listen to it in your car, then you want to put it down for a week and pick it back up again and see what you’re hearing the second time. You just kind of gather together all of those different reactions and decide whether you want to let it go or not. It really helps to be working with the right people because it’s really easy to second-guess yourself. If you have the right relationship with the people you’re working with on the album that’s worth everything. Because inevitably you’re going to want to tear their head off at some point during the process, just as much as you’re going to want to give them a big old hug.”
The labor-intensive process reaped serious dividends for Aran, with the end result being a singer/songwriter record too adventurous to be relegated to mere coffeehouse background status. “I Await You” begins with a simple arpeggiated electric guitar pattern and Aran’s calm croon before being joined by a propulsive bass line, hyper-active drum kit and skittery electric guitar counterpoint. The final product is sped-up electric folk-pop that can’t be easily classified. Nearly every other track on Between Us… shows similar ingenuity and tasteful arranging skills. On one track a stirring violin solo (“Untitled”), the next an expertly shading piano line (“Say Goodbye”).
The whole affair is surprisingly epic for a self-released local pop album, and does admittedly come dangerously close to being a bit overwrought and slick at times. On the whole, however, the execution of Between Us… lives up to its obviously large-scale ambition, which is far from an easy accomplishment.
Aran holds no illusions about the mass commercial prospects for an independent introspective singer/songwriter, even one with a keen eye for wide-lens pop songs, and for now is focused on more immediately tangible goals.
“The only concern for me is always just the reality of money,” admits Aran. “You hope you can sell enough records to make enough cash that you can go in and make another one. That’s really the only concern. Even if you don’t want to, you find yourself sort of clinging a little bit to a good review in an online zine or something, and not for the ego-stroking sort of thing as much as knowing that your connecting with someone. A lot of people do music for the feeding of the ego or to work towards stardom or whatever, and I don’t want to sound self-righteous or anything, but the most important thing for me is being able to connect with people in a different way than most people get the chance to. Most people connect with someone by going to a store and purchasing soft soap or something, that’s the kind of interaction they have, completely transactional. I really hunger for having a certain human connection with people through my music. Even if it’s just playing a live show and having one person go up to me after and say they liked it, that’s great. There’s no money being exchanged between us, there’s no obligations, it’s just a shared human experience.”
Josh Aran plays on Sat., July 31, at Fine Line Music Cafe with Wayside, Damascus Mile, Cathode Rae and 40 Watt Bulb. 8 p.m. $6. 21+. 318 First Ave. N., Mpls. 612-338-8100.
You can find out more about Josh Aran on his official website.
Download an mp3 of Josh Aran’s song High Like Atmosphere.
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