Review Fix Exclusive: Joshua Powell Talks ‘Psycho/Tropic’ And More

Review Fix chats with singer/songwriter Joshua Powell of Joshua Powell & the Great Train Robbery, who discusses the creative process for the band’s new album, Psycho/Tropic.

About the Band:

In their busiest year yet, Joshua and co. tucked Audiofeed, Mile of Music, Hollerfest, DZ Fest, and Virginia Ave Music Fest under their belt, recorded a session at Chicago Music Exchange, scored spots on Spotify’s “Indie Acoustic” and “Writer’s Playlist,” and continued to tear up the American interstate. Enlivening their kaleidoscopic record with a live show equal parts dive bar grit rock fury and poetic ethereal joy, Powell and his band are a groovy, metaphor-rich force with which to be reckoned, forever and ever, world without end.

Review Fix: How did you get involved in music?

Joshua Powell: When I spontaneously emerged from the muck of the south florida swamps, I already had a broken banjo in my clawed hand. And by that I mean, my parents are musical people. I used to hammer out Bach’s 2 and 3 Part Inventions on a cheap, beautiful piano in the living room. Then you know, classic story: the drummer at your church youth group burns you a New Found Glory mix and you start dying your hair black, a bad look against your weird-for-the-South pale skin. And you identify the same spiritual id in punk and in jazz and in hip hop, and finally so many years later you realize everything is actually rock ‘n roll. So, I was swaddled in the blog in back of a Fender tube amp and have been breaking strings with feverish joy for my whole life. This band is just the truest shape I’ve shifted into so far. 

Review Fix: What performers inspire you the most?

Powell: I remember seeing Shawn Harris with The Matches open for +44 which was the first secular show I saw in high school. He wore plaid bell bottoms and dragged his straight mic stand around stage as he ran, like a rabid goblin of pure emotion. I remember being subsequently underwhelmed by the headliner’s comparative staid-ness, and have worked to channel that ever since. I once wept at a Phantogram show while dreaming of being able to wear a jacket like Sarah Barthel’s, and then realizing that anyone can, it just takes the moxxie. When I saw Lomelda play her Texan bedroom shredders at the Ladies’ Literary Club in Michigan, I vowed not to play solo again until I could do so in as compelling an idiom as her own. And I’ve been inspired by the visual art community of Indianapolis, which is burgeoning in a not-insignificant way. 

Review Fix: What’s on your musical bucket list?

Powell: I’ve seen a hundred bands I like play on late night shows, and almost every performance has some strange lackluster mono-dimensionality to it that bums me out. I know performing to a seated audience in a tv studio has to feel weird, but I’d like to play SNL or Conan or something some day and just truly kick its ass. Like Sturgill Simpson did. I’m also actively working to template James Blake’s cross-genre meanderings. I’m in love with the hip hop community in this city (and in general) and any time an artist in that groove allows me to have some small fingerprint on their work, it’s a tremendous honor and joy. So I’m working toward that.  

Review Fix: Goals for 2019?

Powell: We’ve ramped up the caliber of the stage show for our new record and we’re over the moon to take the new show back out on the road. Our fans recently totally backed our campaign to raise funds for a tour van, and we want to go connect with all those people now that they’ve blessed us with this huge asset. We’re on some festival bills I’m very excited about but can’t announce yet. And very soon, we’ll be launching a pre-order for PSYCHO/TROPIC on some very cool psychedelic boutique vinyl. 

Review Fix: What inspired Psycho/Tropic?

Powell: A deep psychological evaluation of personal family dynamics. A new age of dismantling sacerdotal tropes that pavilioned my tenderfoot weltanschauung, contributing richly to my inner life and para-academic disciplines. A walk on a pebble beach in Olympia, Washington with my friend Levi. The exultantly impressionistic contrast of Jodorowskian surrealism. Deaths. The wilting political landscape. And Kendrick Lamar. 

Review Fix: How would you describe your sound to someone who has never heard you?

Powell: Imagine you just completed your FMA thesis and then dropped acid. Then you wandered past mirror-water into a pothole that extended to the earth’s center, where you found your soulmate in a new god poem written by a cat. That cat is sipping black coffee and listening to a Hendrix record and an MF Doom record simultaneously in a way that they sync up. 

I mean, shoot y’all, it’s a little like if Volcano Choir and CSNY had a baby that binged on Flannery O’Connor stories and Twin Peaks reruns.

Review Fix: Bottom line, what makes you special?

Powell: Everybody’s special, right? Or no one is? Can those two exist at the same time? I’m obsessed with the competent feelings that exist in the venn diagram between art and intellect. I’m a student of literature, but I’m also a punk at heart. I want to make records that are mellow and immersive, that build worlds, that have a dozen different semantic and aural layers, that bear repeated headphone listens and annotated commentaries. But playing that live is a pretty sapped vibe–I grew up in hardcore, and that little thrash metal baby born deep in my bowels never moved out. I think we’ve built this new batch of songs with an elasticity that makes them effective dimensional vessels for the real spirit of the work. 

Review Fix: What next?

Powell: We’re releasing a follow-up single and video to PSYCHO this year that we recorded at Postal Recording in Indianapolis thanks to a grant from Fourth Sunday Music Co. We have new merch coming out designed by Jason Spencer, a madman artist out of St. Louis soon. And we’re taking a long weekend in May to sequester ourselves alone together in a little farmhouse in Illinois to begin making something bigger, weirder, more intricate, and more collaborative than we’ve ever tried.

Review Fix: Anything else you’d like to add?

Powell: Sure, here’s a poem I wrote last week:

Cobra King of Lakes

Dad lets loose the leather of
slingshot surgical tube and

the North Carolinian lake

lets itself explode in a 

lapse in its eminent modesty

In the lingering lineation of

that target you 

see the 

contortionist twist, lithe laid-

back through 

a marbling

cacophony of pebbles,

batting the BBs away with

the power of the serpentine mind

You figure that heroes are 

a human idea, only and faulty