"It’s difficult to classify Josh Hedlund’s music because it is, in itself, unclassifiable. Filled with poetic, cryptic lyrics that he refuses to explain, Josh’s music is more than just rhyme schemes set to song. Raised by a good family in the rural mountains of the Northwest, he is more than just a man and a guitar. He is a folk singer, but not in the traditional three-chord sense. He is soft and emotional, but he’s not a “sad bastard” weeping through his verses. He’s indie without all the distracting hipness of indie. He is a singer-songwriter, but that has become so cliché of late, that there is no merit in the label anymore. Let’s just say if Josh wasn’t a musician, he’d be a painter, painting his canvases with the same flawed, ironic, twisting, beautiful sadness that bleeds from his songs. If he wasn’t a painter, he’d be a sculptor, or a poet, or a filmmaker working with the same themes, telling the same stories. In other words, Josh has chosen music to express his keyhole view to how he sees the world; which changes with each song, set list, and new day, but always carries with it the same honest integrity of an artist doing what he has to do, an artist letting what is inside come out pure. It’s no surprise that Josh hasn’t been "discovered" by humania yet. History is usually unkind to those innovative artists who dare to do something not to satiate a hunger already defined, but to continue creating what is inside of them, regardless of what the music industry or the audience demands. Josh’s influences and themes are a mixture of hunger, flawed people, lower class life, love, God, the changing seasons, truth, poverty, the changing small town in the dying West in which he lives, the group of talented muses around him, and his family. There is a delicate quality to the sounds he makes which commands an audience to shut up, to not stir the ice cubes in their drinks and chatter phones… it commands them all to listen, to close their eyes, to concentrate and hear what he has chosen to sing to them. Each pick of his strings and timber break of his voice, the way he holds his feet and sings out of the corner of his mouth, the pauses of breath and the perfectly timed progression of some chords I’ve never even heard of… each of them are individual ingredients that make up the greater form of this beautiful art that Josh has created out of the years and years spent alone in his bedroom, working and writing more than 500 songs and playing only a fraction of them to audiences always hungry for more. Like every true artist, he has endured slumps and gullies, depressions and shadows. He has wallowed through poverty and rejection and has played gigs at near-empty coffee houses just to pay for another week of groceries. Each of these trips into life’s forlorn corners adds another salty pinch of edge and honesty to his music, for at the base of everything, Josh’s music is extremely honest. That, in itself, elevates him above many of today’s artists in my eyes and that is also why his music will last beyond most of them. He plays not for fame or wealth or record labels… he plays because it is the only way to get that demon out into the world, he plays to let others see what he sees. I see it. It is beautiful. I encourage the rest of you to see it too."
Ben Olson - Author, photographer and freelance bum.
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