The following is a transcript of a dialogue between Josh Mays and J. Clark Hubbard, exploring music and art. That’s vague, but so’s the interview, so buckle up.
JM: I just read a book called Gold Nuggets. It’s by Osho. Do you know who that is?
JCH: Nope.
JM: He started a cult in India. He was a big teacher. He combined the science aspects of the West with, like, the spiritual aspects of the East, so he’s a really controversial figure. He’s the one from the Netflix documentary, Wild, Wild West.
JCH: Oh yeah!
JM: And so he like drives this Rolls-Royce and stuff and he moved to Oregon. And a bunch of people moved with him, and they could only wear red. And he just starts this green, self-sustainable in Oregon. And it’s great, but then they poison a bunch of people, and start shipping in a bunch of homeless people, and they drug them, and it’s a real great story. So anyway I read a book by him. Well, it’s a bunch of transcriptions of him talking. It’s called gold nuggets because he just gives little pieces of wisdom. So that’s what I’m going to do today. Give little pieces of cult wisdom.
JCH: Awesome. What’s the first song you remember hearing?
JM: Oh we’re going there. (laughs) I don’t remember which song it was specifically, but when were growing up, this is one of my earliest memories, when we were sick as little kids, my dad would take us down to living room and he would turn on Fernando Ortega. Do you know him? He’s like classical Christian artist. [Dad] would rock us back to sleep if we had fevers or something. Haven’t listened to a lot of Fernando Ortega recently because it makes me feel like I’m sick.
JCH: I had the same thing with lemon lime Gatorade because we drink it every time we had the stomach flu. So now that every time I taste anything like lemon lime Gatorade, then I feel like I have a stomach bug.
JM: Lemon lime Gatorade is my favorite too, but I haven’t drank it since Little League because it makes me think of coaches with four fingers on one hand, and lots of toxic masculinity and failure. I had a lot of recurring dreams at how poorly I did at Little League.
JCH: Did you know I couldn’t wear eye black when I play baseball because I cried every game? Every single game.
JM: Little league was not something that was good for me. I did make one good friend and we hung out on webkinz for a little bit.
JCH: What’s his or her name?
JM: Oh I have no idea. Lenny?
JCH: From Of Mice and Men?
JM: I don’t remember, honestly. Okay let’s go back. I’m talking in layers again. So Fernando Ortega. That’s the first kind of music that I remember hearing. and then songs that my parents Would sing me. We had a quilt to that would hang over my bed, and in each square there was a different animal: so like a teddy bear or a rabbit or something. My dad had a song for each one, and each night we would pick one and my dad would sing that song to us before we went to bed. So all of my childhood stuff is just stuff my parents played. A lot of Nicole Mullins. Do you know who that is?
JCH: Yeah, my Dad works in Christian radio so I know a lot of these random household names.
JM: Oh right. Good. Nicole Mullins is actually pretty good, but I never actually listened to anything by myself. It was just a lot of Nicole Mullins growing up.
JCH: Was there a time in middle school or high school when you found a band on the internet and you were like, “this is a band that I discovered and I did this?” Because I remember that time for me.
JM: Let me think about that for a minute. WOW 2008 for sure was the first time that I like, actively sought out music. That shaped the way that I viewed music for the rest of my life. Shout-out to WOW 2008. It’s great, got some good Relient K songs, got a great Jars of Clay song called Work. But probably the first time I felt that way… I didn’t really know how to buy music online, so I would just buy CDs and order them off Amazon, it would be easier just to download it, but I’m not very smart. So I would order these CDs and I would just have one CD for a while and I would listen to it a lot. Like Abbey Road was one of the first albums that I remember listening to, and then Forget and Not Slow Down was another one. Stuff like that, that I would order by myself in middle school. Then I started getting a lot of Christian metal that I discovered by myself.
JCH: what are some of those Christian metal bands?
JM: Disciple. A lot of Disciple albums. I bought a CD secretly at McKay’s, and it was the DragonForce, Inhuman Rampage. I hid it under my bed because every picture in it, they’re flipping the camera off, and I was like can’t have my parents seeing that. So I loaded it onto my MP3 player and I worked at the church library at the time, so when I was shelving books I would just put it on and listen to inhuman Rampage by DragonForce. And it turns out that every song sounds like Through the Fire and the Flames. But yeah, bands like that, because then it’s kind of divulging from anything your parents showed you, or anything you heard on the radio.
JCH: That was me with like the punk pop scene, because like late middle school early High School I found… I was on Pandora listening to something and I heard Welcome to the Black Parade. That clicked because I remembered hearing that in Middle school when it first came out. I only heard it one time, and I thought, that’s crazy. How do I remember the song from only hearing it one time, so that was a phase for me for a while. So you had a Christian metal kick. Did you ever listen to the older Christian rock or metal bands like Stryper, or White Heart or anything like that?
JM: I listen to some Stryper, but I never like bought a CD or anything like that. I mostly listened to them on YouTube. I made my mom listen to [metal] in the car. My mom went through a lot. One time we were listening to Disciple, and she said “do you really think they’re going to sing this and Heaven.” And I said “what? That hasn’t determine my music taste to this point. But maybe?” That’s what I said a lot. I said maybe. Maybe they’ll sing Disciple in heaven. Now I’m kind of hoping not.
JCH: you don’t think we’ll hear Disciple in heaven?
JM: I don’t know, I would have really mixed feelings.
JCH: isn’t that what the Book of Revelations is all about though?
JM: Kirk Cameron was right!
(both of us laugh)
JCH: when did you start playing music of any kind? Forced, or by yourself.
JM: I started playing recorder really early. See, you start out with the precorder which is a little gray recorder that collects way more spit than a normal recorder. And then you move up. So Mrs. Jackie Shellabarger was my teacher. Then we moved on to the recorder. We had this little belt that we would attach to it and you’d have different beads that you could put on it every time you master the song, so it was like karate. And Mrs. Shellabarger would be like, oh you earned your black belt because you’ve learned how to play mr. Sandman.
JCH: (Vocalizes some chords from Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”)
JM: (Singing) Mr. Sandman! Bring me a dream!
JCH: oh that Mr. Sandman. I was thinking enter the sandman.
JM: Oh those are very different (laughs). But sometimes she would do this bit, that wasn’t really a bit for her. she just thought this was an appropriate thing to say to this to these children. any time that we would be playing while she was talking, she would just get really intense and go “who’s tooting?” And we would all just lose it every time. And she’d been doing this for like 15 years and had never caught on. Jackie, come on, you know? She just baited us you know? So Lucas is in the corner, who stole my rescue heroes VHS and never gave it back. it was When It Rains, It Pours…
JCH: I have that episode on VHS at home.
JM: No.
JCH: I’ll try and bring it sometime.
JM: No please do that, for real. That would bring a lot of joy to me. Anyways, so Lucas is in the corner, and he toots. Miss Jackie’s like “who’s tooting?” And we always lose it. She can’t keep order.
And then finally you progressed up to dulcimer. We would build our own dulcimer, which was cool, and then you play dulcimer. I finished that and my sisters had all learned how to play piano, but I didn’t want to learn how to play piano, so my parents got me a guitar and I learned for like a year from this high schooler who taught me G and C and we would play worship songs. But I didn’t really want to do that. So, we ended up finding a new teacher named Zane Turner, and he ended up teaching me through middle school and all of high school. So we started out, I was in a classical guitar class with him, and I would never practice cuz it was boring. so that just never… but once that class ended, we just got him as like a private teacher to come over to my house once a week and do that and he would just let me learn whatever I wanted to and then it just clicked.
He wrote instrumental metal. He was trained as a classical musician and a jazz musician so there was this like insane amount of technicality and brilliance in all his music so he would teach me how to play all these songs and we’d start out slow and- I’m terrible at guitar right now, I’ve lost all the skills that I had, but I was playing some really intense stuff, and it was just really cool. I could bring whatever songs I wanted him to teach me. He was a really big mentor in my life, taught me how to record.
JCH: So what are the different projects that you’ve been involved in, especially like let’s talk high school and then College. Musically.
JM: I led worship through all of high school and didn’t like it. I don’t like leading worship at all. Cuz you have to perform, and worship is a weird thing to perform and I’m just not very good at it. We called ourselves Just Us Guys. I don’t remember why. And then in high school, my best friend Dylan and I started a band. He was super into Underground Music, really into hardcore, punk, emo, stuff like, that and he would burn me mixtapes of stuff and that’s why I’m into that sort of music still today. So our favorite hardcore band The Chariot broke up, and we went to the last show. It was the first show I’d ever been to outside of like winter Jam. And so the first show that I went to I crowd-surfed, I stage-dived, I moshed. It was incredible. So we decided we got to carry on in their footsteps and make a hardcore band. So my friends Dylan and John and I all met at my house in our living room and within like 5 minutes we realized we couldn’t be a hardcore band. So we became like this weird angsty emo thing. We called the band Sister Josephine.
Dylan was just a machine. I mean he can make songs a few songs of week. Just incredibly impressive, and it would take me like a month to get a good song. so he’s working at a much faster pace. We would go on like these choir Retreats, cuz we were in homeschool choir together, and we would sit on a dock by the lake, would write all these songs and stuff and we’d show people and I thought we were so cool. They’d say “oh you sound like Brand New.” And we sounded nothing like Brand New, but we just ate it up and said like, okay we’ll take that.
So sister Josephine eventually dissolved before we recorded anything, thank God. It was angsty. Like the lyrics were real bad.
JCH: Do you remember any of the lyrics?
JM: Well Dylan wrote all the lyrics. But the problem is that there was cursing. So we were like 15 year-olds, and I’m thinking my mom, sweet Karen Mays, can’t hear this in a song. And we ended up sitting down with Dylan and being like, you’ve got to censor your songs. And he got mad and he still hangs that over our heads to this day. And we got into a little bit of a fight. And then our drummer left so we just dissolved.
JCH: isn’t that just like a drummer?
JM: Isn’t that just like a drummer. God you’re right. So sister Josephine, then it was always really hard in high school to get music going. So I came to college and was sitting on a pretty good amount of music, and started Free Space, a bedroom pop band with Abi Brown, and that went well. Took us one semester to record an album by ourselves, put it on Bandcamp, then just played shows for a good while. We would send albums to online magazines all the time, get little reviews, and stuff like that. We still get messages on the page sometimes from people saying “oh I love your music,” or trying to book us or something like that, which is funny cuz we’re not a band anymore. It’s fun because you can see that you can just put music out on the internet and not do a whole lot with it and people still find it. Cuz like, it’s not great. Real rough recordings. But people message us all the time, saying this means a lot to us or something like that. And you can see your music actually starting to take shape.
I continued sitting on a lot of material that I’ve written for my own project and eventually named it Signs Following. That’s what I have now, I’m recording drums next week, and I’ll finally release the EP that I started working on four years ago. I have another EP and a full album that I’m sitting on as well. And that’s been pretty much all the projects, this one’s going to be very meaningful because it’s just me writing. It’s been a long time coming.
JCH: How do you feel like your different projects have changed you, driven you, or changed or altered friendships or the way you look at things?
JM: I think all of them work together and build off of each other in a really interesting way, where each one shows me more of what I can do than the last one did. So in Sister Josephine, I was too nervous to write lyrics or to sing on it. For Signs Following I was going to get other people to sing. I was never going to sing on a record, because I don’t like my voice. But then when it came down to it, I couldn’t get anything done with anybody else. So after Sister Josephine I started writing my own lyrics and began to sing. Then Free Space kind of solidified that, that I could become a lead singer, and that I could release music with lyrics that I’d written. So each one kind of builds confidence more than anything, and kind of led up to now. I think that’d be the way that they affected me the most. Even if none of them came to fruition, they still influenced Signs Following or future projects.
JCH: That’s interesting that you didn’t want to be like a lead singer. I think most musicians want to be lead singer. Like in high school the only time I ever sang was for my little brother’s band, where I just sang Weezer songs.
JM: The first local show I ever went to was a Weezer cover band. A Weezer/Brand New cover band. It was a good time.
JCH: So you didn’t like the way your voice sounded?
JM: No, I still don’t. I think it’s a lot more vulnerable than other instruments. Cuz if you’re behind a guitar you can be like “yeah I messed up” if it doesn’t sound great, but if it’s your voice it’s your voice. Same with lyric writing. I think that my music would be a lot better if I had a better voice. But a big theme is that—there’s a lot of things that I’m uncomfortable with with Signs Following— but kind of the big theme of signs following has been using what I have at my disposal, regardless of whether it’s the best. So this first EP is going to be recorded a lot worse than the next EP, because I don’t have the best equipment. But you can easily see the growth as music continues to be released. I have the mics I had at the time, I used the pedals that I had at the time, I used my voice cuz I don’t have anybody else to do it. when I release the album I’m going to have a zine that’s released with it: just a bunch of photography with a disposable camera because it’s what I have at the time. That’s the theme that runs with the music. You’ll be able to see it grow as I get experience and new equipment and things like that. That’s kind of been a way to be able to accept that I don’t have all the resources that I’ll have in the future, and be able to kind of document my growth.
JCH: Why do you think—I don’t want to ask why do you write music, cuz that’s cliche…
JM: It’s just in my soul
JCH: But, what do you feel, when you write a song or perform it for a bunch of people?
JM: I feel horrible. It’s terrible. When I played my first show going in I had a huge- I just shut down. I couldn’t eat all day. It’s not a big deal, it’s just a show, and now I enjoy performing, but everytime I record, I feel really inadequate and bad. Like I get negative feelings when I perform and record music. Which is probably not good. Later on, it’s a lot more positive and even euphoric finishing a song or finally releasing it. I think that boils down to a lot of my insecurities, cuz I’ll record something and I’m too hard on myself about the quality. Or I’ll perform and I’m too hard about it and I’m too hard on myself about the mistakes I made. the process gives me a lot of negative emotions and the end result gives me a lot of satisfaction. More than I get in any other area of my life. It feels very self-actualizing. It feels very satisfying. I know musicians always say they can’t pick a favorite song, they’re all their children but you spend a lot of time with it and you spend time thinking about it, just outside of writing it, and you’re always thinking about songs in your head, jotting down little lyrics that you want to use later, so it means more to me than it’s ever going to mean anybody else. And that kind of keeps it going. You don’t mind the negative feelings because you know that it’s going to be worth it.
JCH: Is there a point when you’re writing a song when you know that it’s working? Is there like a click almost like you know “this is a song?”
JM: Yeah, and the worst thing is when you really really want it to work and it just won’t. Like that happened earlier this semester. I spent a few weeks just really trying to force the song into existence because I’d written these two really good lines and I was like “these have to make it into a song because they’re so good.” And it just wouldn’t work. And it sounded so much not like something that I would right. But I kept it around just in case and I was trying to figure it out.
Later, I was playing around on my guitar and I was listening to a lot of The Microphones. Do you know them? Do you know Mount Eerie? Mount Eerie: saddest band in the world. Before Mount Eerie, the lead singer was in a band called The Microphones. So I was playing off of a riff that they were doing, and that ended up with me kind of writing one of my own that has a similar tone to it. I started writing lyrics, and it’s flowing really well. And I’m just laying in my bed with my phone for a little while just writing, writing, writing, and I started incorporating all these themes that I wanted to be in the song, and then the song ends up changing completely. It just stops. It’s real soft, and then it stops and then it gets really big. Then there’s lots of guitars and trumpets and stuff like that. And I’m trying to think, okay now, I want to switch up the flow of the lyrics, and then I look back at those old lyrics of the song I’d been trying to force and they just worked perfectly and they worked even better than they worked in the last song. And then you’re just flying. That was such a good feeling. I kind of just realized how I need to stop forcing songs and just let it happen more frequently. That was such a good moment. This is been a good month. I ended up bringing back an old Free Space song that never got recorded and ended up using it for a Signs Following song. I probably played both of those songs everyday in my dorm for the past couple weeks because I just love them both so much. As I was writing them it just clicked and it felt incredible.
JCH: I was asking that because I often feel that click with poetry or short stories.
JM: Do you ever feel like you’re trying to force it?
JCH: Yeah.
JM: Do you ever like it when you do?
JCH: No, not really.
JM: It’s hard to let go of some things.
JCH: They look cool, or they work alright, but there’s just something missing from them. All the parts are there but the whole just doesn’t work.
JM: Have you ever used elements of those and Incorporated them into poetry that you’ve written later? Or do you just kind of let them die.
JCH: I have a section on my phone, it’s a graveyard basically.
JM: No yeah I have a secret SoundCloud.
JCH: Interesting. Yeah I keep them around. I’ve always thought what is music writing like and I think there’s a lot of similar elements in there.
JM: I approached it a lot more lyrically, and so very similar I suppose. I haven’t written much poetry but I’m sure it’s it’s pretty similar
JCH: Yeah sure. I might try and team up with Isaac, my little brother, and I could write the lyrics and he could do the music.
JM: Yeah! Do that Elton John and whatever that other guy’s name is sort of thing. Sorry I don’t know his name. He’s probably a wonderful man.
JCH: as far as college and post-graduation what do you want to do with music? What do you want to do with your songs or with your albums?
JM: College is great in one sense because you have a lot of people who are good at music who will do it for free. So we have the drum kit in the dorm, and Luke will help me figure out rhythms and things like that. I just texted somebody, can you say cold-texted? I cold-texted him cuz he plays trumpet. And I said “I know I don’t know you, but would you be interested in playing trumpet on some of my songs?” And he said “yeah, let’s meet up next semester and get that recorded.”
And so in one sense, you have a lot of resources around you, and it’s great. But on the other hand, a lot of my friends are touring right now. because of school I have to miss a tour up to Chicago that my friends wanted me to play with them. One of my friends has been to Asia twice instead of going to college.
Post-graduation is going to look like me doing music almost exclusively. Working manual labor jobs to pay off my loans. But it’s going to be incredibly dedicated to music, really trying to get Signs Following off the ground. Hopefully by the time I graduate, I will have the full length out, and be able to play off that and start touring with it. That’s the goal at least. To live that life for a little bit.
Josh Mays is a junior conservation biology major and is currently releasing music under the name Signs Following. Some of his music is on Bandcamp here, or you can just listen closely when the wind dies down, and hear him making music in his dorm room.
