His hair is long. It’s really long and blonde. In fact, he’s reached “mermaid status,” as he puts it, since his hair is now long enough to reach below his breast. He has multiple piercings through his nose and ears, and a black cross tattooed on his index finger. Joshua Powell grew up on the coast of central Florida, which is a much different climate in a number of ways from the snow-banked Indianapolis neighborhood that he currently calls home.
I have known him since I was in the second grade, and I can remember him swinging me in circles by my arms in the sanctuary of the chapel in our small Christian school. Joshua’s dad was the headmaster, and later my own dad became the upper school principal. I remember going out on the Powell’s family boat and sleeping on their couch as our parents talked late into the night. Joshua was much older than me and we lived different lives, but our families stayed close.
Joshua is now 26 and graduated from Anderson University in Indiana with a degree in Music Business and Writing. He has since seen many aspects of the music industry, from leading worship during chapel for our grade school to playing shows with his band all across the country.
Joshua Powell and the Great Train Robbery is the name of Joshua’s indie-folk band. His earlier music from 2013 taps into the heartbeat of America, with songs like “Principles of Salt,” talking about the discontentment of the American Dream. Most of his songs are political or socially conscious at the least, he just hides it behind reverb and falsetto.
But Joshua’s reason for making music isn’t simple. It’s almost a part of him that allows himself to know himself and produce something he feels led to create.
“I realized early on in my practicing-Blink-182-guitar-riffs-in-my-laptop-bedroom days that I could think of a song and actualize it the way I heard it in my head,” Powell said. “My biological chemistry leans abstract, expressionist, ideological. I believe in a cosmic order, and that whatever forced our molecular makeup to be un-random created these “selves” in kind: as re-interpreters of matter. Simply I guess you could say we’re created to be creators. I’m naive enough to believe that ideas in art can draft the wind of social change, and I believe in an inverted Jesusian social order, so art for me is twofold: a process of self-actualization in which I work out my own values and ideas and catharsis as I examine the diamond-cuts of my delusional self, while attempting to contribute to the architecture of the spiritual order I am striving to embody in this world, art as my weird gentle all-feeling rhetorical sidearm.”
You can almost see this desire to know himself throughout the production of his albums. As Joshua changes, the albums change.
After his American-made “good old boy” album, Traveler, he moved away from banjo tunes, and debuted Man is Born for Trouble in late 2013, an album that still contains non-country Western Frontier feels, but also brings in more electric guitar and heavier drums. The rawness of “Parable from Calcutta” starts with harmonious and slightly distorted vocals from Joshua. As he reinvents this Indian parable, electricity rolls in from behind, as drums hit from all sides, and within the first sixty seconds of the song, Joshua has transformed his style.
However, Joshua can’t help his love for acoustic and symphonic poetry, which displays itself in his fifth song on the track, “In Frozen Lake.” He wrote this song when on a tour with his college choir in Europe, and the harmonic rhythm is matched with a layer of tone from Joshua’s descriptions of the people that live in the area.
But then Joshua changed everything in 2015, when he hit his audience with “Alyosha,” a name that is an unashamed nod toward Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov.” This album immediately starts with a fluid and enigmatic electric guitar riff as an introduction to “Gunfighter Ballad for the 21st Century,” a song that aptly displays Joshua’s talent and diverse musical ability.
This album not only highlights Joshua’s musicality, but also shines the spotlight on his younger brother, Jacob, who blessed the tracks with his polished and textured drumming.
Thanks to Jacob, this album leaves the listener percussion-soaked as the songs break for a five second drum solo, and then rushes back into a clean yet brilliant chorus from Joshua.
The ninth track on the album, “Ernest Hemingway,” is the best example of this when in the middle of the song, Joshua has built up the listener with intense drumming and thrilling instrumentation. Then it all breaks down to one guitar riff with heavy drums in the background, leaving the satisfied listener with a head-bob they can’t resist.
The album is hot, chart-topping, cleverly written, and cohesive. It’s an album you just have to buy on vinyl, because you couldn’t forgive yourself if you didn’t endow your collection with Joshua Powell’s voice. The whole album will leave you saturated with reverb, but also invokes introspection.
Joshua’s music has an interesting draw from an array of acoustic touch and rock roots, that has morphed into his newest musical endeavor, PSYCHO/TROPIC.
He has since moved away from the name “Joshua Powell and the Great Train Robbery,” for a simpler feel with just “Joshua Powell,” a band that has its feet deeply sunken into the ground of psychedelic rock.
But as I stated before, as Joshua changes, the albums change.
“We picked the name “the Great Train Robbery” purposefully to evoke the spirit of FOLK. I built a sonic brand into the nomenclature when I was probably 19. Which was short-sighted. Your entire body is cellularly regenerated every seven years or something, right? So, no part of my body that was the person that made our first record is the same as the body of me right now who is making this one.”
Although this switch is somewhat necessary and needed, Joshua says it still isn’t easy. In some sense he’s stripping away the title of the band only to reveal himself.
“ I am saying things on “PSYCHO/TROPIC” I have been afraid of saying before because I know my parents will hear it. I know people from the church where I grew up will hear it. And I don’t want to burn bridges with anybody in the world. But I do want to put my truest self into my hardest work, and so as I now stand naked in front of the world with only my own name on my work, if you don’t like it, that’s okay: you just don’t like me. And you can’t be liked by everyone. I am done self-censoring because I don’t think artists who do that move paradigms.”
Joshua recently played a house show at my parent’s house in Medina in late February. It was an intimate and small audience, which allowed Joshua to play us some of his newer music that will be released on PSYCHO/TROPIC. Between witty remarks and stories about his time on the road, Joshua entertained us with his sometimes mythical, sometimes ethereal music. It’s definitely different, as he pulled out his phone to play the background synthesizer to match his guitar, something you wouldn’t have seen on his older albums.
In some ways I think this medium was created out of an effort to simulate the psychedelic experience, especially since the 1960’s gave birth to a number of bands like Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, and The Velvet Underground—all bands that have a foothold in the psychedelic rock world.
But Joshua doesn’t completely leave his roots, as there are a few songs that are akin to his earlier acoustic melodies.
Joshua hopes PSYCHO/TROPIC will release around August. There is still a lot of work to do, so as of now there is no set release date.
But there are videos of his new music on YouTube to keep you entertained in the meantime.
