Joshua Path
Joshua Path began writing songs when he was in junior high school. But it wasn’t until he landed a gig as a camp song leader that he took his craft seriously. “I heard my songs being sung by the kids around camp,” recalls Path. “That’s when I realized I should give music a shot.”
After that pivotal summer, Path immediately formed a band and began recording demos, all the while polishing his live sound by performing in all the major clubs in the Los Angeles area. His standing-room-only shows landed him a guest spot on KROQ’s Loveline, along with punk rockers Bad Religion. “I had to be the most outrageous, since no one knew who the hell I was,” Path says.
Didn’t stay that way for long. His CDs garnered heaps of praise from the public as well as critics. “Path seems radio ready. And that’s meant in the most complimentary way possible,” said Splendid Magazine. Indie Music Magazine wrote, “Path manages to incorporate all the best elements of American pop music of the last three decades while simultaneously infusing it with his own deeply soulful, yet irreverent, style.”
With the release of his fourth CD, The Sugar Fields, Path was named one of the Top 100 Unsigned Artists by Music Connection. Not only that, but eight of his songs were featured in the indie film “Crutch,” directed by Rob Moretti and distributed by Illuminare Entertainment. He even received a song-by-song critique of The Sugar Fields by the Keymaster himself, Rick Moranis. “He used to be a D.J.,” says Path. “Who knew.”
Now, Joshua Path presents his fifth CD, Headlight In The Sun. Three years in the making, its fifteen songs were culled from over sixty. Blistering and edgy one minute, somber and melancholy the next, Headlight isn’t just the artist’s most accomplished CD, it’s also his most diverse. So diverse, in fact, Path considered splitting the CD into two separate ones: one consisting of rock songs, and one of ballads.
Yet it was co-producer and friend Curt Piar who convinced Path to combine the sounds onto one CD, pointing to the successes of such eclectic classics as The Beatles’ White Album and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. “These are albums that went from rock song to ballad to pop song,” says Path, “and it worked beautifully. They proved that albums don’t have to be the same song twelve times over.”
But choosing which songs to include - and which to leave on the cutting room floor - wasn’t easy. Path created over fifty different sequences of Headlight In The Sun. He even ditched a master from legendary Capitol Records after realizing the sequence was, in Path’s words, “utter shit.”
In the end, the final line-up of songs were based upon the following criteria: “Which ones sound the most real, and which ones could not be performed by James Blunt.”
To record Headlight, Path returned to Piar’s studio, Proving Ground, where Path has recorded his past four CDs. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), Proving Ground is located right across the street from the camp where Path first decided to become a singer/songwriter. “It’s like coming full circle every time I come here,” Path says.
Joshua Path lives in Los Angeles, California, with his cat, Carl, and his extremely noisy neighbors, Bo and Tom Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
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