Don’t hate me for that terrible headline. It is Punny and you know it!
I have honestly been on edge waiting for them to release something since last spring. I was able to meet Josiah on Albright College’s campus at a music business forum. As a panelist, Josiah described his experience as a musician and performed an acoustic set for us. He has a Bob Dylan approach to music business (down with the fat cat), but I’m sure you got that from “Six Dollar Check“.
While I enjoy his take on music business and as he said at the forum that his style of spreading music is by chucking a cd over someone’s fence, it seems like it is taking forever for the cd to get chucked over my fence.
A high-quality performance of Swing could be listened to on YouTube since March in this Live Nation feature “Ones to Watch” on the band and the song has been performed since 2014. The single is finally out and as happy as that makes me, (because that means his album should follow soon after) I’m wary of getting my hopes up that it will release within the next year. That’s my personal soapbox, now on to the music (which I love, I’m just impatient!).
The studio version of “Swing” is wonderful. It is even throughout and the melodic picking pattern stands out magnificently, accented by the steel guitar and the deep bass that truly carries the song. Josiah’s voice is also extremely clean and crisp. Josiah and the Bonnevilles undoubtedly put their heart in this song.
After listening to this studio version and seeing the band perform live twice, I think the band should consider creating a live album. The band is not only able to grab the audience’s heartstrings and pluck away, but Josiah’s voice live is ineffable (Don’t worry, I used Dictionary.com to pick ineffable as the perfect word for this sentence). You can even hear it a little bit in the Live Nation feature. Josiah doesn’t “perform”, he bears his heart and all it has suffered to us, and that is something that cannot be churned out of the popular music machine.
“Music I think is a soul connection, when a kid comes up and they say they have had an emotional moment with a song, that s a success.”
-Josiah Leming Provided Via: Live Nation feature
I know I have had that emotional feeling of being understood, how about you?
-Wesley A. Gehman