Plug and Play

Joshua Marcus persuaded four dozen musicians and visual artists to help Reverse the Charges.

by John Vettese

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Published: May 13, 2008

Michael T. Regan BIG FAN OF FRIENDS: For his new CD, Joshua Marcus says he wanted to work with "everybody I've ever met in the 10 years I've been playing music." (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

It doesn't take long in conversation to notice the ways in which Joshua Marcus nonchalantly makes the commonplace seem unconventional.

When he refers to his relationship with West Philly puppeteer and visual artist Beth Nixon, she's not "my girlfriend" but rather "my partner" — a shared role, not a possessive one.

Discussing the imminent extended break of his band, Fan of Friends, Marcus explains it's because cellist Chelsea Thompson is "about to give birth," a state of anticipation, instead of "pregnant," a state of being. 

This outlook carries across to Marcus' music, where somber meditations become comedies, where a banjo trill upstages a guitar strum and where making a record becomes a communal collaboration.

"People who have heard it so far are like wow, this is amazing, I can't believe you arranged this," Marcus says of his latest, Reverse the Charges, out earlier this week on High Two Records/Contraphonic. "But I didn't really arrange the music as much as I arranged the friends who played on it."

The music, as it were, arranged itself.

Marcus made his 2006 solo debut, Make Believe, with a roster of fellow Philadelphia musicians like Jack Ohly and Amy Pickard. The positive reception received by the short record of banjo ballads and plaintive harmonies encouraged Marcus to try again on a bigger scale. For his follow-up, he wanted to work with "everybody I've ever met in the 10 years I've been playing music." It was a bit of an overstated goal, but one nonetheless yielding three dozen musicians and another dozen visual artists — including Nixon, whose Magical Land sculpture appears on the cover.

Marcus wrote the album with this collaborative approach in mind, crafting certain tracks around the styles of certain artists. Once he made basic recordings of everything, he scattered CDs via post around New England and the Midwest, giving his collaborators free reign to design their own parts.

Then he looked at his calendar.

Lesser Birds of Paradise nest in Chicago, a good starting point to play a show and record backing parts for "What We Find Is Gone." Then it's off to a date in Providence, after which Susan Sakash of The What Cheer? Brigade could record a trombone part, and up to an arts-collective show in Brattleboro, Vt., so Red Heart the Ticker could back up "Business as Usual."

Routing the tour around the recording schedule produced tricky scenarios in which musicians wrote their parts without knowing about the other elements.

"Let's say my one friend in Maine never heard my other friend in Pittsburgh's violin part until I got to Maine after Pittsburgh," Marcus explains. "So it's like, 'OK, your part's awesome, but here's this other variable you didn't know about. So let's try it again.'"

The end result sounds not at all like the disparate puzzle pieces it may have been, but a thoughtfully constructed and composed recording, with each element given room to breathe amid the spare mix. Anchoring everything is Marcus' lilting, melodic singing, husky on the lower register, cutting to the bone on the higher. It's a sound that, in other hands, could sound tremendously forced or contrived. But when Marcus does it, it sounds natural; he's not forcing his voice anywhere it doesn't belong.

"Over the years, I've really tried to sing out, without being self-conscious and without repressing," he says. "Just letting go and finding the spot to reverberate the whole room with my voice, trying to do something that might be a little too high or a little too sharp, but really just going for it because it feels like it's the thing to do."

These elements make Reverse the Charges come off like a timeless folk record, which is an interesting conundrum.

Plenty of artists identify as "folk singers" when they're actually uninspired singer-songwriters. Marcus has no interest in filling the "giant commercial niche" he sees as part and parcel of that label. As such, he chooses not to identify himself as folk. And yet he sounds more genuinely folk than any of them.

Topically, Reverse the Charges is a study in these opposites; the title has nothing to do with land-line telephones, but is more a reference to Marcus' central postulation: What if everything positive was negative? What if the rules were reversed?

It comes across clearly on "Business as Usual," where Marcus tells a true story of almost getting hit at the grocery store by a hasty, perturbed motorist whose windshield bore a sticker reading "take it easy." His initial frustration turns to sympathy, as he tries to understand the man more upon later encountering him in the store ("I looked into his shopping cart and saw he was a family man").

A different kind of role reversal can be heard when Marcus performs the song. At his record pre-release at The Rotunda in March, the crowd laughed as the story unfolded. The solemn, almost weepy tune had become a lively number and Marcus — knowing that it really is kind of a funny story — smiled warmly and continued.

"I write songs when I'm in a certain mood, and it's not often the most joyous," he says. "I don't write many happy songs, but I'm relatively positive. Especially when I've been afforded the opportunity to play in front of people, to share that experience with them."

Not just playing, but afforded the opportunity to play. Not just an album, but a worldview crystallized.

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)

Joshua Marcus' record release is Thu., June 12, 7 p.m., $7, The Other Green Line, 4305 Locust St., 215-222-0799, greenlinecafe.com

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