Josh Doyle's Notes
Immersing myself in “Born To Run”, back writing again for my debut solo full length record “The Long Distance Runner”. Be back soon.
1. I need your brains! Six easy ways you can help me find new fans @ the new “inner circle“. I have unlocked it so anyone can have a look but it will soon be fans-only like the “fansonly” page.
2. The verdicts are in - some reviews of “Values and Virtues EP”
http://www.teletext.co.uk/
http://www.the-mag.me.uk/M
http://www.crossrhythms.co
http://www.spillmagazine.c
Fan Reviews
http://www.joshdoyle.com/v
Submit your own review - - leave your review at the bottom of the page here
3. Havent bought the new CD yet?
Get just the new CD here - http://www.joshdoyle.com/v
Get CDs and Tshirts here - http://www.joshdoyle.com/s
4. Its all about the fans!!
Go to the fans only section to see pictures from the UK tour of you folks.
Go to the inner circle to participate on the new mini message board.
Thanks!
Josh
Heyy
1. 33 (!!) free songs now in the "fans only" part of the new joshdoyle.com - including stuff that has never been unveiled before (ie: i just found it in my cds). I am going to be putting new videos up there too… either become a website member or join the e-team - same thing…. then you get access to everything… click here
2. Microsoft have provided quite a cool service for a select number of artists- they pay me 50cents for every download I give away for free…they get to advertise and I get paid for my music while you dont have to… get the free acoustic concrete moon here by clicking on the banner.
3. MISTAKE!! I gave you the wrong password for the DUMDUMS:THE MOVIE trailer - it is not Bor3d, it is (lowercase) bor3d… thanks for the 20 people that pointed it out haa. see the trailer here > http://vimeo.com/4868778
4. NEWS!! Apparently I got played on ESPN2 with "The End Of Fear" - thats my first ever solo song placement… Then I heard there are two more possibles, for "boyracer"" and (the full studio version of) "concrete moon". ALSO two internet radio stations are doing a weekly "josh doyle jukebox" without any coaxing at all - http://www.lovegravity.com is a big supporter so big up to them :). Anyone who supports me, I want to help out…oh and there is a 9/10 review of values and virtues @http://www.crossrhythms.co
There you go!! Thanks for your support - - keep buying the tshirts, cds and downloads at the new joshdoyle.com/shop
ROOOOCCCCCKKK
Josh
P.S Is your picture up at http://www.joshdoyle.com/f
THE UK TOUR MAY 2009 - FALKIRK to LONDON, STARTED WITH $300 IN MY WALLET
So I had many requests to come over to the UK to tour - I am English by birth (and accent ha) and lived there
my whole life up until I came over here to Nashville, TN six years ago. Again the mailing list and facebook were
the two important tools - I sent emails out to the mailing list to request where I should come and play, I filled
in all their details location-wise and then planned the tour around where the most people were located.
I started in Falkirk with no budget, $300 in my wallet and a whole country to travel - nine shows over thousands of miles.
I played a few solo, a few with guitar player Mark Hamilton and then two different bands who learned the songs via MP3s
and one practise per band!! We played to packed out clubs and half empty clubs, but all people coming to see me!!
And the cherry on the cake was that after paying everyone and everything that needed to be paid, I came back to USA
with money! I made a profit, which goes back to the fact that all the CDs/Merch were paid for by my amazing supporters!!
SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
I am now a profitable recording entity and international touring entity, with no management or agent ha!
I could do with press, getting on the radio, getting my songs on TV shows, maybe a manager and agent but
everything has got to be on my terms and not soul destroying. I would rather be my own person in a dayjob
than a slave to a corporation sending me around the world at their bidding. I just need more fans!!
Thats how I can make this my living without all the business stuff!
My next plan is to continue the story of "The Long Distance Runner", which began with Dumdums "It Goes Without Saying", continued through my "End Of Fear EP" and now "Values and Virtues EP". You can read about how everything fits together into the saga above… Its like the great american novel in album form. Yknow like Anne of Green Gables meets The Godfather meets Updike.
JOIN THE MAILING LIST, JOIN ME ON FACEBOOK!
Dont miss out on the great music still to come!!
JUNE 27th 2009 - THE NEW CD -
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PEOPLE LIKE YOU
This was how it worked - I put a few emails out to my
mailing list and facebook telling them the truth :
I dont make a great deal of money in my dayjob,
I mean, I make enough to provide for my wife and kids
(a 5 year old and a 2 year old) but there isnt any
disposable income after that for me to make records.
However, I was still writing songs and I knew there
were people out there who cared and wanted the
songs recorded and in their hands so I took a leap
of faith and put up the “EP Elite” which allowed the fans
of my music to pay between $10 and $250 and
get different packages from the basic CD to having
their name drawn into the artwork on the cover,
a high quality t shirt, signed cd, extra downloads,
thankyou in the credits, admission to all the
Josh Doyle gigs ever… people got their moneys worth
AND thanks to them, my costs for everything
were paid off BEFORE the CD was even released!!
So…not the absolute deadline we had planned but this is definitely the last day to get your name (or someone else’s) "immortalised" in the artwork of "Values and Virtues".
Click here to see the different options on the order page.
The order for the cd artwork will be placed on Monday. So its your last chance to purchase your Gold or Platinum membership, for either a thankyou credit or an executive producer credit, respectively.
Click here for behind the scenes video, song samples, studio pics.
You will continue to be able to purchase Digital, Vinyl and Silver memberships. We will leave it open for the time being to give opportunity to any more people that would like to still be a part of this.
Thankyou!! Hear samples of the new songs again at http://www.joshdoyle.com!!
Josh
Now for all the REAL fans….. Josh Doyle News
Was in the studio yesterday, everythings sounding wicked!
I am hoping to make a preview sampler by the end of March to convince folks who havent yet shelled out any dough that you should help me out - you wont regret being part of getting this CD made…but blessed are you who have not heard and have still believed! You are magnificent!
**BIG NEWS FOR PEOPLE LOOKING FORWARD TO MY EP!**
**Final tracklisting!**
1. High School Soldier
A whole new lyric on the song a few of you may have heard when I was testing it out on strangers as “the mysterious werewolf” on “ourstage.com”. I was just putting it up to get some feedback from people who didnt know me but it kept winning in every category I put it on, out of 1,000s of bands on there. I think the new lyrics sum up the whole EP really well.
2. Ghosts like you
“The band are unplugging their keyboards, my shoes are sticking to the dancefloor, talking to no-one on the cellphone, its exhausting trying to be interesting…” typically self depreciating, this totally sums up a feeling and I love the song and the melody. I have only ever played this in my acoustic set and theres always someone who says this is their favourite song of all my songs. This full band version is sounding like a hit record KER-CHING! No it sounds great - I think you’ll “get” it.
3. Pop Idol
This may or may not be about some superstar based on my real life touring experiences. The whole EP is telling a story - this is about seeing someone in an enviable position and wondering what you can get away with. Definitely the punkiest song on this CD, though the spirit of all of this stuff is definitely more RAWK than previously.
4. Waiting for the payoff
You can see a full lyric from this one on my facebook fan page. It came to me thinking about the line from the Johnny Cash movie with Joaquin Phoenix, writing what you would want the last thing anyone heard from your lips. Something to sum up your entire experience on earth. The recording at first was sounding a bit Tom Petty but now its more Bends-era Radiohead and with the cello in it on the hard rocking riff - kablamm. Now the whole thing is amped up and rocking away, the bridge reminds me of “Living on the Edge” by Aerosmith!?
5. Concrete Moon
People have been loving this one live, again I get folks saying they think this one is my best song and they havent heard this full band, cello, fleshed out awesome version. I think its probably the “solarstorms” of this EP, the most immediate song of the bunch. I’m actually pretty hard on myself when it comes to putting music out properly, and I wanted to have melodies strong enough to not need harmonies and lyrics that were all fully formed and I feel like i’ve accomplished that on all of these recordings. Took long enough though…
I realise James Taylor is a world-renowned superstar. But he is one of the greats and if someone deserves to live on forever, that someone needs to be talked about, and half of you wont have heard this dude so here you go….
I heard “Fire and Rain” for the first time when I caught the end of “Running on Empty” with River Phoenix on BBC2 and this song played, caught my attention and I checked on the subtitles on teletext - it read “James Taylor - Fire and Rain”. I had never heard of the guy singing but it seemed like he had something to say. I didnt know how old the song was or whatever, I just needed more… which led me to JT and becoming a huge huge James Taylor fan.
When I bought my first CD player, later that year, my first three CDs were James Taylor’s greatest hits, Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys and The Carpenters greatest hits (I already had all my Soundgardens and Zappas and Kings X covered on cassette being an avid kerrang reading metallist). Anyway James Taylor sung my life to me. When I was going through hard times in the sixth form (my senior year), I used to take off school and walk out past the town, deep into the Kent countryside with “Country Road” rolling through my head;
“Mama dont understand it,
wants to know where i’ve been,
got to be some kind of natural born fool
to want to pass that way again,
but you know I could feel it,
walking on a country road”
I mean for real - that was it right there, I was going to buy everything this guy ever brought out, learn everything I could about him because he had me in his sights, he “got me”, because I could “feel it” . Away from the cities and suburbs and our neatly paved over civilisation you could get out with nature and feel it, feel something real and living, feel the presence of God, feel freedom to walk towards the hills and keep walking until you wanted to stop, no restrictions, I could feel the future in front of me and anything I wanted to do with my life out there under the sky.
But there was something else - there was always this yearning to share it with somebody. That was the downside to the freedom of being out there alone on the highway rambling in the sunshine - I wanted to be in love on top of everything else, and love isn’t freedom, love brings with it responsibility, you cant just up and leave. But it was a hole inside me. And James Taylor knew that too:
“Take to the highway,
wont you lend me your name,
your way and my way
seem to be one and the same”
Its like he could feel that too - the need for a companion. I was always wishing someone would see me walking alone through the villages and along the roads and come along with me and we could “let our feet take us where they wanted to go”.
James Taylor is just great. Fire and Rain too, sum it all up including a great verse about faith and hope and helplessness:
“Wont you look down upon me Jesus,
You’ve got to help me make a stand,
You’ve just got to see me through another day.
My body’s aching and my time is at hand.
And I wont make it any other way…”
I mean when it gets down to the bottom, when you’ve nothing else, if you believe or not, you’re gonna hope theres a God up there that is paying attention, cause sure as hell no one else cares. Check out these songs, the back stories are nuts too - mental institututions, suicides, heroin use… James Taylor was the 70’s’ Kurt Cobain, a tortured sensitive songwriting genius thrown into the spotlight to change peoples lives.
I don’t have to tell you that Hollywood is a synthetic wasteland of phony backslapping backstabbing awards ceremonies and desperate red carpet photo ops by the most fractured people in the world chasing after immortality by celluloid. But when the real world shows up, everything gets thrown into its proper perspective.
Is it going too far to call Mickey Rourke the “real world”? This is a dude who had significant talent and opportunities but opted out of the business to follow his own heart as a professional boxer (famously turning down “48 Hrs.,” “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Platoon,” “Rain Man,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Top Gun,” and “Tombstone” along the way). He got his good looks beat out of him and ended up a “broken down piece of meat” (as the line in “The Wrestler” goes) with no prospects in La-la land. The worst of the worst - a hasbeen.
Anonymity is the leprosy of the sunset strip and he was virtually anonymous to all but his own house pets - thanking his dogs in his recent Golden Globe winners’ speech for Best Actor, “when no one else wants to know you, sometimes a man’s dogs are all he’s got”. Now he is favourite to win the 2009 Academy Award for Best Actor, years past his Hollywood sell by date.
“He wanted to be a movie star again” his agent David Unger says, “So he would just go and reintroduce himself as would any young kid trying to make it in hollywood.”
He got a bit part in “Man On Fire”, a larger one in “Domino”, then a major role in “Sin City”. Then he beat out “The Wrestler’s” financiers’ favourite, Nicholas Cage for the part of Randy “The Ram” Robinson due to the director Darren Aronofsky seeing his talent above the box office draw and wanting more to create art than commerce;
“I had no expectations,” Rourke said of his latest movie. “I was just happy they let me work again.” (Darren Aronofsky, who directed “The Wrestler,” told the New York Times, “On the first day of shooting, when the A.D. said, ‘Bring No. 1 to the set!’ Rourke said, ‘I haven’t heard No. 1 in years.’ No financiers would bankroll the movie because of Mickey, except one, which gave us $6 million.”)
You can probably see the appeal of this story for me in my situation, a guy faltering on the road to success and making it back on his own terms. But who knows if I will make it back? Mickey Rourke probably didnt think he could but he kept going because he felt like he had something to offer the world that only he could offer, and I feel the same way. But entertainment options are almost limitless, who am I to compete? I’m just one guy, who is in my corner?
Business models like my “EP elite”, excite me not just for myself but for other artists too. In my situation it gives people who have been a fan of my previous work a chance to keep it going until I can sustain myself. And I make music that you dont have to be a fresh faced stage school graduate to perform, its real stuff… If Mickey Rourke took 20 years to make his comeback, i’ve got time - i’m not quitting!
A: ‘For so many years, I’d sit and talk to the dog, and say, I’m not coming back, it’s over.’
Q: You’d accepted that, had you?
A: ‘Not totally.’
Q: You never quit?
A: ‘I was never going to quit. That’s not in me. But I thought, I’ve f****d it up. I didn’t think I’d come back to this level ever again. I hoped I would but I thought too much time had gone by.’
Since Mickey Rourke has been out of the picture there has been limitless fresh younger meat for the grinder wanting to be exploited that have said “yes sir” to every cold corporate dream their bosses have thought up just for fame and success. But most havent survived. Then here comes Mickey fighting back from the brink and scores the oscar nomination and one of the best acting performances of the decade. How could he have been looked over all these years?
Q: If you knew what you’d have to go through to get to this point, would you go through it all again?
A: ‘You mean the 15 years? Of penance and shame? Maybe not.’
Q: But maybe you wouldn’t be the actor you are today?
A: ‘That’s true too. But I didn’t think it was going to take 15 years. I thought maybe I could come in two or three and things would fall into place. But I wasn’t a little bad. I was real bad. And you pay the price for what you do in this life.’
*Interview segments taken from The Telegraph, Observer, New York Times, JoBlo.com and Larry King Live.
Announcing…
The “EP elite” membership program and the forthcoming “Values and Virtues” EP.
This is your chance to get fresh new music from me, and a tour date near you soon.
Josh
(if link doesnt work, go to www.joshdoyle.com)