Steve Poltz Releases 14th Studio Album 'Joyride' in Advance of Canadian Tour
by Cashbox Canada
Steve Poltz. Cashbox Canada Magazine Cover
There are artists who make records. And then there are artists like Steve Poltz, who get tricked into making them and end up with something that sounds like a warm hug from a stranger at the end of a very long, very weird road trip.
That's JoyRide. And it is exactly what the title promises.
The story starts the way all the best ones do: two guys in East Nashville, living close enough that one of them just picks up the phone. Producer Dex Green, the kind of musical architect who's helped shape Grammy-nominated records for Shemekia Copeland, Elvis Costello, Margo Price, and Nicole Atkins, called Poltz up one morning and said, essentially, come on over. No grand plan. No concept album vision board. Just a home studio called 3Sirens and a standing invitation to make some noise.
Poltz, characteristically, almost didn't go.
"I never really want to go into the studio," he admits. "And then suddenly I remember how much I love it." That's the Steve Poltz experience in miniature: reluctance followed by revelation, trepidation giving way to wonder, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, a song appears. "I end up with a sweet memento," he says. "A snapshot of a moment in time."
After 18 albums, fourteen solo plus the Rugburns records, the live things, and the bootlegs floating around out there, you might expect the process to feel familiar by now. It doesn't. "The fact that it's still a mystery," he says, when asked what still surprises him about his own songwriting. "It's strange how songs appear and take shape, like some kind of reverse disappearing ink." The Halifax-born, perpetually-on-the-road troubadour has co-written Jewel's platinum number one "You Were Meant for Me," collaborated with Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, and The Wood Brothers, and earned the kind of devotion that makes fans beg him to come back and bring their friends. And still, every time, the song is a mystery arriving from somewhere he can't quite name.
He described making JoyRide with the kind of accidental poetry that only comes from someone who has been doing this for three-plus decades: "Capturing me in a studio is like convincing a whirling dervish to stop spinning long enough to sign a bill into law. It's chaos, caffeine, and accidental poetry, art colliding with microphones and commerce in a glorious mess. No seatbelts, no helmets. Just unsaturated, unadulterated art. Real humans making real noise in real time."
The ten songs move like a great set list: funny, human, a little unhinged, and then suddenly, quietly, devastating in the best way. It opens with "If It Bleeds It Leads," a sharp-eyed look at the noise machine of modern life that includes the kind of line only Poltz could write: "I can never watch the news with you because you yell back, you scream like they can hear you in the television set." It's a song about staying grounded when the world keeps handing you reasons not to be, a subject Poltz thinks about more than you might expect.
"I remind myself it's always been this way," he says. "We just have phones now, nonstop breaking news, endless scrolling, the squeaky wheel getting the grease. We're fed a steady diet of outrage." His answer isn't to unplug or disappear, but to lean toward the human. "I try to find human connection, even if it's just a short conversation with a stranger. I practise patience and empathy, but I have to work at it. Sometimes I lose my way." It's the most honest thing a person can say, and Poltz says it like he means it, because he does.
Humour has always been the other side of that honesty. "Everything is funny to me," he says. "Nothing really matters, and everything matters. It's a constant collision in my head." His lyrics have always carried that collision, the line between the profound and the absurd drawn so lightly it's almost invisible. "I think I was delivered preprogrammed for irreverence," he says. And you believe him the moment you hear "The Son of God," a track in which Poltz may or may not have had a phone conversation with Jesus about a set of Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedias. He plays both parts. Himself and the Saviour. It is, he cheerfully acknowledges, the kind of song that might get him crucified. He seems fine with that.
Side two brings "Love a Little Bigger," a rowdy co-write with Vince Herman of Leftover Salmon that ends in a singalong reminder to forgive faster and swim more often. "New Tattoo" tells the story of a man who got his lover's face inked onto his own face. Bad plan, great song. "Brand New Liver" imagines swapping yours out like a car part instead of quitting drinking. And then the album closes with "Hairlift," home to what Poltz calls his favourite line he's ever written, a moment so wonderfully absurd it needs no further explanation here. Go find it yourself. That's part of the joy.
Live, Poltz is something else entirely. Legendary for shows that careen between comedy and catharsis, he is the first to admit he walks onstage with no idea what's about to happen. "I usually feel like I don't have the magic in me to play a show," he says. "I don't know what I'm going to do. Then I get out there, the adrenaline kicks in, and things start taking shape. I find some joy, stumble into laughter, and it always surprises me. It's good medicine, but man, it's draining."
He splits his time between countries, scenes, and audiences, moving through a peripatetic life that long ago stopped feeling like travel and started feeling simply like existence. "Nowhere feels like home," he says, without a trace of self-pity. "I'm constantly looking for the rental car, the hotel, the food, the soundcheck and the stage. I'm like a kennel dog when I get on a plane. I just sit there and try to relax my mind." Canada, the place that made him, is always somewhere in the background, a fact and a feeling, not quite a destination anymore.
What he hopes people walk away with, from the album or the show or even just a passing conversation, is simpler than you might expect from someone this prolific, this restless, this endlessly funny. "I hope they get a little vacation from the chatter in their heads," he says. "Maybe crack a smile. Give their minds a brief respite."
And maybe, just maybe, they'll say: when are you coming back? I want to bring some friends.
STEVE POLTZ LIVE: Marathon Live Schedule Includes Headline Dates, Festival Appearances, And More Across North America And Australia/New Zealand For complete details and ticket information, please seepoltz.com/concerts.
APRIL 29 – Toronto, ON – Horseshoe Tavern 30 – Kingston, ON – The Spire
MAY 1 – Ottawa, ON – Red Bird 2 – Ottawa, ON – Red Bird 3 – Chelsea, QC – Motel Chelsea 14-17 – Joshua Tree, CA – Joshua Tree Music Festival † 29-31 – Ogden, UT – Ogden Music Festival †
JUNE 18-21 – Stanley, ID – Sawtooth Valley Gathering †
JULY 21-24 – Big Indian, NY – Sad Songs Summer Camp ‡
* 17th Annual 50th Birthday Bash w/ The Rugburns ** Steve Poltz & Friends - 17th Annual 50th Birthday Bash (seated show) † Festival Performance ‡ with Milk Carton Kids
