Episode Nine: Joshua Burnside

We talk with Northern Irish experimental folk songwriter and producer Joshua Burnside.  Joshua’s 2017 album Ephrata won the Northern Ireland Music Prize, and he has followed that up with two EP’s, All Round the Light Said, and the more recent Wear Bluebells in Your Hat If You’re Goin’ That Way. A live album is expected shortly.  We talk about dreams, how writing songs is like building tables, and yoga music. Also, one of us may have been out way too late the night before the interview.

Northern Irish experimental folk songwriter and producer Joshua Burnside is something of a regional anomaly. With a brooding, powerful sound echoing artists of places afar and time long gone, his enthralling craft defies local comparison in striving towards an aesthetic as much as visual as it is sonic. Balanced with a diverse palette of sounds, Burnside deftly blends alt-folk and elements of the Irish folk song tradition with South American rhythms and Eastern European influences, while introducing synthetic and found-sounds, synths loops and crunching beats to create a stormy world that shifts and swirls perspective like a lingering lucid dream.   Weaving elements of Irish traditional and European folk music with hints of Americana, he creates songs that are understated yet passionate and heartfelt.