On his debut LP, Joshua Josué offers a road-weary spin on the American dream, its hard lessons delivered in English and Spanish. Written mostly on the road and tracked at Goat Mountain Recording near Joshua Tree, Calif., Beneath The Sand (Electric CholoLand) fuses roots rock, Tejano and Chicano soul.
The album features contributions from an impressive list of players, including Los Lobos multi-instrumentalist Steve Berlin, Los Super Seven accordion ace Joel Guzmán, Old 97’s guitarist Murry Hammond, drummer Mitch Marine (Dwight Yoakam) and guitarist Hershel Yatovitz and bassist Rowland “Roly” Salley (both with Chris Isaak’s band).
The title track was cowritten by Salley, a 2009 Grammy winner for his writing work on Robert Plant & Alison Krauss’ “Killing The Blues.” Fittingly, Josué finished “Beneath The Sand” with Salley and Ben Rice (another Isaak collaborator) in a remote cabin in the Mojave Desert. But it’s a singular desperation that forms the emotional core of the song. After the loss of “someone very dear” to him, a despondent Josué wandered through Mexico and Central America for about a year.
“I didn’t set out to write a song about grief,” he says. “But sometimes the song finds you and tells you how it needs to be written.”
We’re proud to premiere Joshua Josué’s “Beneath The Sand.”
—Hobart Rowland
