Joshua Burnside – a track-by-track on the folk artist’s new album Teeth On Time

The Belfast-based singer-songwriter Joshua Burnsidee employs a lush fingerpicked folk sound with nods to Irish traditional music and electronic textures on his new album.

Released Friday on Nettwerk, Burnside says of the record…

“This feels like my happiest family of songs to date. Or the most joy-filled ones anyway… which isn’t much of a boast. This album was written against the background of my becoming a father for the first time, and of my family growing alongside my wife Emily. And, alongside that joy, comes a lot of fear and anxiety, both of which are also pretty prevalent throughout this album. The songs were written between Belfast and Comber, Donegal and Paris, and recorded in my unsound-proof studio in Belfast city centre. So the sounds and life of the city and countryside, alongside that of my son, are all key parts and drivers of the tracks on this record.”

Joshua shares with us here a track-by-track on each of the 10 songs on the album.

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1. Teeth of Time / Mountain

I always write a track with the intention that it’s going to be the first song of an album. Most of the others could be moved about a bit, but the first and last tracks have to feel like openers and closers. 

The first track is the most exciting for me. I feel like the listener has to be surprised, there has to be an element of drama about it. I wrote and recorded the first half of this song as I went, cutting up the guitars and fiddles, but using the cuts percussively. I love the way ‘The Books’ do this. 

In the second part of the song, I’m singing to my son, expressing my fears about what sort of world he will grow up in, about the destruction of nature, specifically in the north, and my own regrets at having not done enough, if anything, to stop it.

2. Up and Down

This was one of those songs that came easily one afternoon. As if it were already written and I was just discovering it. Some songs are like that, probably the better ones. But I think they happen as result the difficult songs, the ones that you write and re-write, and pour hours of time and work into, and eventually scrap. 

It’s a simple wee one, reflecting on some of the contradictions and parallels of life. 

3. The Good Life

I started writing this whilst driving around trying to get my 6-month year old son to sleep.

Lyrically it’s pretty self-explanatory, ‘Once in a Lifetime’ by Talking Heads was an influence. I was also listening to John Francis Flynn’s latest album – I love how its produced, so there’s a little bit of that in there. 

4. Sycamore Queen

This was originally a very folky number, with guitars and banjos, but it was just a bit twee. So I went for a big crazy distorted organ instead and then it sort of made sense to me. It’s a song about a sycamore tree that I used to talk to when I was a child… and other things.

5. In The Silence Of

I had a lot of voice notes from around the house of sounds I found interesting – children’s toys, the washing machine, my son and I playing, just little snippets of domestic peace and joy. So I just started piecing them together. And then I wrote a little reel on the banjo which worked to the groove, and finally added in some samples of Laura Quirke (of Lemoncello) singing. I cut up the lyrics, just thinking about the sounds she was making and not the words, so you get all these half words and broken sentences, leaving lots of room interpretation.

6. Marching Round the Ladies

This song was inspired by an old Belfast folk song that I discovered in the in the songbook ‘Belfast, city of song’. I’ve changed the melody and added a few extra verses, one line in particular regarding the Tories has been particularly fun to sing over the past year or so!

7. Ghost of the Bloomfield Road

This is a song I wrote when I was in the depths of sleep deprivation. So I wanted the music to feel a bit loopy and surreal to reflect that. The Bloomfield Road is near our house, and in those first In those first few months of parenthood, I would sometimes catch my reflection in car windows and think “god I look awful”.

8. Good for One Thing

The original version of this song was entirely different, different chords, melody and mood. It was like a circus song from hell kind of thing. I gave up on it, but I liked the words, and so one night in the kitchen I started playing it softly in Open D tuning, and it changed the whole song from something boisterous and angry, into something sort of deeply lonely and sad. 

9. Climb the Tower

I was trying to learning the claw-hammer technique on the 5 string banjo, and I thought I’d write a song using this technique as a way to practice really. What inevitably came out sounded a bit old-timey, so I thought it would be nice to balance that by leaning into words like ‘tower’ and ‘shower’ in a northern Irish accent, to bring it home a bit. And then from there the song sort of unveiled itself, and became about growing up in County Down.

10. Nothing Completed

This was actually one of the first songs I wrote when I began writing this album, so maybe its odd that it’s the last song on it. But it just made sense to me to end with it, love is not something you can complete, and music is the same. I thought it would be funny to do a sort of crash ending to the album, so people think their speakers have just blown out or something. 

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Joshua Burnside tour schedule:

Thu 27 Feb – Edinburgh, The Caves 

Fri 28 Feb – Aberdeen, The Tunnels

Sat 1 Mar – Newcastle, The Grove 

Sun 2 Mar – Stroud, Prince Albert

Tue 4 Mar – Deal, The Lighthouse

Wed 5 Mar – Brighton, Hope & Ruin 

Thu 6 Mar – Southbourne, The Wight Bear

Fri 7 Mar – Bristol, Fyfe Hall

Sat 8 Mar – Leeds, Hyde Park Book Club 

Sun 9 Mar – Birkenhead, 

Tue 11 Mar – London, Islington Assembly Hall  

Wed 12 Mar – Birmingham, Hare & Hounds 

Thu 13 Mar – Cardiff, The Gate 

Fri 14 Mar – Newport, Carnigli Nights Out

Sat 15 Mar – Manchester , YES Basement 

Wed 26 Mar – Kilkenny, Cleere’s Bar & Theatre 

Thu 27 Mar – Clonakilty, DeBarra’s

Fri 28 Mar – Kinsale, Catherine’s Cultural Centre

Sat 29 Mar – Dingle, The Green Room 

Sun 30 Mar – Tralee, Tobar Naofa

Tue 1 Apr – Strandhill, Sligo Brees 

Wed 2 Apr – Galway, Roisin Dubh

Thu 3 Apr – Dublin, Whelans

Sat 5 Apr – Belfast, Ulster Hall 

Mon 3 Jun – Utrecht, TivoliVredenburg

Wed 5 Jun – Cologne, Gebäude 9

Thur 6 Jun – Paris, Pop Up De Label

Sun 8 Jun – Antwerp, AMOR

Tue 10 Jun – Hamburg, Nochtspeicher

Wed 11 Jun – Berlin, Franzz Club

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