Josiah & the Bonnevilles Pours His Blood, Sweat, and Tears Into 'Endurance'
Photo: Dan Winters
No word better describes the path, the process, the man that is Josiah Leming better than endurance. Battling timing, fleeting music industry trends, and himself, Josiah is the template of the purposeful stubbornness needed to be a great artist. That, combined with wily lyricism and a mythically intimate live show, has made this Nashville-based artist a not-so-guilty secret amongst those who have crossed paths, a musical embrace you don’t want to let go but let others join in on.
With an auspicious beginning on American Idol, Josiah, cut from a cloth that aligned more with dustbowl musings of Guthrie or a lost member of the Traveling Wilburys, always struggled to match his skillset up with the industry. Never a question of desire or a deficit of talent, Josiah admits his growth as an artist is as much tied to personal development as it is to his craft. Indulging in the pitfalls and follies of youth, Josiah found it hard to steer his artistic shadow into the silhouette of who he was as a man. Crediting scaling down his lifestyle to pivot, he learned to self-produce as a cost savings effort, reducing his financial footprint to bare necessity by moving into a friend's room. He helped equal that austerity musically, a boon for this compositional discipline. Removing everything unnecessary removed the pressure, and the result was palpable creative output.
On his latest record Endurance, which sounds so cumulative to the literal blood, sweat, and tears shed over the last decade, his always evident, hyper-credible songwriting is in full force but equally so are his poetically ephemeral moments—the wisdom impossible to lash down but always carried with you on a long listening. Endurance is a blessed listen, a mirror to all of us recklessly emotive beings, erring into a mold before breaking it, sometimes positively, sometimes because of our innate fragility.
The measure of how small we are, Josiah explains, is about putting “God in the Room,” and that theme figures prominently, a linear thread through both our lives and his songs. The every person embodied in the record is very much who Josiah is, a well-worn bible filled with advice, pocketed whenever the emotions start to eviscerate our self of place and self, a personal monument, like this record, to our heuristic curse, our ability to learn and unlearn, only endurance helping us prevail.
Listen to Endurance below:
