Wednesday morning, I stop work, look about, am I still an idiot? Yes, still an idiot, listening over and over to Lift to Experience's apocalyptic Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads. Still an idiot, googling to see what happened to Josh T. Pearson, the singer, guitarist and main songwriter of said band, I find out he's living in Berlin and has grown a great beard, and is not recording anything, and has no intention of recording anything, despite the record company Bella Union, for which Lift to Experience recorded Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, being very interested in issuing a new album by him, and the fact that he's performed on many occasions, and even released a live album, of his most recent songs, many of which can be viewed on Youtube.
There seems to be less distance now between the Josh T. Pearson of this interview with Lift to Experience, just after Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads came out, and his apocalyptic musings, and between the bearded, Berlin-dwelling Josh T. Pearson of this one, who barely gets by through his day job, who can only afford to eat one meal a day and is still an illegal immigrant in a city foreign to him, and his apocalyptic musings. Which is to say, the bearded Josh T. Pearson has disappeared into his music, just as the Chinese painter was said to have stepped into one of his own paintings.
This unrecorded Josh T. Pearson is one with what he sings about; there's no persona anymore, no bandmates to hold him back; he's a one man band, Josh T. Pearson, with his guitar and his effect pedals; he doesn't need a percussion, he can stomp his feet; he doesn't need to record songs about the apocalypse because he is the apocalypse, he's nothing other than the apocalypse, he lives inside the whirlwind, he's God's voice from inside the burning bush which must be achingly, agonisingly perilous. He's a prophet of the disaster and the disaster; he's our judge and our saviour, he's all the angels and all the devils, he's a battleground, a disputed territory, great hordes pass across him …
How difficult it must be to disappear into what you made, to no longer have the distance, nothing to hold you back. He's on his own, Josh T. Pearson, illegal immigrant, with hardly enough money to eat or fix his teeth, yet he can't record either, he feels he's not ready to record, he wants to make an album as great as the apocalyptic Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, yet he's unable to make an album that great.
What's he going to do? Wander, lost, in the world he opened. Wander in that world he was able to push away from him before, saying, that's what I've made and it's separate from me. Only now it's consumed him. Only now there's no distance between Josh T. Pearson and what he's made. Terrible fate! To be too weak to withstand what you put into the world! To be weaker than the actions that seemed to have accomplished themselves without you! Terrible, enviable fate to burn up in the fire you set to burning …
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