Joe Purdy Finds Restoration and Reclamation in the Mountains of New Mexico
Arkansas born folksinger, Joe Purdy has released four meritorious bodies of work over the course of the last five months, bringing his total album count up to an impressive 18 albums and firmly establishing himself as a consistently prolific songwriter. More notable than the quantity of albums is the quality and method of the latest releases. After taking a six year hiatus to heal a significant case of songwriter's burnout, Purdy has returned to his musical career with genuine gusto and is cranking out thoughtful, well-written, tastefully produced tracks at a head spinning pace, much to the benefit of loyal folk audiences who have missed his understated and pure approach to the craft since his 2016 album release of Who Will Be Next?
Purdy’s current creative surge can be accredited to his 2021 decision to restructure his life completely from the ground up. Although Purdy is an Arkansas native, he has spent most of his adult life immersed in the artistic communities in Los Angeles, California. While he attributes the birth of his lyrical career to the relationships he built in that scene, churning out more than a dozen albums in the span of fifteen years left Purdy with an empty well in regards to his musical cup. While he never quit writing, he did halt entirely recording and producing any new music while attempting to regain his lost center. Shortly before the pandemic of 2020, Purdy and his best boy, Charlie the Dog, spent time out in Joshua Tree National Park. Armed with just a tape recorder, Joe and Charlie were able to record about 40 tracks which would later make up April 2022’s release of the album Coyote and the three subsequent releases from Summer 2022 of Desert Outtakes: Vol. 1 Folk-Slinger, Vol. 2 Gussie Blues, and Vol. 3 Old Letters. The following year after his time in Joshua Tree, Purdy made the move to Taos, New Mexico with the hopes the high mountain air and dry desert spiritualism might breathe new life into his creative motivation.
Purdy told Spin’s Katherine Yeske Taylor, “I needed some peace, and I didn’t have it. I needed to find another phase of life that wasn’t just doing the same exact grind that I’d been doing.” Purdy was quickly enveloped into the town’s tight-knit artistic community, and seems to have found a rich vein of musical inspiration and motivation we can only hope lasts him a good long while. Purdy says of his current community, “It’s just perfect for what I want and what I need right now,” he says. “You wake up and you want to go outside and enjoy the big sky and beautiful mountains. You can just see clearly. I made one gut decision, I went to a place, and I started waking up smiling again. I started really, fully having a reawakening. Before I knew it, I went from having kind of a dead career to all of a sudden, we’ve got all this stuff planned.”
Purdy hired a new management team after catching his breath in Taos, and is once again touring and playing festivals and shows, including one magical night at the Ryman in March of this year with longtime friend and talent, Gregory Alan Isakov. Watching Purdy perform his solo set that evening, and then later sharing the stage with Isakov and the rest, it was evident that those of us in the audience were bearing first hand witness to the washing away of the long creative drought that had plagued Purdy since 2016. It seemed the catharsis of that moment, on that historic stage, with those stellar fellow musicians, brought Purdy back out of the darkness of the desert to the pure and simple joy found in creating and sharing his craft through gentle, and often, bittersweet song-stories full of combinations of humor and heartache, hope and despair, and laughter tempered by quiet, persistent sadness. The mood and tone of Purdy, and his ability to avoid the overproduction of his work in the studio, allows audiences to connect at a more honest level with the truth of his writing and his retelling of our common human experience.
Coyote’s standout tracks “Ramblin’ Boy,” “My Loving Arms,” and “Heartbreak in the Key of Roger Miller” all play smartly into the lost-love theme without being redundant or overly obvious in delivery. Folk-Singer, released in June 2022, contains several clever and humorous protest tunes including “Hard to Be a Prophet,” “Nuclear Bomb Song,” and “Happy Birthday Woody Guthrie” while upholding a wistful plea for change. Gussie Blues, released in July 2022, stays true to the theme of April’s Coyote and contains lyrics pertaining to personal situations in relationships Purdy was previously experiencing at the time the songs were written at Joshua Tree including “Ain’t No Woman” and “Sante Fe.” Old Letters, released in August of 2022, revisits Purdy’s past as he draws on previous emotions and former desires to serve as forlorn inspiration for songs like “Laura Wilson” and “Caroline.”
Of his endearingly straight-forward songwriting style, Purdy says, “I love what I consider to be real songwriting. I don’t mean to be a snob about it, and I don’t think I’ve always done a good job at it, either, for that matter. But I’ve always tried to be honest in the writing, to pretty much a brutal degree. I found out early that within reason, no matter how badly you’ve behaved, if you can make it rhyme, you can be forgiven. It’s been my own therapy — a way for me to forgive myself or explain to myself how I feel about things.”
With such a wealth of new material from Purdy to fall in love with, we can only remain hopefully eager for Purdy’s future contributions to an industry that desperately needs artists whose primary love is the structure and purity of the song, as well as the telling of the story, and sentiment contained within. Of that future, Purdy says, “I’m excited to get back in a position where I can get out of my own way and start releasing music with the veracity that I used to. It’s nice to be back in a place where I can have some perspective. I was built for this.”
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