It’s never too late to start a rock band.
That might be the takeaway from a conversation with RNDM's Joseph Arthur. The 41-year-old singer-songwriter made a name for himself on Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records, and in subsequent years as an experimental folky guy who relied mostly on his acoustic guitar and a loop onstage.
But Arthur got his start playing bass in rock bands. Now, almost 20 years later, he’s finally come full circle thanks to a spontaneous invitation to record some tracks with his friend, Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament.
“I kind of got lumped into singer-songwriterdom; I played harmonica and a lot of my influence is folk music, so I understand that,” Arthur says, laughing, over the phone from a tour stop in Milwaukee. “But I started writing songs around when Nirvana was blowing up and Pearl Jam and grew up loving Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, so it’s really comfortable for me to be in a proper rock 'n' roll band.”
Arthur and Ament had known each other for years when Ament asked his friend to record vocals for a track on his 2012 solo album, While My Heart Beats. Ament then invited Arthur to perform at Pearl Jam 20, a huge, star-studded celebration of the iconic alt-rock band’s two decades in music that formed the basis of Cameron Crowe’s documentary, Pearl Jam Twenty.
“We met at PJ 20 and he was like, ‘Yeah, you should come to Montana, we’ll record some more,’” Arthur recalls. “And I thought he wanted me to record some more vocals on some of his songs, which I was happy to do, but it turned into something more than that. As soon as I got there, he was like, ‘OK, you got any songs?’ and I said, ‘As a matter of fact, I do.’”
Arthur, Ament and Ament’s longtime collaborator, drummer Richard Stuverud (Three Fish, Tres Mts.), jammed, and in that first night they recorded “What You Can’t Control.” Naturally and without much discussion, RNDM was born, and the band’s debut album, Acts, was just released Oct. 30 via Monkeywrench Records. RNDM has a trio of adorably dorky music videos that illustrates they’re not taking themselves too seriously, which is also evident in their live shows. And though they’re just nine shows into their first tour, Arthur is already confident of the band’s future.
“We’re already building up the next record and evolving as a unit,” he says. “We’re playing three new songs live. It feels great, like a rebirth in a way ... I’ve been doing this for a long time and you could get burnt out. But staying open to new ideas and moving forward — in some ways it makes you a more difficult entity to market, 'cause people like you to be kind of a brand so you can be defined as one thing and then sold as one thing easier. But, I’ve never really done that at all.
"For me, everything is brand new still," Arthur continues. "I just feel so enamoured and in love with playing rock 'n' roll guitar right now! It’s so fun and so great to find something like that that keeps renewing itself if you’re open to being a beginner all the time, everything stays so fresh.”
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The stories behind Peter Gabriel's Real World Records: Joseph Arthur