Album Notes

THE VAGABOND TALES Story

From the Louisiana bayou to bunkers beneath the streets of Baghdad, the life of Joseph Parsons has been predictable only in its unpredictability.

Rather than write about life, the Philadelphia-based singer/songwriter has chased it down and breathed it in. He stole his first car at age nine, held his first gun at ten, left college after one semester for a cross-country odyssey that left him alone in Los Angeles, where he did manual labor by day and wrote songs in a low-rent room at night.

Eventually his music would win him followings far from home -- in Europe, for instance, where his CDs earned raves in publications ranging from heavy metal sheets to porno rags. He performed in cafes and concert venues, and sometimes on the street, throughout Germany, France, Russia, and across America as well, eventually prompting Performing Songwriter to observe that his "lyrics aim straight for the heart and the mind but his music hits you somewhere around the hips" and Rolling Stone to wonder at the "fragile soul trips" on which his songs embark.

He cut his first CD in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1987; a second, recorded in Los Angeles and Barcelona, followed in '89. For a while he set music aside to do antiwar work in Iraq before and during the first Gulf War -- then went back to his life of observing, writing, performing, and traveling. The German label Blue Rose released his album 5 a.m. in 1998 and followed it in '99 with Joseph Parsons, a fusion of narrative lyric and musical experimentation that, as the artist recalls, "nearly killed me. There was a lot of pain in the process of making that record."

On his latest album, The Vagabond Tales, Parsons achieves the balance he's long pursued. His songs probe the human condition, finding insights in everyday routine that most of us are too busy to notice; his sound pares down to its spare and elegant essence, with an emphasis on acoustic textures that draw attention to the subtleties of performance.

"I just wanted to make a straight-ahead record, without a lot of pretension or production," Parsons explains. "I wanted to let these songs evolve and be born from me."

There's spaciousness in The Vagabond Tales; a breeze blows through it, breathing air into the mix. Yet the stories that Parsons tells aren't as simple as sunshine; a scent of mystery, of questions long asked and not yet answered, colors this material too. "The big picture is about redemption," he says, "about working through things. Look, there's a song on there, 'Shot of Will,' that's about a drug addict losing everything. That song -- every song here -- is based on real characters. We all know these people. And by bringing this dark stuff into the light, I can bring the complexities of these people out into the open."

It's also the next chapter in real story here -- the story of Joseph Parsons, the wanderer with the wisdom of the world woven through his songs. Welcome the traveler home -- and let The Vagabond Tales begin.