Photo by Tony More

Many of the songs on Jerry Joseph’s new album originated during a stretch of 2014 when he volunteered as a teacher at an underground co-ed rock school in Afghanistan. He later recorded this material at TRI Studios with Widespread Panic’s Dave Schools serving as producer. Jim Scott (Tom Petty, Wilco) mixed the record, which features Joseph’s steady bandmates: Steve Drizos (drums), Steven James Wright (bass) and Jeff Crosby (guitar). A number of additional musicians also participated including Steve Kimock, Mookie Siegel, Scott Law and Jason Crosby.

Today we premiere the official video for “Mars,” a song in which Kimock guests on guitar. As for the song itself, Joseph explains, “I was walking down the beach in Chicago years ago talking about technology with a couple of current captains of the tech industry. They were heavily invested in Elon Musk and discussing his plans to have a person on Mars in 20 years. I said that when I was a little boy, I told my parents I wanted to go to Mars and they bought me pajamas with rockets on them. Now when my son says he wants to go Mars, I say I have the guy’s number! I told my son I thought a trip to Mars was too long and too dangerous, he replied, ‘Oh dad, you’ll be in heaven a long time before my rocket gets to Mars.’ On a side note, though I wrote the song in Kabul, a couple days before I got to Kabul, I went to dinner with my friends to an Istanbul tower in the middle of the Bosphorus. A sultan had built it to hide his daughter and now it’s a pricey restaurant you have to take water taxi to. Note of warning, never ever order anything with the word ‘sultan’ in it: Pie , delight, kabobs etc… So the song is a child-space-Istanbul-sultan-Kabul reprieve that leans to the point of litigation on Crowded House. Making the video involved a lot of big hot glass furnaces and tools I can’t use and hearses and a drone camera. I had no clue as to what those lunatics at Lower Boom were going to do with it. I’m very psyched to have been able to work with them.”