American folk band Joseph from Portland, Oregon visited The Current studios in June of 2023 during their stop in the Twin Cities, and played a sold out show at the Fitzgerald Theater. The three sisters released their latest album The Sun in April of 2023. Natalie, Allison and Meegan performed three songs from their most recent album and chatted with host Mac Wilson.

Watch and listen to the entire session above.

Guitar and Vocals - Natalie Closner
Vocals - Allison Closner
Vocals - Meegan Closner

Credits: Host: Mac Wilson
Video Director - Christian Antrum
Camera Op - Erik Stromstad
Camera Op - Alexander Simpson
Audio - Derek Ramirez
Producer - Derrick Stevens
Graphics - Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer - Natalia Toledo

External Link: https://thebandjoseph.com/

Interview Transcript

Edited for length and clarity.

Mac Wilson: Hello, friends. My name is Mac Wilson. We are in The Current studio with the band Joseph. Natalie, Meegan, Allison. Welcome back. So you're in town playing at the Fitzgerald Theater, a sold out show. Like we learned moments ago that it's sold out. Yeah, congratulations.

Natalie Closner: Thank you so much.

Mac Wilson: So you're back on the road. You took a couple of weeks off from the earlier leg of the tour behind the new record the sun? How were you able to refresh and revitalize over the last two weeks? What did you do? Did you take a break completely from music? Or what were you up to?

Allison Closner: I planted my entire garden. And that was really nice. I had my hands in the dirt.

Meegan Closner: I live next to a lake and so I jumped in the lake every day.

Natalie Closner: Wow, I went on a hike. So we did the things outside in nature.

Mac Wilson: Well, this is this is great. It's new and different things taking a break. So what are the what are some of the ways that you're easing back into like, this is night one back on the road? Like, do you have any practices that you're like, Okay, let's try to kick this back in again.

Natalie Closner: Oh, well, coming here is so fun. I thought when we got in the car to come here, just how special it is to start this leg coming to The Current. You guys are so good to us. You always have been and it just was like, Oh, this is so celebratory. We're back at it. We always love playing the Twin Cities. The audiences here are, you know, the best and it's just really fun to be back.

Mac Wilson: Well, the last time you were in, we chatted back in the fall of 2019. That was a general time of like turmoil and tumult. And then 2020 happened. Yeah. So, so much of your music, I think is about resilience. Did you feel that that gave you a leg up? Like going into the pandemic? You're like, Okay, we've, we've been preparing for this our whole lives. You feel like you were in a position to actually handle things fairly well as you went into that period. Wow.

Meegan Closner: No, I feel like we were the same as anyone else. Yeah. But I would say it gave us the time to go to some therapy. Yes, it did. It did. It gave us time to take space for ourselves and reassess. Yeah, everything. Literally everything literally.

Mac Wilson: Taking care of yourself is so much in the discourse to the point where this is the it's me and Joseph, we got to be vulnerable about this, like I started on SSRIs a year ago. And I told my mother about it. And she's sort of seem shocked, like, like, not sure exactly what to make of it. Like "Mom, everybody I know is doing this too. We're taking care of ourselves." So even in the last couple of decades, where there's been so many leaps and bounds with the ways that people are taking care of yourself. So if you want to dive into the idea of therapy, and the specific ways that that helped your lives over the last couple of years, I'd love to hear.

Allison Closner: I've done a lot of therapy specifically geared towards the anxiety that I've experienced in my life. And I had such an incredible experience talking with people about that. And it's been, for me personally very life altering, but I found some programs online and things. So that's I don't know, if that's been my experience, I feel very grateful to have had some people to talk to and I was feeling so bad.

Natalie Closner: I love hearing about your tools that you're finding because I feel like I love that this idea that you just kind of Sally onward and you and you just you know, pull up your bootstraps and go is just kind of dissipating. Because it's like, no, we can resource ourselves. I had an amazing experience doing therapy with somatic experiencing, which is essentially just like of the nervous system of the body. And it really helped me with so many things, just kind of recognizing how my body's this resource that kind of will tell me when things are going on and give me these cues and how do I listen to that and like use my body like with breathing and just kind of centering and grounding in these different tools and exercises that I learned from that that have helped me a bunch when it you know. Before that, I was really like living out of my brain a lot and just being like, this is what we do next. We are a robot. It's like no, this whole thing is trying to like say, oh my gosh, my chest is really tight right now. How do I kind of like open my shoulders and breathe into that space and like that's is specifically one of the tools that was really helpful for me.

Mac Wilson: I'm gonna have to write down the name of that specific therapy because I think that that would really help.

Natalie Closner: It's somatic therapy. I learned about it because my best friend is a therapist, and she got training in this modality and it's just like really helped me a ton. Yeah.

Mac Wilson: We're here in The Current studio with Joseph, also over the last couple of years. I'm curious, did you get any pandemic pets, any animals during the fray in any of your households?

Natalie Closner: You collected them?

Allison Closner: Well, I was at the time of the pandemic, I was living on our brother's little farm and I collected two sheep.

Allison Closner: Yeah, Shetland sheep. And they were very, very sweet. But they live with him still. And I don't that's Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, did you?

Natalie Closner: I did, but I don't have him anymore. Yes. too. Sad. have a story to talk about.

Mac Wilson: It goes there. We started with pigeons. Pigeons and dogs. So Oh, awesome. I mean, pigeons. Yeah, that's a super cool on. Well, I mean, it, you build a hutch for them. And then they're, they're homing pigeons. So if you let them out, they'll fly around for the whole day. And then they'll come home at night. And you can have these in the neighborhood. You don't need a permit for them. So it's, they're a little bit easier version of chickens. Where a chicken, you have to go to the city council and get the right permits for it. And then they're walking around. Whereas these do you eat their eggs? We don't eat them. No, they've that we they've hatched some eggs before. The only downside is that they're, they're free. That makes them more vulnerable to predators. So we just lost one last week. But that's how it goes. It is super cool. It's that was really relaxing for us. Like last summer, we let them out and then you watch them go all the way up and go anywhere they want to come home at the end of the night, or at the end of the day, rather.

Natalie Closner: Do they have names?

Mac Wilson: Yes. We have to give them gender neutral names, because you can't like you can't gender them at first until they start laying eggs or they start exhibiting like breeding behavior. So the gender neutral names so the the doting mama right now is Chungus.

Mac Wilson: Sonny died last week, and then we have Sula and August is the other one. So these are all children of the original batch that we had last year, and they each passed away from different things. But it's, it's cool to watch that progress too. It's sort of a neat thing. Let's go visit the birds. You know. Anyway, that's a that's my bird story. I love talking about my birds. As anybody who listens to The Current, they know that I'm a huge bird fan. We won't even dive into the dogs right now. So we're here with Joseph, we're talking about the sun and taking a step back back pandemic era, too. And as I was listening to your songs as you were playing them in the studio, I'm listening to your harmonies, and I'm like, how do you arrange harmonies on Zoom?

Mac Wilson: Whether in the songwriting process or the arranger arranging, did it primarily take place on on Zoom? And then how did that come together?

Meegan Closner: We wrote so many songs over zoom, because the three of us were not in the same place for most of the time. So it's hard with the lag. That was the hardest part of like, you couldn't really play guitar and sing at the same time.

Allison Closner: We needed to be super creative. And we wrote with, we did co writing sessions with other people. And there was so many people coming up with really interesting ideas. I think one of the one of the most interesting and best ones was with the writers that we wrote "Nervous System" with. They had us everyone mute their videos, microphones, and then they one of the boxes was playing the background track. And then we all would type in the little message box like ideas for lyrics and things. Yeah. And then but it was nice for me because I think. Writing is hard for me. And so it's something that I'm constantly learning as we go. Writing songs I should say, not just like writing in general. But anyways, um, but it was cool, because you could throw out an idea and if it wasn't good, it would just scroll up in the chat and if it was good, then yeah, then it would land.

Mac Wilson: You hopefully had somebody like saving your chatter writing it down the good stuff.

Natalie Closner: About the harmonies, we waited till we were together to lock it in because we always we just go with like, whatever is intuitive and who has an idea. So that all happens like when we're in person. Yeah, yeah, I had made demos with like ideas, but I knew they would come up with better ideas for the harmonies.

Mac Wilson: How has the new record going over on over the road. Like how was the response been so far?

Meegan Closner: These are some of our favorite shows we've ever played. I think these songs are really fun to play live, we have such a good band that's playing with us. And the audiences have been incredible.

Natalie Closner: People who listen to Joseph are just really open hearted, warm, emanating people. And so being in the same room together, just means a lot. And we also will get, you know, it blows my mind when we'll get these messages of people saying like, Oh, we actually, uh, we got a really cool message today, actually, of a mom who is bringing her daughters. And she said that they started listening to a podcast about nervous system regulation, because of our song "Nervous System." And she was like, my girls know about that because of that song. And it's just like getting those kinds of messages, and everything just blows my mind. So it's been really special.

Mac Wilson: I definitely get that impression that if you go out to a Joseph show, you know, the sort of mood that that it's going to be in the best possible way. Are you familiar with Cloud Cult? Oh, they're, they're based out of here in Minneapolis, a lot of really emotional stuff. They're definitely they're in the same vein, and they're worth diving into. They did a show with the Minnesota Orchestra last summer, last spring. And it was I was watching it on the web stream. And I was crying. And somebody noted that that's what happens at a Cloud Cult show. So there were people who like won tickets to the show. And they said, Well, these people they had no idea what they got were getting into because they sat down in the audience and everyone around them is crying. Oh, and they had no idea what they that they were in for. I kind of think Joseph shows are kind of the same way. So people have to be prepared to feel vulnerable and feel those emotions, like I said, in the best possible way. Well, Joseph, thank you again for stopping by The Current studio today. And I look forward to having you back soon. Thank you.