“My first album was a personal love letter to God,” Josh T Pearson tells me, looking like a cross between Johnny Cash and Moses. No wonder, then, that it took him 10 years to record another. On this year's release, Pearson had moved on, talking failed love like a punk Leonard Cohen stranded in the wilderness. Face to face, Pearson is, however, quite the Southern gent: the Last of the Country Gentlemen, as he calls himself in the title of the new album. In a west-London café, he recounted how he got here, and why he is nervous about this Saturday’s big gig at the Barbican.
Pearson grew up in Texas. His father was a Pentecostal preacher who abandoned the family when he was eight. He walked out to follow a more "Jesus-focused life" but yet this, somehow, included not paying child support. It was down to Pearson’s mother to look after him. “My Mom was really mean,” he says with a grin, “but she had to be. We were the poorest on the street, and she had to work a couple of jobs just to raise my sister and I.”
Being separated from their dad didn’t put them off going to church. The chapel they attended was like something out of a Coen brothers' film. There was speaking in tongues, “singing, dancing, clapping your hands and all that kind of crap”. It was Pearson’s first exposure to music, and made a believer out of him.
Pearson says he was exhausted trying to 'save the world. It's hard. You really lose your mind after a while'Pearson is a somewhat unique Christian, though. As a teenager he decided to drop some “essential” beliefs and would listen to The Smiths and shoegaze bands. The family lived in a suburb outside Dallas, called Denton. It was a place of musical freedom, where great bands would come to play as a warm-down from playing big gigs in Austin.
There was also a lively home-grown music scene there. “I was surrounded by a lot of influences and smart, sharp, kids,” Pearson drawls, adding, “this was in the pre-internet days. There was no idea of making it as a band. You made the music you wanted without any thought of it going anywhere. It gave me a real freedom to create as big and grandiose a vision as I wanted.”
That vision was The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads’ British-indie-influenced Lift to Experience, an album about “getting to the Promised Land, whatever that might be”. But after touring for a year and a half they called it quits. Pearson says he was exhausted trying to “save the world”, a line from one of his songs. He looks at me with a look that may or may not be serious: “It's hard. You really lose your mind after a while,” he pleads.
Pearson then retreated from the world. “I worked as a carpenter. That's my fallback. I do woodwork. I was in the country, doing odd jobs, living alone in the house I bought for $10,000. Maybe I should have bought a car. It was surrounded by poverty. Not surrounded by drug dealers, just country rednecks. Hillbillies, I love them. I am one of them I guess.”
Pearson describes the songs as delicate. Sometimes they are, but frequently they are also personal and painful, like an Everyman's whisky-soaked sadness
During that time, he also took to heavy drinking. “I don’t really know how to summarise 10 years in a nutshell,” he tells me. “Becoming an alcoholic? Spending a few years trying to get sober?” More than that, all the time he kept observing people. When not in Texas, he was hitching around Europe, sleeping on fellow musicians' couches. Between times he had a brief, ill-fated marriage. And all the time he wrote down every observation and melody that came to him.
The result was The Last of the Country Gentlemen, an explosive, acoustic album full of yearning. Pearson describes the songs as delicate. Sometimes they are, but frequently they are also personal and painful, like an Everyman's whisky-soaked sadness. The album has won plaudits from all quarters of the press. Live, too, the show has been a great success. Pearson is currently on his second tour of the year. But he's still careful to read his audience. “If they’re ravaging wolves I've got to be a bit more closely guarded and tell them more jokes,” he says. But surely not at the Barbican, this Saturday? “London is always tricky,” he replies. “Audiences are spoiled because they have their choice of the greatest shows every week. I am going to have to be at the top of my game.”
- Josh T Pearson is on UK tour all week, finishing at the Barbican on Saturday, 26 November
- Find Josh T Pearson's special five-track Christmas EP Josh T Pearson's Rough Trade Christmas Bonus
Watch Josh T Pearson perform "Drive Her Out"
