Features

Joe Goodkin: The Daily Vault Interview

by Jason Warburg

Wikipedia describes a “bard” as “an oral repository and professional storyteller, verse-maker, music composer, oral historian and genealogist.” In 2025, it’s an unusual term that might only come up in conversation with a singer-songwriter who’s thoroughly steeped in their craft, or maybe a scholar with a degree in classics.

Of course, if your conversation partner happens to be both of those things at once, then it’s practically inevitable.

Chicago singer-songwriter Joe Goodkin earned a degree in classics a couple of decades back, and immediately put his training to use, composing a 35-minute song cycle exploring and narrating the tale of Homer’s Odyssey. It’s a unique creation that he has since been invited to play for college and high school audiences in all 50 of the United States as well as several countries abroad. More recently, he composed a sequel covering Homer’s Iliad, which has been equally well-received.

The other half of Goodkin’s “bifurcated” musical career (his term, see below) has been spent plowing more conventional fields. Early on he was a guitar player in others’ bands, before graduating to frontman of a band, before becoming the singer-songwriter face of a project called Paper Arrows that released five albums in six years and garnered an indie label contract.

At a certain point, though, Goodkin realized that, as an indie singer-songwriter, the economics of touring with a band didn’t pencil out for him; he could only hope to turn a profit by playing solo dates. This led him toward a new paradigm and fresh song-cycle that proved to be a breakthrough: three EPs of six songs each, with all 18 tracks featuring only Goodkin’s voice and guitar. The intimacy of these recordings was reflected back in their lyrical content, the most personal and vulnerable of Goodkin’s songwriting career.

The resulting Record Of Life, Record Of Loss and Record Of Love EPs came out over the course of four years between 2013 and 2017 and earned wide praise (including from this writer). Subsequently, Goodkin crafted solo reinterpretations of a set of songs from his previous project on the album Paper Arrows (2019), and delivered a brand new set of songs with a small group on 2023’s Consolations And Desolations.

His latest is a new EP, the self-titled Joe Goodkin, which lifts six of the 18 songs from the Record Of… collection and reinterprets them in a band setting. This further act of transformation and concentration—the six songs were strategically chosen to distill specific themes—has resulted in perhaps Goodkin’s most powerful and personal release yet. Taking inspiration from artists like Bob Dylan and Jason Isbell, while manifesting influences from James Taylor to Semisonic (Goodkin’s keening, emotive voice often reminds of Semisonic frontman Dan Wilson) Joe Goodkin offers a masterclass in songwriting and performance.

My recent chat with Joe was fascinating, illuminating, and a lot of fun—a deep dive into the creative process of an artist who has carved his own unique path, with plenty of practical lessons offered for any with the inclination to follow in his footsteps. As he explains it, Goodkin has over the years grown from a bard of others’ stories, to a bard of his own, and the power and promise of that evolution was present in every moment of our conversation.

THE DAILY VAULT: I write fiction, and I read comic books as a kid, so I’m always curious about origin stories. Please share your origin story as a songwriter.

JOE GOODKIN: [laughter] Nobody’s ever asked me that! I think a lot of it goes back to high school and the things I was listening to then. I went to high school in the early ’90s and the type of music that my band was playing at the time was what you would hear in the early ’90s—grunge stuff that was classic rock-inspired.

At that point I was writing more guitar parts than songs. I wasn’t the singer in the band, and that maybe stunted my growth as a songwriter a little bit, because guitar parts and songs are two totally different things. I started writing my own songs in high school, but I never shared them with anybody, all the way through college. It wasn’t until after college that I got in a band where for the first time, I was the primary songwriter and singer, and then it was another decade after that until I was working on a project where I was the only one writing.

Like a lot of things in my life and career, it was a long journey to even get to the point of starting to be a songwriter. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t. I started playing guitar and singing when I was eight. There’s a lot of music in my family. Some of those Beatles records are some of the first things I heard, along with Simon and Garfunkel and albums like that.

It’s just that songwriting is a really particular type of craft and intelligence and it’s something that, even after writing hundreds of songs, and decades in, still stumps me sometimes. I was first probably attracted to the most important material of that time period, like Bob Dylan and that sort of stuff everybody has to go through.

And then the ’90s were a time when a lot of weird music was popular—it was a really cool time for that. My theory, which I have no data to support, is that there was so much money in CDs that labels were taking chances on some of these smaller and weirder artists. And I think if you look at stuff that got popular in the ’90s, it’s really weird. There are some things that you look at and go “Wow, I don’t think that would have made it in the ’80s, and I don’t think it would have made it in the 2000s.” I think it gave me the sense that any sort of music could be popular, any sort of songwriting could be popular—which is false.

It was a long process before I felt comfortable finding my voice. In some ways, the first of the three Record EPs that I released, Record Of Life, was the first time I felt like a fully realized songwriter. And at that point, I had already released 50 songs with one project and a dozen songs with another.

               

Diving into the new record, it features full band versions of six songs that you originally recorded for the Record EPs. Those were genuinely solo records, just you and a guitar. What was the impetus for those three original EPs, that formed the genesis of the new one?

At the time, it was partially practical. I had been recording in a band set up for five or six years at that point that I called Paper Arrows, which was really myself writing songs, and then a rotating cast of musicians, with a couple of the same guys that I was working with here in Chicago. I really like those Paper Arrows records a lot. They got some good college radio play, I licensed some of them to TV shows like MTV Real World and Keeping Up With The Kardashians, and I got a small indie record deal for the fourth of those albums.

But I could see that touring as an independent band, without a big label backing you, was impossible. And you have to tour to sell the record—that’s still how you do it. And I could not for the life of me see how I could take these Paper Arrows records that I made, that I loved, that were full band productions, and take them on the road and not lose my house, or at least lose money. It would bum me out, because I loved the project and people seemed to like it.

At the same time, I was touring solo behind this unique folk opera that I wrote based on Homer’s Odyssey. And I was getting a lot of work in the early 2010s for the first time, going to colleges, performing for lecture series, performing in classrooms. It was really fulfilling, first of all because it scratched a bunch of itches for me.

My educational background is in classics, and I loved the pieces I’d written. I got to start traveling a lot, which was really cool. And I got to travel at a level as a touring musician that was amazing, staying in nice places—they were taking care of me at these colleges—and I just thought, anything I do going forward from this point, I think I have to do by myself. I think that’s the only way I can build this into a sustainable career. I can’t bring drummers and bass players and guitar players on the road with me; it’s just not going to happen.

And on top of that, the subject matter of this Odyssey piece was so specific and unique and narrow that it led me to believe that, in my original songwriting, I should try to start with more specificity than I’d done with the Paper Arrows project. I’d become a bard of Homer’s Odyssey, but now I tried to become a bard of my own story. I was trying to tell my own story in a more detailed way, the same way I would imagine an ancient bard doing it.

The first song that came to me was “Gray.” If I look back at my writing books, I can see myself leaning towards that type of writing in the months before, but then it just sort of all happens, and that song comes out, and I remember thinking “Wow—I can do this by myself. In fact, I think that’s the only way I can do this.” At this point I don’t need a band, it’s just my story. So I started writing in that format for that ethos a little bit more, and I abandoned a full band record that I’d been working on. Transitioning to an entirely solo project with no other musicians involved just developed this momentum, and that’s the way I recorded it, and the way I performed it, too.

So many times in my creative life, it’s all about grabbing that momentum when you feel it.

Yes! The antenna is up, as Keith Richards said, and you just go at it. You know, it’s weird, I think when you start out writing, you think writing and creativity is going to be like “Eureka!” moments where you have an idea and then you execute it. Sometimes, on a larger scale, it happens that way, but at least for me, especially the last 10 to 15 years, most of the time it just tumbles out. And then I’m sort of an observer of my own creativity in the moment. It’s not a calculation, it just comes out and you go “Oh, hey, wow, that’s pretty good.” [laughter]

I think that’s what happened with “Gray”—it just cracked open. And then I just kept going at it for 17 more songs. And that was what made up those three EPs.

With the new EP, you took two songs from each of the Record EPs and rerecorded them. Why did you choose to circle back on those and try them in full band arrangements?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a little while. I love the original recordings. I think they’re exactly what I wanted to make and represented what I could make at the time. They were really good for the material at the time. But I’ve also been performing a lot of the songs solo over the last 10 years and I’ve developed versions of them that felt like I was almost writing new songs.

Even though the first set of EPs were solo recordings, they’re very produced, very layered. Some tracks have eight or nine guitars on them; some have four or five voices. I had to develop a way to play my own material solo, which was really strange and also fun. But with these live solo versions, there was new space in them, and over the last 10 years, I’ve become a much more confident arranger and producer of my own work. Plus, I’ve built up a lot of relationships with musicians that I really love, who I’ve worked with on other people’s projects and some of my own.

So I just kept hearing space in these songs to try to present them in a way that was maybe easier for some people to access than the solo stuff. The solo stuff is a very specific production ethos, and you’re either in it or you’re not. But more people, I think, want to hear a conventional full band recording, and it’s a little easier for them to access the material sometimes if you present it that way.

And then in early 2024 I applied for a grant from a Cook County level fund supporting local artsbusinesses affected by COVID. I asked fora record budget, a sizable amount of money, at least for the records I make. I never thought I’d get the grant; it was one of those things you send off for and wait. And it just came in.

In the spirit of what the grant was supposed to be, I wanted to spend all of the money in my community, on these musicians that I love, at a local studio. I’d gone to Nashville for my previous record and made an album there, Consolations And Desolations, which was really fun, but I wanted to try to work from closer to home.

The closest studio to me is a block away from my house and happens to be owned by a guy named Brian Deck, who produced Iron And Wine and Modest Mouse and Counting Crows and a bunch of other records I really love. So I just walked down there and saw the studio and was like, “Hey, would you produce my record?” And I had a budget where I could afford the kind of producer and the kind of talent that I was able to bring in on it.

So, you have to keep your antenna up for creativity, but you also have to keep it up for the business side of things, too. Making art does take resources and funds and when I got sort of gifted this money that I didn’t think I would get, it seemed like the universe was telling me—because I’d already been thinking about it—to go ahead and go after it. It was a really cool opportunity.

Was there a sense of discovery or rediscovery of the songs as you were trying them out in these new full-band arrangements?

Yeah, for sure. What’s cool about the way we recorded is, we recorded the whole thing in two days, basically live and without any rehearsal. The people that I work with like to record that way and I don’t like to rehearse before I record. There’s a Nashville thing where you just show up and there’s a chart, or maybe you send a demo, and you try to capture the first time you all play the song together the right way.

That’s the goal, so it was entirely discovery—nobody knew what these songs were going to sound like. Sometimes the song is written in such a way that it makes you record it in a certain way—and sometimes the harder you think about it, the worse it gets. A song like “Never Come Back,” to me it felt obvious that the only way this song can sound is the way we played it. And in fact, that’s the first and only take we did of it. That’s the only time that song was played with the band, which was really, really cool.

So there was a huge amount of discovery in it for me, and the band that we were able to assemble, they were all so good and so intuitive and listened so well that I don’t think we played any of the songs more than four times. Maybe pieces of them, but most of the complete takes were in the first three or four takes. Later we went back and added some strings and background vocals and horns and things like that, but the core of it was entirely discovery.

I don’t know which musician said it, but I heard somebody say once that “Recording machines love discovery. That’s what they like to hear.” So we’re coming together for the first time and you have to have a certain level of technical ability and the material has to be the type of material that can be communicated fairly quickly or fairly intuitively. But yeah, that’s part of the reason I like the recording so much, is I think there’s a really cool discovery energy in it because of that.

That’s great. Now I’d like to read a quote from each of the songs and see what they trigger—maybe a memory they’re describing, or a memory of when you wrote the song, or whatever.

From “Gray”: “How do we say goodbye / When we have the chance to write / The last words of a precious life?"

That’s sort of a topic sentence for the whole record. That song was one of those things you write that sends your life off in a different direction creatively. When you get those, they’re a gift.

And the first lines of that song: “Up and down the stairs we went / In the gray of a winter that wouldn’t end / An old black dog with bad hips and a cough / Some days we’d have to carry him the last flight up.” I remember writing those lines almost like lightning strikes—they just came out.

The last song, “Ashes,” has a response to the quote you read. Part of the reason for me tightening this up to six songs was that it clarified for me what those first 18 songs were really about, and they weren’t about what I thought they were when I wrote them. The thing I thought was most important about them was actually not the most important thing. I was able to hit the thing that was most important better by getting it down to six.

From “As Old As I Am Now”: “And I looked at all the smiles of the people who shaped my life / And I knew someday they’d all be gone / And once they were as old as I am now."

I really admire that type of songwriting, more than any other type, where there’s some sort of twist near the end, where you’re able to capture the meaning of the song with one little line. Jason Isbell does it all the time. Joni Mitchell does it all the time. Leonard Cohen does it. And I’m not suggesting I’m in the same league as those songwriters, but that line where the meaning of “As Old As I Am Now” changes from how old the people are who you’re talking about, to understanding your own mortality—that was the heart of that song.

That’s one of those songs that evolved to be better than when I wrote it, I think, and it’s probably the one where the arrangement changed the most from the original recording. I think I was gifted that song; I don’t think I knew what I was writing when I wrote it. And being 10 years older and having gone through more loss and grief and life, I wanted to present it in a slightly different way, with the knowledge I have now of how special a song it is.

I love the kind of songwriting you’re describing, with a twist; it somehow gives a song an extra dimension.

Yeah. The one that jumps to mind is the Jason Isbell song “If We Were Vampires,” where he gets to the end of the second verse and he just tucks in “…and hope that I’m not the one left behind.” Right there, it becomes a different song. He’s got all this sort of fun stuff about what it would be like if you were immortal, but really, it’s a song about not wanting to be left behind; he’s saying he wants to be the one to die first. That’s one of the most amazing examples.

I think Joni Mitchell does it in “River,” too, where she sort of sets you up to think that song is about one thing and then then she sings “I made my baby cry” and you realize what that song is really about. People still sing it like a Christmas song, which is ridiculous.

But anyway, thank you for calling that line out. I do like that one.

From “Sarah and Julie”: “Don’t say she lost, don’t say it when / Everyone loses the fight in the end / Say that she won for the way that she lived / Let us be judged by the love that we give.”

Yeah. Sarah passed away in 2018. [pause] She got to hear the song in 2017 or 18.

Wow.

It’s another one where you write about people and then they’re gone and it’s a little bittersweet. Because when you write a song, I think you sometimes believe it has magical power—which it sort of does—but one of the powers it doesn’t have is stopping time and keeping people here.

There’s a Paul Simon line. “Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears,” which I think is one of the best lines ever. But I still like that notion that she’s not gone, you know—she’s in my song and my grandparents are in my songs and all these people that I wrote about at the time, who are gone now, are still there in some sense. They’re not alongside us right now, but they still exist in that way. I think that’s what I was after in that chorus.

I love that idea. For “My Mother’s Voice”: “Now the generations turn and we’ve moved up a place / All along I’ve tried to learn how to be less afraid / Of saying what I mean and singing what I feel / Of living what I dream and making my hopes real.”

I wrote that song for my mom’s birthday eight or nine years ago. This goes with “As Old As I Am Now,” which is why putting these songs a little closer together on a condensed track list makes them more powerful. It’s picking up a thread from  “As Old As I Am Now” about other people’s mortality and awakening your awareness of your own mortality. I think these songs were the process of me becoming less afraid about saying a lot of things. It’s hard to live by that idea, it’s very hard. You try not to be afraid, but I think these songs really help me at least be less afraid of things like that.

That’s powerful. From “Never Come Back”: “And I wish I’d spoken up / And said I love you all / Because you never know when someone might walk out of your life / And never come back.”

I was really happy to rerecord that one. Not that the solo version of it, which is truly a solo version of it, didn’t do it justice—I think it did. But I think it becomes a little more powerful in a band presentation. It’s almost like an archetypal soul song, in a way to me that’s moving. 

That’s another one where I tucked a twist into the end of that verse. It’s about my family and my family’s loss, but it’s really about me trying to integrate the meaning of that into my life, that you should say that you love somebody now, because every time could be the last time you see them. It’s hard to remember to do that, even if you can write it in a song. I think I was trying to say that in the song for the people I love to hear and as a reminder to me to try to live with that in mind.

Finally, from “Ashes”: “All three of them left us in the blink of an eye / One after another, after another they were gone / I felt helpless to do anything so I did what I could / And remembered them in song.”

Sometimes life throws you a condensed period of loss, and part of it for me was that I had been really lucky up to that point. I didn’t go through a lot of the death type of loss as a young person. I had three living grandparents until I was in my mid-30s. Even the older people in my life didn’t die… and then eventually, time catches up.

I lost this cherished pet at a time when we also had three people over 90 in our family. You could say their age makes what happened next less tragic, but it doesn’t make it less impactful. My mom’s parents and brother passed away in the span of a little over two years. I didn’t know what else to do, so I put them in songs. I was picking up on the “Sarah And Julie” idea that I can talk about them and sing about them and have conversations with you about them, and that makes it feel like they’re back, every time somebody listens to the song or talks about it.

My experience has been that writing and the creative process help me to process grief.

I think that’s right. And then if you’ve put something about grief out into the world, it’s reassuring, because now there’s a thing out there that’s like a monument. It’s something that helped me a lot, but there’s also value in that for processing as well.

Did you feel like you learned anything new about these songs while you were working on the new full-band versions for this EP?

Yeah. I took it as a chance to go back and change some things I thought could be better. I don’t think I could have done them any differently at the time, really. There were a couple of lines that bothered me that I changed. 

It’s interesting—the producer, Brian, never listened to the original recordings. He decided not to. I replayed the songs for him with an acoustic guitar, like they were new songs, which I think was really cool. I don’t think any of the band ever listened to the original recordings either, or if they did, it wasn’t in order to record them. They heard my demos of me playing the songs on acoustic guitar. Brian had some very good suggestions about song structure, and a couple of lyrical suggestions as well.

One thing that I take a lot of pride in is that I only actually did one vocal take of the whole record. After we finished the band tracking, I went into the live room and I thought I was just singing clean rough versions so we could hear how it sounded. I did one take of each song and then Brian said “I think the vocals are done. I don’t think you have to re-sing any of them.” And that’s what’s on the record.

Of course, a couple of the lines I sang, I mis-sang. In the end, I just thought “Well, I guess that’s what the lyric is for this version.” [laughter] I also changed the key on one of the songs. “Ashes” is a half-step higher or maybe a full step because I thought I could sing with more energy with a full band and it was a little bit easier to play.

So, I learned things like that. I also learned some of the things I mentioned with the lyrics. I have enough distance from it now that it almost doesn’t feel like I wrote them. It almost feels like I learned somebody else’s songs at this point, which is really neat to me because I discover all these things that my younger self left for me. Some of them, I think I left very purposefully and some of them—the subconscious is a motherfucker! [laughter] In a good way and in a bad way. You’ll create things and then come back to them and go, man, I was screaming at my future self to remember this or that.

I found that type of stuff in the songs that I decided to re-record. The ones I picked were the ones where I felt like my past self had left my future self a lot of room to work with, more so than others. I found I couldn’t believe I wrote some of those lines. My first thought was “I can’t write lines like that”—but I did. Other songwriters have said that—again, not to put myself up there with Bob Dylan, but in an interview he did with 60 Minutes maybe 20 years ago, he quotes an early work of his and he just says “I can’t write like that anymore. It just poured out of me.”

I wrote things like my Odyssey piece when I was comparatively very young, 23 or 24, and I don’t think I could write it that way anymore. I think I had to be young and dumb and not know any better to do that. So I think there’s a benefit to when I wrote these songs, because there’s a naivete in them from being a younger self and being in a real moment of grief. As an older person, I was then able to reflect a little bit more and take pride and reassurance and learn something, because you forget about processing grief, too. That’s the other thing—you sort of go through grief and then you compartmentalize it a bit.

Making this record helped me to see that it’s okay to feel that grief. I did, and I processed it, and I got through it.

As with most writers, your songs are a mixture of lived experience, stories you’ve heard, and pure invention. A lot of your songs feel really personal, though, especially on this record. My experience of writing about loved ones has been that it’s tricky, because you’re searching for that balance between being honest and genuine and inadvertently causing harm to someone you care about. How has that piece of it been for you?

With some of the people involved in this, I asked their permission to write about them. If I thought I was telling their story, I sent it to them and asked them to tell me if they thought there was anything they didn’t want out there.

I think what most people take from my work is that I’m the most vulnerable with my own story. I think if you do that, other people get more comfortable with you speaking for them, because they see that you have as much skin in the game as they do. If you’re making yourself vulnerable, then there’s no double standard and I think it’s easier to get people comfortable with that.

Some of the songs are sad, but they’re written to tell people’s stories and bring joy and light to them. I wrote about people I love, even if I wrote about difficult things, especially on these six songs. Some of the other 12 [songs from the Record EPs] have some even thornier things. I didn’t ask permission for my ex-wife to write about her, but she doesn’t turn up in this one as much.

I think that falls within the long tradition of writing songs about break-ups and former partners.

Yeah, I mean, we could be Richard and Linda Thompson, and do it together.

That’s another level! [laughter]

He said that that’s not a breakup record, which I don’t think is true, but it’s an amazing record, whatever it is.

Anyhow, I asked for people’s permission where I thought I was speaking in a way that needed it. The other thing that helps me out with this is I try to write without judgment. That’s what makes these songs work. I think the goal is to foster empathy, and I think if people can see you’re creating empathy for them and making them human, it pretty much eliminates the chance that something’s going to be taken the wrong way or that you’re going to write in a way that winds up hurting somebody.

I love that. If there’s one thing the world needs, it’s more empathy.

It’s the answer to everything. It’s really, really simple. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s very, very simple.

Your songs feel so naturalistic—whether you’re solo or with a band, the recordings always feel genuine and unfiltered. You talked about the process you go through to achieve that, but it feels like we’re in the room with you, and that sense of immediacy and presence feels like an integral part of your music. How much of that is a conscious choice, and how much of that is just how you work?

It’s all part of the same thing—chicken and egg. It suits the material, for sure. People do write very personal songs that are not as direct and exposed and intimate as the way I record, but I think it suits me. It’s the way I feel like my work is best presented.

I do take a lot of pride in capturing things very quickly in the studio, and I think that the musicians I respect the most largely have done that. Also, for me, the first idea is almost always the best idea. And if my chops are such that I can get these songs out very directly and quickly, that’s what I want to do. Those are almost always the recordings that I feel like do the material the most service.

On a lot of what I’ve recorded in the last five or six years, the vocals are sung in live takes. I told you about this record. Also, The Blues Of Achilles recording that I did with Steve Albini is all live takes to tape. The Joe Goodkin - Paper Arrows record was all recorded with live takes, too. It’s just something I’ve gotten into the last couple of years without thinking about it; we did very few vocal takes on Consolations And Desolations, too.

It just seems like it suits me and the material, and a lot of the people that I really love as singers, that’s the way they work, so that’s the way I want to work, too.

                

Please talk about The Odyssey project and its sequel The Blues Of Achilles, based on The Iliad. You mentioned your classics training, but what inspired them?

I was an accidental classics major in college at University of Wisconsin, Madison. It’s the only type of classics major, I think. [laughter] Going back to our conversation about creativity, to me there’s a through line of keeping your heart open to things that impact you sort of by surprise. My first semester at college I took an ancient Greek class, because I’d seen a couple of ancient Greek words in a book in high school and thought they looked interesting. And I fell in love with that language and the discipline, and ended up majoring in classics.

I was really lucky that I had a great program at Wisconsin, and I had a family that—well, you know. Some families are dickish about that. [laughter] I had a lot of support, and it was something that really lit my heart and brain up at the same time. Then, not long after I graduated college, I wrote this bardic retelling of Homer’s Odyssey in song—not with any plan that I would still be doing it 23 years later, but maybe that’s why it’s been so successful. It wasn’t a calculated career commodity, it was just something that I liked.

Especially once I became a full-time musician in 2010, it’s been an amazing foundation of a career for me. As you said, I wrote a sequel to it based on the Iliad in 2018, and then premiered it in 2020, and between the two pieces I’ve done those performances 500 times, in all 50 U.S. states. I’ve done it abroad, and in Greece and Italy and the Netherlands, and it just keeps going.

It frustrates me a little bit sometimes that my career seems to be bifurcated, where there’s this normal music over here and this classics-inspired music over there. I completely understand why some people don’t seem to be into both; there are some people who are, but largely the two kinds of music seem to run on parallel tracks. But I try to see that as something to be thankful for, because being a musician is really hard, and really hard to do full time, and the fact that I have a couple of different things that can sustain my career and sustain me creatively, is probably more important.

I feel fairly comfortable saying I’m the only person who has played the Odyssey in all 50 U.S. states, and what happens when you attach yourself to a story that’s been relevant for 3000 years, is that it’s relevant all the time. Christopher Nolan’s next movie next year is a big budget Odyssey with Matt Damon as Odysseus. Guess who’s going to work more next year because of that? [laughter]

It’s amazing. I never want to complain about it other than about that weird sort of perplexed feeling I get sometimes: “You know, if you’re into this thing, I’ve got all this other music too...”

But I do think those projects connect to these EPs. What I learned about being a bard of somebody else’s story was the power it had to generate empathy and move people and connect people. I think the throughline to all my work is human connection. That’s the thing that excited me about the classics, and it’s the thing that excites me about Greek epic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. It’s the thing that excites me about songwriting in general, whether it’s my own story or somebody else’s or some amalgam of that.

I feel confident you’re right about being the only person to play a live set based on The Odyssey in 50 states. But that’s exciting about the Christopher Nolan movie.

Yeah, you’ll be hearing about it next summer, that’s for sure. With all those classic stories we’re a little trepidatious with every new version that gets released, because we have in our heads shows like the TV version of The Odyssey from the ’90s with Armand Assante as Odysseus and bad, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys-type CGI. But Christopher Nolan is one of the best film makers in the world, so I’m sure he’s going to do something with it that’s interesting.

With Chris Nolan in charge, we can keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best. So, you mentioned the Paper Arrows band project that you were doing previous to the Records. Please talk about that.

It’s been a long journey to being a songwriter and I’ve gone through phases. You have these increments, and breakthroughs. During the 2000s, I was in a band that did okay in Chicago and made a couple of records; I wrote all the music for that band and sang.

And then I started writing all these songs that just didn’t seem to fit that band’s format. We had this really powerful rhythm section and a violin player and I was playing a lot of loud electric guitar. It was a really cool band and it taught me a lot, but I was writing all this quiet music that was a lot more sensitive and a lot more overtly personal. One winter I just started recording it separately from that band with a friend of mine in a makeshift attic studio, at a time when I was also going through a divorce, which helped fuel the writing. 

    

The music that came out of that, made for very little money out of this attic studio, with me mostly playing acoustic guitar, wound up being the first Paper Arrows record, Look Alive. I finished it and sent it to people and it got a much bigger reaction than the other stuff I was working on. It was a step in the direction of a kind of vulnerability that wasn’t there before, in the presentation or the writing.

In the end, it was the phase I needed to go through to get to the point where I wrote the Record EPs. Paper Arrows went on for six years and put out five albums. That project turned me into an everyday writer—I was basically putting out a record a year, which I’ve mostly kept up since. And I found a couple of guys to work with who I really liked, who were really good for me and made my material better.

It helped me understand how putting together a band really impacts your material, and it also helped me with the business end of it, because I got some placements on TV and some college radio attention, and a little record deal, which felt great at the time and was also really important to me.

What I said about the EPs is also applicable to Paper Arrows, I made the best records I could make at that point based on who I was and how I was writing. And this isn’t my first time reinventing old material. I made a record under my own name a few years ago [2019] called Paper Arrows, which was sort of reverse engineering solo acoustic versions of songs that I’d done with the band Paper Arrows, two songs per record, plus five or six new songs, because I just felt like I could perform the old songs better at that point. I really found my voice by becoming more vulnerable.

All that Paper Arrows material is there for people to find, if the algorithm ever sends them that way.

A lot of creative people I’ve talked with have experienced a trajectory where over time they are driven to go deeper and deeper with their art. A writer friend of mine likes to say that we’re always writing two stories: the story we’re working on, and The Story—the one we’re telling through our entire creative life. I’m in my 60s and still figuring out what The Story is about for me. How about you? Do you feel like you’ve gotten any closer over the years to figuring out The Story for you?

I’m a human connection junkie, an empath, and I’m also one of these weird people that actually really likes and respects music. As in, I think it’s the most powerful thing in the world. If you look way, way back at it, you realize that pitch and rhythm evolved as a form of communication long before conventional language. If you look back at evolution. living things were communicating through song before they were communicating through what we think of as language. And some of the first ways that human beings tried to preserve what was important to them was through song, before there was writing.

I believe in music; I think it changes people’s lives. I think it’s the fastest way to help people recognize common ground and common experience, and it creates involuntary reactions. I think most of the music I’ve made is me trying to make a connection between myself and other humans, and also facilitate human connection in other people and create those experiences.

That’s great because it’s a never-ending project. Maybe you get a little better at it, become a craftsperson, but again, some of the stuff you write when you’re younger and don’t know any better winds up being less affected by all the bullshit that crowds your head as you get older. And then, part of getting better at telling your story is seeing six other stories you could tell, by virtue of the one you just told, or by virtue of how you’ve improved while telling them.

I’m really excited because right now it feels like all these things I’m doing are spawning other ideas that I’m excited about. I think I’ve recognized what’s unique about the way I create and now I have confidence and I’m not afraid. I don’t buy into this whole thing of you’re creative and then you’re not creative. For me, at least, it’s a lifelong pursuit.

For sure. And that segues nicely into the last question, which is: what’s next? What’s on the horizon for you?

By the time you read this interview, the new EP [self-titled / Joe Goodkin] will be out.

Then I have another record I’ve already made with the same producer, called Winedark Life. It’s the record I’ve been trying to make for 20 years. It’s the record I tried to make with the first Paper Arrows record, but I wasn’t good enough or confident enough yet to make. It’s very acoustic-oriented and intimate. It’s storytelling, but not as overtly autobiographical. I was lucky enough to get another grant to make that record in January this year, which was really wonderful. That will come out early next year.

I’m also working on another classics-related project based on the Sophocles play Philoctetes that I think is going to get produced at some point next year. As well as the stage adaptation of The Blues Of Achilles called In Loving Memory of the Dead, as well as a screenplay called A Winedark Life that’s about my travels with The Odyssey, as well as a memoir.

So I’ve got some stuff going on! [laughter] I just feel so lucky—not that I haven’t worked hard, but I think I’ve gotten better at letting my guard down and keeping my antenna up and paying attention to those little moments that used to come five or six or 10 years apart. Now they seem to be coming more often, and they seem to be multiplying.

So yeah, that’s what’s next, all of that.

I relate to that. Sometimes I think I get less done because I have too many ideas and I can’t figure out which one to pursue next.

Yeah. I think one of the ways you can get better is by understanding when it’s time to pursue what thing. And I think that’s something that I’m starting to get a little better at, because it matters. Creativity is awesome. But most of being successful at anything is administrative in some sense, like whether it’s business or art. It’s like the better your administration is, the more creative you can be.

People don’t like to hear that because it kind of breaks this idea that art is entirely inspiration. I can’t remember who said it, but, quote, “Inspiration is for amateurs.” It’s about showing up and doing the work and then figuring out what the world’s telling you—what should come out next or where you should go and what the right time is for that. I don’t like the administration part any more than anybody else, but it makes a difference if you can grit your teeth and get through it.

I’m sure it does; for example, you went out and got those grants. That literally facilitates the creative work.

Yeah, and it’s basically like half a record deal, without any of the strings attached. The grant pays for recording and producing the thing. The other half is promotion, but nobody has any idea what promotion is anymore, not even the record labels. For me, the minimal strings attached to the funding for these projects means that I can make them and not go into debt.

And that’s really freeing. I think people discount sometimes how that can impact you. My intentions have never been wrapped up in “Let’s make a ton of money”—clearly, based on my subjects! [laughter] But music exists in a business format. It just does. You have to know about resources, and if you want to make art, you have to figure out what your resources are and how to use them.

[Many thanks to Joe Goodkin for the conversation and the photos. Visit him at www.joegoodkin.com]