From Billings to Brooklyn: The music of Joshua Guthals

Published: April 10, 2009

By Bente Grinde

There is a hill in Joshua Guthals’s Brooklyn apartment. “I call it my pile,” he says, apologizing for the mess as he ushers me in.

When he thinks about it, the pile is reminiscent of the hill he grew up on at his family’s home on a dirt road six miles outside of Billings. Papers, flyers, videos, printer cables, clothes, and miscellany form the distinct mound of clutter on the floor. Plenty of people trip over real and metaphorical piles made of things left undone, but this thing is truly an entity. This is topography.

The 31-year-old singer/songwriter forms the fulcrum of the Brooklyn-based band Kind Monitor, which has recently released its first six-song EP, Somebody Saves My Life Most Every Single Day, currently available on iTunes.

Other instrumentalists and multimedia collaborators move through his work and around his projects (he's shared the stage with Scott Matthew of Shortbus, Lady Rizo, indie-rap star louis logic, and a host of jazz musicians), but Guthals writes, sings, plays guitar and keyboards, and charts the stylistic course.

His music is wonderfully deliberate, exploring a variety of styles while staying true to itself.

The new album has a tight and unique sound for a first EP, and is full of instrumental collaborations arranged skillfully around the artist’s sighing vocal melodies. People often compare Guthal to Nick Drake, Thom Yorke of Radiohead, and Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard – I also sense hints of Colin Meloy’s and Bon Iver’s melodic inclinations.

Though sometimes a bit hesitant to take risks, his work is unique and promising, with the honesty desperately needed to move indie music from the wallowing emo era toward a recovery of hope and reconnection. “Sweetly melancholy pop perfection,” writes John Cameron Mitchell; “the Emily Dickinson of the indie pop-rock world,” says Creative Loafing.

Guthals’s pile is rich with the themes he often explores in his music – stories of disconnection and isolation. “This pile has a lot of missed opportunities in it,” he explains.

Kind Monitor: Goodness that can’t intervene

Like much of his repertoire, the song “Kind Monitor” (which became the name of the band) emerged from a story of intense hopelessness that drifted in through Guthals’ window when he lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco several years ago. Every morning, people who were enrolled in a substance abuse recovery program would gather on the sidewalk outside the treatment center below the musician’s apartment to smoke cigarettes and discuss personal history.

Guthals became overwhelmed by the sense of isolation and loss in the stories told by these disembodied voices. “These people didn’t feel supported. They felt disconnected and fragmented,” Guthals recalls. “There was an emptiness in their lives that wouldn’t go away.”

As a way of coping with his own intense emotional response, Guthals created the idea of a “Kind Monitor.”

“These people wanted something to take care of them,” he reflected. Kind Monitor represents this something – omniscient, though not necessarily divine. Guthals perceives it as “a goodness that can’t intervene.”

Montana: Filling up the void

Guthals thinks about Montana a lot. A friend recently suggested that he attempt to draw on his connection to his home state as inspiration. To him, the nature of the open landscape and the natural beauty represent a sort of artistic void, or blank slate.

“Montana’s so big and empty, you just want to fill it up,” he says. Perhaps his attempt to draw artistic inspiration from his hill of missed opportunities is a way to begin filling up that void.

Guthals's parents required him to take music lessons in grade school. He studied percussion with Mary Wells and piano with Brownie Snyder in Billings for several years.

During his time at Billings Senior High, he played in the band, orchestra, marching band and pep band and performed in a few piano and percussion festivals, in addition to the Red Lodge Music Festival.

"I had a love/hate relationship with all of my musical involvements," Guthals says, "mostly around feelings of obligation and wanting to be free of such responsibility. These themes are a big part of my songs to this day."

Listening to his songs, it is clear that his relationship with music has developed and matured through such internal conflict, and that years of wrestling with discipline and commitment have actually added to the complexity of his sound.

New York, post 9/11

After graduating from Rice University in Houston, Guthals spent a year in Missoula writing and recording music on his four-track and working on creative writing projects while living with his older sister. He decided to move to New York City later, after he had been teaching music and art to children in Tucson, Ariz., for some time.

Guthals moved to the city just before Sept. 11, 2001. "I wrote a song called 'Buy A Piano' about that experience of bringing all my dreams with me to New York and then having this huge horrible tragedy happen," Guthals said. "The main line of the song was, 'All I really wanted was a view of the world.'"

He decided after a period of confusion and crippled motivation to withdraw from the acting conservatory where he had been studying, move to San Francisco, and recover from the experience of being in the city during that time.

After many years working and making music in the Bay Area, Guthals moved back to New York. "I realized I wanted to learn a better version of the city," he explained. "I wanted to come here and give it another go."

Hiding in the studio and making music

Guthals is a quiet person. He seems so passive in comparison to other New Yorkers that people sometimes find it hard to believe that he has personal or professional ambitions.

“I had intense performance anxiety for 10 years,” he admits. He loved playing music, but his fear of singing in front of an audience was something he had to talk himself out of. “All I could do was hide in my studio and make music.”

While the album shows signs of his struggle to express himself freely, the artist has managed to translate his shyness into a compelling and heartfelt aesthetic. His vocal lines drift down as though out of thin air, as though delivered by ghost or someone who’d be perfectly comfortable remaining invisible.

Guthals claims that his lyrics are one of the most important formal elements of his work, and he spends months working on a song, fine-tuning it with the help of his sister, who works in the public schools in Montana. Sometimes, however, the vocal tracks are so quiet and distorted that the lyrics are nearly unintelligible – making it more compelling and tragic when his carefully chosen words are obscured by his own music.

In a sense, Guthals has actually fashioned himself after the idea of Kind Monitor. He is a listening presence, someone who has taken on the task of acknowledging loneliness and emptiness through his music, making himself into a distant, semi-disembodied voice that observes and doesn’t attempt to interfere.

But Guthals' pensiveness and reflection do not result in complete detachment from reality; rather, his thoughtfulness fuels a commitment to change things for the better. Lately, he has been instrumental in launching Project Reversible (www.projectreversible.org), a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to awareness and fundraising for social justice organizations.

Guthals' ability to create and to engage with the world relies on his ability to express intense feelings of loss and confusion through music and to expand beyond them toward a greater capacity to experience life.

Whether in the form of a pile on his floor or in the breadth of thematic and emotional territory he covers in his music, Montana and the landscape of home follow Guthals wherever he goes. "The expansiveness of that place is such a part of me."

Expansiveness is also a fundamental quality of Kind Monitor. It is a gentle force for resolution in a troubled time, and as long as the band continues to seek personal truth through its music, its compassionate voice will resonate with more and more people who have been waiting to hear it.

Learn more about the artist at kindmonitor.com.