Los Angeles-based artist Joey Dosik is well-known for his work collaborating with other groups like Vulfpeck, but now Dosik is becoming popular for his work as a solo artist. Both his debut full-length album, Inside Voice, and EP, Game Winner, were released earlier in the year.

With funk and R&B influences, Dosik draws on the past to make an album that is all his own, and he took his time with Inside Voice, working on the album for four years. "In a lot of ways the kind of cliché answer is that it took my whole life to make the record," Dosik says. "It took that long to feel good enough to actually put out something that was an album, because the album is such a precious format."

Before his show at First Avenue this past month, Joey Dosik stopped by The Current's studio to talk with David Safar. Use the audio player above to listen to their conversation and read highlights below.

Interview Highlights

On "Grandma Song"

It's actually a song that had been around for a while, and Jack, from Vulfpeck, and I had always kind of had this idea like, "Man, if Antwaun [Stanley] was singing this song it would be amazing," because it's very obviously rooted in my own personal story as an American boy with a Jewish grandmother from the old country, and so for Antwaun to be singing it, only he could pull it off and it's really special, but it's also been my song for a long time and I was able to put my own version of it together for my own record.

On his connections to Minneapolis

My love for it started even before I came here. I was lucky enough to play in the amazing singer Nikka Costa's band, and Nikka was tight with Prince. They worked together, had written together and Prince was coming out to our shows sometimes, and he had us come to Denmark to play a festival with him, and I kind of got to be around him. I remember being side stage in Copenhagen standing in between Larry Graham on my left and Prince on my right and we're watching Chaka Khan, and I'm pretending to be a normal person: "They're just watching the show, yeah this is music, this is Chaka … " and every now and then Prince would start dancing. He would walk out to the side and do a little majestic Prince twirl or something. But as a musician, you have to know about Minneapolis. Minneapolis funk changed the world and shook up the world and it's a musical language that I find myself diving deeper and deeper into, beyond Prince all the other folks who were so influential, Jesse Johnson all that stuff. Cory Wong, who's in Vulfpeck, is from Minneapolis and is definitely a sort of champion of Minneapolis funk, and I've gotten to learn a lot from him as well.

On Inside Voice

The first thing that came to mind was that childish thing where people say, "OK everyone, use your inside voice." But I'm also very into words with multiple meanings. So for me, this song as a lyric you could think of it sort of as the childhood context, you could think of it as some kind of spiritual journey, you could think of it in a musical way, because the inside voices of a chord are the notes in between the bottom and the top that are moving. So when we wrote the song it was sort of, "Wow there's a whole lot of things at play here," but then there's also some the intimacy, the kind of romantic notion of it, too, which I think is kind of the thing that comes the most across."

On the reprise of the "Inside Voice" track

There's no reason why an album has to be 10 tracks and each song is three minutes and 30 seconds long. Most of the time people don't even get to track eight, it's just like, "OK, I've heard this thing," so for me I see it as an opportunity to do whatever.

Web feature by Simone Cazares

External Link

Joey Dosik - official site