Long nights on the road, driving from city to city. Sleeping in cars and airports. Playing songs for small, indifferent crowds.
Trying to build a successful career as a musician might not sound glamorous, but for Josh Finley, it’s all part of the journey.
Finley, who graduated from Emporia State University in 2006, was back in town Saturday night to debut some new songs at Beer:30. They are songs he hopes to release on a new album.
His ultimate goal is success as a musician and a career in New York City, but Finley is taking methodical steps to realize his dreams.
His journey started when he was a student at ESU.
“My last year in college was really the start to my music career,” Finley said. “That’s when I started writing more and playing shows and getting to know the community and other musicians better.”
Music was sidetracked after he graduated, when he moved to Kansas City and started working as a manager at Target. It wasn’t long before he realized he wasn’t on the right path.
“It just wasn’t my dream,” Finley said. “I was asking myself at that point what I had to offer and what I could do to get back and be true to myself.”
In his first year after college, Finley decided to follow his dream of being a songwriter.
“I had a lot of realizations after school,” he said, “just on where I was and where I wanted to be, and that it was time to start moving, start being active. Somehow I found the drive to succeed.”
Finley always wanted to travel, so his first move was to Houston to get a fresh start and explore the music scene in Texas. Not content with how things were going there, he then moved to Nashville, where he currently lives. He chose Nashville as a step up, a step toward New York.
His goal in Nashville is to learn the ins and outs of the music business, to learn about publishing houses, copyrights, studios and labels. The city also boasts a large number of talented session players, and Finley is in the process of networking, trying to find a manager and perhaps a record deal.
“Nashville’s a great spot because it’s not threatening in the sense of being a huge city,” Finley said, “but it does have that aura to it of being a music city. I thought it was a good place to learn the business, so that’s what I’m doing right now.”
Eventually, though, New York remains his ultimate goal.
“I’ve always wanted to go to New York,” he said. “Some of my biggest inspirations when I started writing originally were Bob Dylan and Jeff Buckley and Ryan Adams. And then I started getting into reading about the folk scene and the Beat poets and Greenwich Village in the 60s and Jack Kerouac’s writing, and it just made me want to go to New York more.”
But for Finley, success doesn’t depend as much on location as it once did.
“If I’ve learned anything, you can be successful in any part of the country with music, especially with today’s resources,” he said. “But there’s that internal drive, what makes you tick, and the energy of that city and the aura of the American Dream that makes me think of New York.”
Getting there is a long road, though, and not entirely a pleasant one. Finley’s show in Emporia is his fourth in an acoustic tour to hone his new songs. The tour started in New Orleans, where Finley spent the night in his car before driving to play in Houston. From there, he flew to Reno, where he played in the airport and sold some copies of his first album, “This is Personal.” He then played a show in Lake Tahoe before returning to Houston for another show.
On Saturday, he will perform with a full band at The Roxy in Overland Park.
The important thing, Finley said, is for him to stay diligent and keep working to improve.
“You have to stay strong,” he said. “From an artist’s standpoint, you reach new highs and new lows every day. You’ll play one gig one week where it’s just amazing and you really felt like the audience was into your music and you couldn’t have asked for anything better. Then the next gig there’ll be six people in the room and nobody knows you.”
The new songs Finley has been working on are for the new album he hopes to have out before next fall, “Brunette on Brunet.” Finley said he spent about six months locked in a room, working on the lyrics and the music.
“Everything I’m doing is very deliberately laid out,” he said, describing his interest in the idea of an album as a complete package as opposed to a collection of unrelated songs. “I love albums that have a theme. That’s something that was so great about the 60s and 70s, there was always a theme in the album and the artwork.
“We’ve become so saturated in the last few years with the idea of, ‘yeah, get your two hits and the rest is just to fill space.’”
Finley, whose new album’s title is somewhat a reflection of Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde,” says it is an homage to Dylan for being such an inspiration as well as a response to that era of music. The album deals with the act of looking back at a failed relationship, after enough time has passed to allow room for irony and humor.
“It’s when you’re at a standpoint where you’re not hurt from the relationship ending anymore, but you’re more at a standpoint where you can sit back and give it one last glance,” Finley said. “It’s about who I am as opposed to who I was and what I’ve learned.”
For this album, Finley is experimenting with tempos other than the standard 4/4 time of rock ‘n roll.
“I’ve been working on some waltz tempos, some 3/4 and 6/8 times, some swing,” he said. “There’s even some old country feel in there.”
Whether it pays off or not, the hard work of following his dreams is worth it for Finley.
“I needed this,” he said about being on the road. “Ultimately, the success has yet to be written on whether I get signed by a label or not. And that’s not really my goal. The music is the story of what I’m doing.”
As he looks toward New York and works on getting the album together, Finley described his idea of success not as a life of fame and fortune, but as one of the satisfaction of living your dreams and doing what you love.
“Obviously, to be successful in life is the ultimate goal,” he said, “but who knows? At the end of this, if I come away with a well-produced and well-recorded album and am able to share it with even a small number of people, I’m happy. I’m content.”