Having spent most of my musical career cooped up in my bedroom, I haven't played too many gigs under the Hobo Joe? moniker. This project is still very much finding it's feet as I'm feeling around in the dark trying to create the noises that I want to hear. I've been apprehensive about performing as I feel the songs I've written aren't ready yet. I realise now though that performing them and getting feedback from a prospective fan base is probably a good idea. When I say I haven't really gigged, that's not really true. I've gigged with a fair few bands and I spend a fairly large chunk of my summer playing all sorts of events with my band The Roustabouts who are a sort of "gypsy-cabaret collective". While I enjoy that an awful lot, if left to write music myself, that's not what would naturally flow from me and that's what Hobo Joe? is. It's my attempt to create something that feels natural for me. Drenched in reverb. My natural state. I take a lot of inspiration from a lot of different places. I'm a very big fan of post-rock, shoegaze and other ambient music as well as math-rock, doom/stoner metal, grunge, lo-fi and some more common genres such as punk and folk. Inspiration isn't just limited to musical sources though and I'm always looking for new ideas in the world around me. Be it from film and TV, video games, the sounds I hear on the beach, bird song, the roar of a fire staff spinning between my fingers, the wonderfully disgusting scraping noise of urethane wheels sliding across the pavement, anything my ears can grab hold of. This project has been called many things, it's not particularly strange to me, although my best friend has told me that he just doesn't get it at all. He says he's never understood my music but I suppose I'm not really writing it for him. Someone on Facebook had a listen to a loop I'd been working on, she said it was transporting. I honestly couldn't hope for a better adjective.
