When he is not recording, Joshua Francis is touring the country, playing live at a variety of venues. He is a regular at Thorn Cross Prison, Warrington where he performs concerts for what he calls his “jailhouse flock”. Joshua has also played the KingsStock Christian music festival in 2015, while other important performances include the Strawberry Fair in 2016 and playing in front of Terry Waite C.B.E. for homeless charity Emmaus UK’s 25th anniversary in Cambridge. Joshua has also made several records for charity, including an EP for mental health charity ‘Rethink’.
Joshua Francis has received radio airplay all over the UK, North and South America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He is also a regular guest on HCR104fm radio based in Huntingdon and Flame Christian & Community Radio in Birkenhead. Currently working on his next album “Menorahs And Fedoras” which will be released in the summer, Joshua has dropped the single, “Now The Time’s Come Around”.
Listening through Joshua’s catalog it becomes clear that he has a deftness for articulating the plight of the downtrodden and misunderstood. An aptitude for stepping inside his fellow man’s shoes and feeling the wear on the sole, the caked dirt between the treads, and the permanent awkwardness of the fit.
This insight is obviously what keeps listeners riveted throughout his releases. On “Now The Time’s Come Around”, the travelling troubadour turns more inward and takes a look at his own shoes.
For Francis, that means personal sentiment – music that can be credited with being the commonest of human experiences, perhaps one of the few conditions that we all truly share – the love for someone else, whoever that may be. This isn’t merely ‘a’ human condition but rather the human condition.
Francis pours himself into country-folk’s tropes: pining for Samantha after he was ‘lost chasing women and wine’. Joshua Francis’ songwriting on “Now The Time’s Come Around” resonates best when he’s able to invest as intimately in his own story as he does when singing about others.
On top of a sprawling organic arrangement where he plays all the instruments, except violins by Anthony Nottingham, we hear a revelatory soul, and the steely reason of hard-earned wisdom all bundled into a single ragged voice. This song portrays a world-weary, incredibly gifted musician who really cares about what he does.
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