Sometimes difficult moments can not only be life-changing, but they can sometimes spark a blazing inferno of creativity. Which is why today, we’re excited to bring you the exclusive first listen of the latest track from emerging Dallas-based folk-inspired singer-songwriter, Joshua Dylan Balis.
The mesmerizing acoustic number “We’re on Fire,” is the title track of his forthcoming debut album, which will be released on May the 13th 2022 via State Fair Records.
While you get to enjoy this sneak preview, you should know that you can pre-save the track ahead of its release tomorrow on all major streaming platforms at the following link.
Josh spoke a little bit about this track and its meaning by commenting:
“We’re On Fire’ is one of my favorite songs from this new album, it’s a double entendre, referring to the lyrical theme of the song, which deals with the implications of finding purpose in an impermanent world, and with the transformative nature of the times we’re collectively living in. Indeed, we are on fire and the burning question in the background of our lives is ‘what will remain once the ashes have blown way?'”
Josh was inspired to write more music after his own brush with a near-death experience, as his Dallas apartment went up in flames. As with anyone who could experience something such as that, there was a bit of a wake-up call into the realization of how precious time is. Josh would then go on to write 11 original songs looking back at his younger days, folks who have come and gone, and what the future holds.
The title track is the second single released off the album and follows up on the previously released, ‘Stories.’ A track which is about a love letter of sorts to friends and family.
Josh is also celebrating the release of the track with Reed Gaines and Lauren Watkins, at The Basement in Nashville on April 15th. It will be a 9PM-11:30PM show, with doors opening at 8:30.
More On Joshua Dylan Balis
Joshua Dylan Balis vividly recalls the winter morning he stepped out of a shower in his 16th-floor Dallas apartment and heard sirens converging on the street below. He went to the living room window — a wall of glass — and saw only black smoke, so he threw on some clothes and flew down those 16 flights of stairs — only to confront a locked gate at the stairwell exit. A first-responder had to pry it open to let him out.
That fire, which occurred about three years ago, fortunately involved only one kitchen, but the experience stayed with him.
“It was the first time I was confronted with a fear of death or any kind of mortality in a real way,” Balis explains. Afterward, he began viewing time as something we consume, like fuel, and when it runs out, the flame dies. That concept worked its way into the title song of his debut album, We’re on Fire, an Americana-leaning mingling of folk, pop and what he characterizes as “a little electricity here and there when I want to make a point.”
When Balis wrote the lyric, “Time is gasoline. And we’re on fire,” he was also thinking about his career. Already in his mid-20s, he worried his musical window of opportunity would start closing if he waited much longer to climb through it. In 2016, he’d released his first EP, Modern Gospel, but he didn’t promote it because he suffered from stage fright. (Balis also admits that he should have listened to his dad’s advice about putting that title on a gospel-free EP.)
Still, those four songs displayed so much songwriting talent, Dallas label State Fair Records came knocking. Thinking he’d feel more comfortable as part of a band, Balis put one together. and they began working on an album. The result of that two-year effort was deemed unworthy of release, however, which strengthened Balis’s resolve to give solo work another go. But that brush with death lit a figurative fire underneath him.
Following a friend’s recommendation, Balis contacted OmniSound Studios in Nashville, which turned out to be a perfect fit. The staff and studio players introduced him to Nashville’s music scene, and Balis quickly realized that if he really wanted to heat up his career, he needed to immerse himself in it. So he found a place in Nashville — elevator free — and made the leap.
Fire may have, pardon the pun, sparked the album, along with the title tune’s central metaphor, but Balis uses it mainly as a device to examine life’s choices, and what ignites them.
“The burning question in the background of our lives,” Balis says, “is ‘What will remain once the ashes have blown way?’” In other words, how do we find purpose in an impermanent world? How do we use our time well? And what will we leave behind?
In “Stories,” Balis regards time as an allowance of sorts; we each get a certain amount. It’s easy to visualize him perched on a stool in an intimate listening room, a nomadic troubadour dropping tuning patter, as he sings, “How’s everybody doin’ tonight? Ain’t it wonderful just bein’ alive? … How’s everybody doin’ tonight? I’d like to thank you all for givin’ your time.”
He wrote the song, a gentle pop tune that momentarily bursts into rock, as a going-away love letter to the hometown friends and family he’d miss when he moved.
Sometimes he envisions himself performing it before thousands of people each night, “like a greeting that I’ll play for my whole career.”
A generous uncle offered to help Balis chase that vision — if he promised to re-record two EP tunes: “When You Were Mine” and “The Long Walk Home,” the first song he ever wrote. Evoking Leonard Cohen in its quietness, the slowly unwinding, beautifully arranged love song reminds us, “unless you love, your life will pass you right on by.” (Balis’s father, well-known Dallas bassist, producer, radio personality and club owner Danny Balis, plays on the track.)
We’re on Fire obviously contains some weighty subject matter; “Grandmother,” a moving lullaby, is about losing his beloved grandmother (his father’s adoptive mother) to dementia. A tough Texan who’d sung with Patsy Cline and married seven times, she introduced Balis to Cohen’s poetry.
“She’d step into a memory and you’d be a character from her past,” Balis says. “I found out a lot about her by listening to her live in those memories.”
Almost every songwriter addresses loss, but if they’re not careful, their sounds of sorrow can overburden listeners. Balis, who produced the album under his production-company name, Visions of Neptune, deftly sidesteps that issue by using melody and arrangements — and moments of lightness such as the uptempo pop-rocker “Lydia” — to give We’re on Fire the balance and breathing room it needs.
But his warm, welcoming voice, equally adept at finding craggy valleys and pristine high notes, would attract listeners regardless of his songs’ subject matter or arrangements. Knowing exactly when to whisper and when to unleash dramatic power, Balis demonstrates self-taught skills some singers need a lifetime to learn.
He even forms a chorale of one by multiplying himself singing three-part harmony in the album’s 45-second intro, “All in My Head,” a gorgeous nod to inspirations Bon Iver, Sigur Rós and the War on Drugs.
“I started falling in love with music by listening to the greats: Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen,” Balis notes. “They inspired a sometimes rebellious and absent-minded kid to pick up the guitar and start fiddling. As I got older, the Strokes, Radiohead and Coldplay challenged me to stick with it and expand my abilities.”
His father exposed him to most of those artists, and gave Balis that guitar when he was in third grade. Balis got serious about playing in fifth grade — right about when he witnessed his dad performing at Dallas’ beloved Granada Theater and realized it might be possible for him to do that someday.
He began writing when he discovered he enjoyed inventing melodies and lyrics more than playing someone else’s. But poetry and Eastern philosophy also motivated him.
“Ultimately,” Balis explains, “I just wanted to explore the world of spirit, which seemed far more tangible than the one we live in.”
That exploration manifests itself in several songs that seem to hover between the Eastern concept of acceptance and the Western tendency toward desire — an observation that reminds Balis of a favorite Bukowski line: “As the spirit wanes, the form appears.’”
In songs such as “Coming of Age,” “Lydia” and “Silver Linings,” spirit and form, the duality of existence and other philosophical matters reveal themselves as considerations of how time, or love, alter our perspectives.
Those first two also illuminate another pair of important inspirations: Mellencamp and Springsteen. Balis admits he wasn’t aware of their influence until he played back what he’d recorded. That’s when it struck him that he doesn’t totally control what he sounds like — or really, any aspect of his life.
It’s another manifestation of going with the flow instead of imposing will; of following our dreams instead of denying them.
With “Silver Linings,” Balis uses his flair for cinematic storytelling to remind us that no matter how hard dream-chasing gets, as long as we’re living our truth, we’re already winning.
But sometimes, it helps to light a fire.
