Josh Joplin Group
Kelly Gregory
Josh Joplin and guitar.
Josh Joplin
Hailing from Chicago, the Josh Joplin Group is celebrating the release of Useful Music (Silver Anniversary Sessions), featuring demos, outtakes, and previously unreleased material from the band’s 2001 debut album, which spawned the minor alt-rock hit, “Camera One” (produced by Talking Heads' Jerry Harrison and featured on an episode of Scrubs). After a handful of subsequent albums, the group took a long hiatus and then returned with 2024’s Figure Drawing — followed by 2025’s GpYr. The band’s music still sounds fresh, and its mix of introspection and celebration goes down even smoother now than it did back in the day.
$18 ($15 adv.).
media release: If you were ever called upon to argue the case for popular music as art, a Josh Joplin Group album would make a solid Exhibit A. That verdict belongs to critic Jason Warburg of The Daily Vault — and it’s the kind of thing that tends to follow Josh Joplin around. Quietly, persistently, the way a reputation earned over three decades tends to do. Legendary artist manager Russell Carter, who has guided the careers of Indigo Girls and Matthew Sweet, puts it more simply: “I am willing to bet Josh has written a bad song, but I can tell you I have never heard one.”
Joplin dropped out of school in the tenth grade, spent two years living out of a VW van, landed in Atlanta, and assembled the core of what would become Josh Joplin Group. By 2001, “Camera One” — produced by Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads — had become the first independently released single in the history of Billboard’s Triple A chart to reach number one. It appeared on the breakthrough first season of Scrubs and sent the group onto the stages of Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, MTV, and VH1. Useful Music sold half a million copies. Paste called him “part Armed Forces, Elvis Costello, with Woody Guthrie’s bent for storytelling, but with a voice all his own.”
After stepping back to raise a family and produce two feature films, Joplin returned with Figure Drawing (2024) and GpYr (2025) — the latter produced with Grammy-winning Lorenzo Wolff and featuring his daughter Lomie on lead guitar on the album’s emotional centerpiece, “Before the Light Takes Us.” Spin called it “a collection of pop-infused gems...paired with the musical and lyrical depth of an older, wiser songwriter.” Americana Highways heard in it “the sophistication of XTC.”
Now based in Chicago and released on his own NarrowMoat imprint, 2026’s Useful Music (Silver Anniversary Sessions) — and a full rerecording of “Camera One” by early all the original members — not as a commemorative gesture but as a genuine second take: the same song, the same people, a quarter century of living between the two versions. The ccompanying video, directed by Carter Amos, examines the song’s meaning in the age of social edia and influencers, featuring performance artist and neoteric costumer Justen Guittierez and actor/comedian Dave Hill.
