Artists Are Necessary, An Interview with Joe Sturges
Joe Sturges is a drummer and composer based in Madrid. Merging classical, jazz, hip/hop, and a variety of other influences, he creates a unique sound in his compositions, aiming to tell a story with his music.
Tell us about yourself Joe, and thank you for sharing with us today.
I started playing music when I was very young, about four years old is when I got my first drum kit. After some days I broke it from playing it too much, but I always felt a very strong connection to music, playing games with myself trying to recognize songs just from the intro chords, or guessing the tunes that played in all the shops and places in the background everywhere I went. At 12, I got a ridiculous toy-like electronic drum kit, and then after much practice, I got an acoustic one. From that point it was endless hours of practice, gigging, more practice, and eventually composing and writing my own music, having released my first EP, “Awareness” this April.
Highlights?
Learning from both Paul Stocker and Javier Vercher. Paul Stocker was my mentor for a couple of years back when I was eighteen, and Javier Vercher I met while doing my masters degree. Both are master saxophone players and musicians who have deeply influenced me, both as a person and musician, with their stories, philosophy, and energy. I was honored to have had Vercher play in one of my compositions on the EP.
Greatest inspirations or influences?
Ryuichi Sakamoto has been my biggest musical influence, I feel very connected to his music and to his approach when creating art in general. He is an activist and an explorer of sounds, and I feel all of his projects have a deeper meaning that correlates to him as a person, a thing I feel is admirable in this non-stop creative times we live in, in which a million new projects and songs come out every day, and then are forgotten a couple of weeks after when the new bang is released.
I also get a lot of inspiration from chefs, architects, writers… honest creators in general, and most importantly good people.
Tell us about your creative process?
It's very slow, and I am still searching for the trigger that makes it all click. When composing all the process is very much story-driven. It usually begins with the typical phone recording, then sitting down on the piano and such, but it's not until I sit down and realise what I want to say with the song, as in what specific story or memory I want to tell with the music, that the process comes together.
With “Summer”, a track of the EP, I knew it was going to be about being too worried about with the day to day struggles to enjoy living in the “now”, but to tell that story in a bit more defined way, I wrote a couple of paragraphs of text, really explaining the meaning to myself, and this gave me a lot of insight into the sections and parts of the composition. If I don´t know the meaning fully, it's rare that the song gets finished, and writing down in a piece of paper what I want to say with it, usually makes every section of the song much more clear and easy to compose.
Would you like to share anything about how you feel the creative industry will be affected by our current situation, moving forward?
Who can tell really how everything is going to change after the whole pandemic is gone. I only hope people are starting to appreciate that first, the sanitary system and the people working in it are deeply unappreciated and second, that artists are necessary too, not only for spectacle and entertainment, but for living, as I´m sure no one has spent their isolation without reading a book, listening to an album, watching a movie, and so on..
