Artist Spotlights: The Gospel According to Josey

The prolific Athens, Georgia-based experimentalist talks Waffle House, outsider art, and making music for the apocalypse.

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Written by Ethan Rubenstein

Photo courtesy of Josey Wallace

Recommend If You Like:  Neutral Milk Hotel, Thelonious Monk, SOPHIE

“Sorry I’m so crazy, I just want to be famous,” eclectic singer-songwriter Josey Wallace croons in the chorus to “Crazy,” the opening salvo to her 2018 debut album Better. In the same track, she mentions wanting to “be Michael Stipe,” the R.E.M. frontman and fellow Athens, Georgia native.

After learning to play French horn in high school, Wallace quickly became enamored with creating music, self-releasing four albums within the span of a year as F.L.E.D. (Fall in Love Every Day). The quartet, which range in genre from lovesick bedroom pop and meandering free jazz to jittery electronica and stream-of-consciousness hip-hop, showcase a rare versatility and unfettered vulnerability that when taken as a whole feels like hooked up to an IV drip leading straight to her inner psyche. 

“People at work callin’ me F.L.E.D. / I can feel it in my brain/ fills me with glee but also dread / ‘cause that’s not really my name,” Wallace lamented on “People” from her 2019 album Worse , shortly before coming out as a trans woman and shifting to release music under her first name rather than the previous acronym. However, this rebranding has created even more unease: “It's kind of weird that people think of the art as like ‘Josey.’ Like, that's actually me and the art is a really small part of the thing,” she noted in our interview.

Despite laying out dreams of fame in her early output, Josey isn’t as keen on the idea nowadays. “I think I was a little bit naive about the nature of the bedroom pop aesthetic because in my head bedroom pop is everybody being like Kimya Dawson and Daniel Johnston,” she reflected, “Like all these people who were actually doing home recordings.” 

Earlier this year, she even pulled several of her albums from streaming services, although they are still available for purchase on Bandcamp. “There are a couple of songs that I do live with the bands that I'd like to record how we do them. Put those back up. There are some that I think it would just be fun to remake. And I think I'll do some remixes” Wallace said. For her, melodies and musical motifs are in a constantly evolving flux, with different versions appearing on different platforms or within various songs. “Anybody who makes music have like little shapes that they do all the time, right? And the older I get it seems that I grow like more and more obsessed with them.”

Josey’s aversion to fame reminded me of 24-hour breakfast diner chain Waffle House, another Georgia-based institution that notably doesn’t advertise yet is ubiquitous (so much so that “Beautiful,” the second track off of Better, uses a WaHo bathroom as a setting). “I love the thought of being a musical Waffle House,” she responded when I brought up the analogy in our interview, “There's a thing about [it] that is kind of dystopian. But if you consider it coming from a place of pure intention, it's pretty nice. They have pretty fleshed out disaster response protocols. They say that the first thing that opens up after a tornado or something is the Waffle House…I like thinking about music in that sort of municipal context because that's the same thing that Waffle House is doing. It's taking something that ostensibly isn't really a core part of society, but people know that it kind of is. Music is like that level of importance to me.”

The end-times seem to be another recurring theme for Josey, with her last album being titled Apocalypse Now. “When I started learning guitar, a lot of that came from an anxiety about like, if I can only play piano when the world ends, it's going to be so much harder for me to find a piano,” she admitted in our interview. The increasingly fraught American political landscape is definitely an influence on this line of thinking: “When I read my local music [critic] being like ‘Apocalypse Now, seems a little on the nose, doesn’t it?’ I’m like ‘not really.’ They're taking the medical records of transgender people in Florida. That's really happening. People are doing fascist shit. You’re in Texas. I’m in Georgia. That's where it's happening.” 

Whether it’s via promoting mutual aid on social media or most recently performing at a festival aligned with the Stop Cop City movement, Josey has consistently used her platform as an artist for activism. Josey’s discography has certainly grown more topical while remaining deeply personal, featuring visions of a Marxist utopia in Worse’s wobbly breakneck jam “(Communist) Conclusion,” a commentary on social media addiction in the form of a pulsing house anthem on Apocalype Now’s “Algorithm Crush,” and a twinkly treatise on organized religion in 2020’s “What Would Jesus Do?” 

“I was raised Unitarian Universalist. I feel great about it, honestly. I'm in a very lucky kind of position to be a transgender woman without religious trauma. I really lucked out with that one,” Wallace noted of her upbringing when we sat down with her, “I’m not really religious anymore. But I do like Jesus.” On the other hand, her music seems to have partially filled that void: “Making art is like communing with the spiritual, the higher than us,” she mused, “I believe that, but I also think that it's kind of pointless to do that without having it also be about communing with people. You try and be wholly with yourself when you make the art so that when it's received by people, they can receive it on a higher divinity that's in everybody. That's where I'm throwing it towards.”

Despite the recent retreat from major streaming services, Josey shows no signs of slowing down her output. “I released so much music and I have like hundreds more files,” she said in our interview before teasing a new release of guitar demos, “I want it to be that there's always another 20 songs that you can find because I know that across everything on the internet I have like more than 100 songs [...] You just gotta dig through the bullshit.”

Listen to Josey on Bandcamp, Spotify, and SoundCloud. You can follow her on Instagram @j0_oseywal_lace.