Beyond presents:
Josh Doyle
Entry Requirements: 18+
Josh Doyle is a British-American singer-songwriter and musician best known as a solo performer as well as being the frontman of UK rock group Dum Dums In 2003, he and his wife sold and gave away all their personal belongings and moved from the UK to Nashville, Tennessee. The next year saw him recording The End of Fear EP with college student Sam Shacklock, one half of Intramural (the other half be-ing Statistics frontman and Conor Oberst bandmate Denver Dalley). Doyle released the EP independently from his website, mailing each CD out by hand. An underground US following developed quickly, and respected zines such as Absolute Punk "a stellar debut, 8/10" and Sound The Sirens "a therapeutic must-have" gave high ratings. Using only MySpace and physical CD mail order sales (no touring, no digital sales, no radio) Doyle slowly but surely sold out of the first run of the EP, with help from a remnant of Dum Dums fans and a growing contingent newly discovered fans from the US. In 2005 he played rough acoustic demos of new material to rock producer Joe Baldridge (Beck, Family Force 5, Jewel), who began producing his album, "The Long Distance Runner", without a record deal or management. At the same time, he also played his first solo shows in four years in Tennessee supporting Imogen Heap. His new songs impressed sufficiently to obtain international management from Showdown in the US (Creed, Mutemath, Paramore, Family Force 5) and Radius in the UK (Imogen Heap, Dum Dums). In 2009, Doyle parted ways with Joe Baldridge and Showdown Management frustrated by the lack of time they had for his project. The tapes for "The Long Distance Runner" were unfinished and tied up in contractual red tape though Doyle aimed to revisit them as evidenced in his liner notes on the Values and Virtues EP. Values and Virtues was released independently, funded by his fanbase.With the proceeds of those sales Doyle was able to tour the UK without a label or any sponsorship, testing a new way forward for artists who have fans but choose not to sign with a record label. Interview about his crowd funding project in Music Magazine In 2010, Doyle had his songs featured on ABC TV show The Unusuals and in promos for the ION Network over all the US cable networks. He used the licensing fees to fund a home studio and began his "Songs From The Nuclear War" project in 2011, which itself led to a small scale Midwest US tour. In March 2012, Doyle beat 17,000 other entrants to win the Grand Prize in the Nationwide 2012 Guitar Center Singer Songwriter Contest. Doyle recorded his debut album in April 2012 with producer John Shanks (Bon Jovi, Alanis Morissette, Keith Urban) in Henson Studios, Studio D. The prize had stated that John record a 3-song EP, but impressed by Doyle's body of work, Shanks decided to record an entire album in-stead "Every song was great. It became clear to me that Josh Doyle was a very impressive artist...he needed a statement that was as strong as it could be for the new journey he would be embarking on". Multiple Grammy-winner Shanks enlisted a legendary line-up, including drummer Matt Chamberlain, guitarist Dean Parks, keyboardist Patrick Warren and bassist Leland Sklar to serve as Doyle's studio band, and the entire album took only about six days to complete tracking. Many of the ten tracks were recorded over six or seven takes, some only one or two. Leland Sklar (Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Warren Zevon) ex-plained the process; "There was just a magic that used to go on, and it still happens on occasion, like I was saying with this Josh Doyle... He came in the studio, and all it is is him playing acoustic guitar – done. No charts, no arrangements or anything. It was so on fire and so great that we cut 10 tracks and did his album. This guy just kept pulling songs – he was writing. Then when the guy sits down to play and we'd say, "Well, it's just a run through," every time he opens his mouth, it's a performance