LOWREV

For nearly 30 years, Fiedler has been a founding member and lead guitarist of The Juliana Theory, the Pennsylvania-based post-emo outfit he helped form in 1997—always the guy who brings in the ideas, never the one at the mic. Now, under the name LOWREV, he has stepped to the front with It's Hard To Lie To Strangers, a debut album that came together with some encouragement from a friend at Equal Vision, which put the record out.

Fiedler says the new record is rooted in grief, but his longstanding healing relationship with the guitar helped usher 12 tracks forward into a meaningful new release. At this stage, Fiedler says he's over the expectations game. Instead, he's just glad to follow through on such ideas in the face of so many other demands, personal and professional.

Analogue: You're already in a band with longevity, but this feels like a vulnerable position — something that's all on you, where you're playing everything. Is that as vulnerable as I'd think it would be?

Josh Fiedler: The more nerve-wracking piece for me is when I will play live, because I haven't sung lead in a band since 1997, and I was 18 years old and still in high school. So that's going to be a weird thing for me. But I've always wanted to be in a band. I love being in a band. Being a writer, a guitar player, that's always been my thing. That's always been where I'm happiest. Obviously, The Juliana Theory from '97 to 2006, and we broke up for a while, got back together here and there for some reunion shows. But then in 2019, Brett and I did an acoustic tour, and we ended up doing an EP and a reimagined record. And then I have little bands around the Pittsburgh area that I've done since then. Always the same role. I've always liked to be the person that comes to practice with a couple ideas and lets us all kind of work together to finish a song.

And honestly, something came over me last year. I had years and years of writing things and recording voice memos on my phone of little guitar parts, little vocal melodies. I don't know what happened, but some divine thing came over me and decided, let's just finish a bunch of these. So I decided just to do it. I was listening to a lot of Julien Baker at the time, and I love what she does. She's a solo artist, but all of the atmospheric guitars that she puts into the songs, the pianos and all that layering along with her incredible vocals — I was thinking, maybe I can do some of that with some of these song ideas I had.

So that's kind of what I did. I just sat in this little room here and recorded songs, and eventually it was like, well, I don't want this to just be all of that, because I'm not a very proficient piano player. I thought the album needed drums and stuff. So I had my really good friend Justin play drums on the record, on I think four or five songs, to give it some more band elements, because I knew eventually I did want to play live and play these songs as a band. I still can't imagine myself getting up by myself and playing them, but we'll see. Maybe that will come one day.

Analogue: You say you like to be the guy who brings in a song, and you've always made these little memos. How far back do the ideas go where you think, 'I'm saving that one for me'?

Josh: That's a good question. I think it really depends on how much of an idea I get and what I feel like it fits better with. Does it fit better with PAC, which is one of my bands I do with some friends here in Pittsburgh? Does it fit with The Juliana Theory? Do I send it to Brett and see if he can do something with it? Or is it something that now I should keep for myself? Some of this stuff—for instance, the song "It's Hard to Lie to Strangers" was based off of a piano part that I probably wrote back in 2011, 2012. And I just sat on it. I never did anything with it. But then some other things were brand new, that I just came up with last year and started singing to. So it's really a mixture of things based off of really old things that just never had a home, or some fresh ideas.

Analogue: Was there a song that served as a turning point, where you thought, 'There's some juice here'?

Josh: Yeah. My dog had passed away unexpectedly in April of last year. It was our family dog. We were all really torn up about it, as you can imagine—me, my wife, and my kids. And I wrote a song around that feeling, a completed song. I think that's what kicked it off. That's the first song on the record, "I Hope I Get To See You Again." That kind of kicked off this whole journey. To me, it was like, oh, maybe I really can write a whole song and sing it and do everything myself. Maybe I can finish some of these old ideas I had sitting around, because I did that song.

Analogue: Honoring your pet that way is an interesting creative jumpstart. Is songwriting the way you process most things?

Josh: Playing guitar, I feel like, is my therapy. If I'm feeling a certain way or stressed out, playing guitar sort of grounds me, even if it's just playing by myself. I guess that's my therapy. I've heard other artists talk about that too—something about playing six metal strings and hearing the sound all around you. It centers me more than talking to people. For myself, anyway, I would rather sit and process things myself and just play guitar and do it that way, rather than talk to people outside of my wife.

Analogue: I'm curious about expectations for something like this. You could have left these songs private, but you gave them the proper treatment. You got other people involved, etc. Given your own reticence to do this in the first place, what's your expectation for all of it?

Josh: I recorded, I think, five songs and I sent them to my friend Dan [Sandshaw] at Equal Vision, because we have been friends for a long time. The Juliana Theory is on Equal Vision, I have other friends that are on Equal Vision. I just sent him the songs and said, 'Hey, I really like these songs. I think I want to do an EP or something.' He listened to the songs and really liked them, and it was, 'Well, what do you think about doing a full-length instead of an EP?' And I was like, 'I've got a lot more ideas that I can finish. Sure, why not?' And so I did.

Yes, I want people to hear it. I hope that the songs resonate with people in a way that so many songs have resonated with me—from Julien Baker or Elliott Smith, The Beatles, The Cure. So many albums have resonated with me in my past. But I'm trying to go into everything without any expectations. I don't have any grand ideas of massive popularity, Grammys or anything. [Laughs]

I've talked to some of my friends about this too. I'm not getting any younger. I kind of just want to try as many things as I can before I'm not able to do them. I'm on the wrong side of 40, pushing 50. It's like, why not do this? I've got all these songs in my head, so why should they just exist in my brain and nowhere else? I might as well just put it out and hope people connect with it in some way. That's really my motto going into this: try not to have any expectations. I kind of did it for myself. Maybe something in me just wanted to prove that I could do it. And just kind of riding the wave.

Analogue: That had to be heartening to have someone hear your songs and say, 'Let's not think of an EP, let's think of more.'

Josh: Yeah, it gave me a lot of confidence that somebody that I'm not related to was telling me that they liked my songs enough that they wanted to hear more.

Analogue: Do you have a favorite song on the record?

Josh: I obviously am partial to all of them, but I think my two favorites are "It's Hard to Lie to Strangers" and "Smiles Light Up the Room."

Analogue: For any specific reasons?

Josh: "Smiles Light Up the Room" is more like a love song to my son, who has autism. Sometimes it's hard for people to understand people who have autism. Obviously there's a wide spectrum of how they act and behave. That's just my love song to him. That one means the most to me, personally, anyway.

Analogue: You've talked about your family in a few ways here. Does being a family man alter your hopes for the album?

Josh: Yes, for sure. It definitely alters that. I have my wife, and I have three kids: two daughters and a son. They keep us extremely busy, whether my oldest is going off to college or I help coach my daughter's travel softball team. We've got a lot going on, and touring is hard enough. I've done tours with The Juliana Theory, and it's always hard leaving. It was hard leaving when I was in my twenties, let alone now. So I don't plan on doing any full-scale touring for the record, but I definitely want to play shows. I'm kind of just letting things come to me that way. Obviously I'd like to play shows, but you're not going on full six-week tours. We'll see what comes. With The Juliana Theory, we've gone out for two weeks here, a week there, which is tough, but it's doable. So we'll see what happens.

Analogue: I'd love to give you the chance to share anything else about the record, or other creative plates you're spinning.

Josh: It's a record that's deeply personal to me. I hope it resonates with other listeners. I do have almost a second record done already, because that kicked off a thing in my brain. I was like, well, I can do this. I might as well just finish every idea I have in my brain. So it's trying to balance that with everything else, and maybe not finish everything.

And I'm still working on a record with my band PAC, which is my friend Justin who played drums on the LOWREV record, but I have Scott Mellinger from Zao in that band with me. Chris from Punchline was in the band, but he took a step back because Punchline is going to be pretty busy. And then we have a new singer, Bethany, who's working on vocals at the moment with that record too.

And then a Juliana Theory record will come out too. Brett's working on finishing all the vocals for that. Really, as I was talking about earlier, I'm trying to do as much as I can before I can't do it.

VISIT: LOWREV

Photo: Jesse Korman