The Who: Joe Marson (Los Angeles, CA)
The What: Love is a beautiful thing…unless it’s a cannibalistic thing, which is a whole other matter.
Ask Joe Marson, the soulful alternative rocker who deep dives into that headspace with his single, “My Love Is A Cannibal” from his upcoming EP Electric Soul Magic Vol. II (out on April 14th). With a sound that – at a minimum – boldly fuses blues, rock and soul, this new EP steps Marson’s song game up into a sharper sonic territory with “…Cannibal” giving romance a distinctly darker and harder edge. “Sometimes I feel that love and lust can be be like a hunger, like emotional vampirism.” Joe explains. “It can be selfish and cruel and leave one person full and the other empty, as if one has eaten the other’s heart. Hence, my love is a cannibal.” Food for thought folks and, yes, pun absolutely intended.
The song’s video which Marson calls, “…truly a labor of love.” traverses further into even darker territory with an almost Nine Inch Nails-esque feel and is something of a testament to what one can artistically accomplish with limited funds and a little imagination. “My friend Nadia Itani and I came up with a lot of the concepts, mostly deriving from our of dark 90’s grunge era music videos. With only a $500 budget, we had to get very creative. The elevator was a gem that Nadia knew about in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I had the idea of crawling out of the TV, so we took apart a television, replaced the screen with latex, and then projected a pre-shot segment of me banging against car window. I bought the mannequin at a yard sale, took it apart, and attached a plastic skeleton rib cage to it. I replaced the top a foam torso, got a cow heart and pumped it with hand to the beat of the song.”
You read that right. It’s safe to say that Marson got creative as fuck.
The Where: If you’re in Los Angeles on Thursday April 6th, you can find Joe Marson on stage belting out songs (cannibalistic and otherwise) at The Satellite. And of course, you can find and keep up with Marson in all of the usual places such as his official website, Facebook page and at @JoeMarsonMusic on Twitter.