When you say goodbye to someone you love, it’s tough. When you say goodbye to a place, well, it feels like a breakup. Former Staten Island teacher Josh Steinhart and Adobe & Teardrops fave Annie Bacon break up with New York on Steinhart’s new single “Before the Morning.” The song is that perfect blend of melancholy, nostalgia, and sweetness. Steinhart’s voice reflects his Dylan and Dawes influences, though he adds his own earnestness and joy to the mix. Fans of Pete Mancini will find a lot to love here.
In our interview, Steinhart talks about his life as a school teacher, the transition to becoming a stay-at-home dad in Michigan, and how he seeks to pursue his music without touring.
Explain the title of your single.
The single, “Before The Morning,” is basically about that time before you leave somewhere or someone for the last time. It’s taking a look around, acknowledging the past that has happened there, raising a glass to it, and knowing you’ll be moving on by the next day. It was pretty cathartic for me to write, since I wrote it when I was leaving New York City, where I had grown up and lived my entire life, to move to the Detroit area.
Who are some of your musical influences?
I’m primarily a piano player, so as a kid I was hugely into BIlly Joel and Elton John, and then in high school Ben Folds and Bruce Horsnby, though I’m not sure my songwriting has many similarities to theirs. As I got a little older and started focusing more on songwriting I got turned on to Bob Dylan, which led me to The Band (still my favorite group of all time), and I went down the rabbit hole. I’d say these days the musicians you can hear the most in my songs are Dylan, The Band, Dawes, Jackson Browne, Tom Petty and Counting Crows, and some lesser known artists like Slaid Cleaves and Greg Holden. I’d also say Ryan Adams was hugely influential, but after the stories about how he has treated women emerged I just can’t really listen to his music, and won’t play his songs. I have a ton of respect for Tom Waits, The Jayhawks, Josh Ritter and Jason Isbell, and wish I could write just one song like some of the ones I love from them. Maybe one day…
Name a perfect song and tell us why you feel that way.
Oh man. There are so many songs I just love, and I’m sure later I’ll think of a few others and kick myself for not thinking of it sooner. I think Jason Isbell’s “If We Were Vampires” is incredible for its lyrical content. The chorus just really nails the entire concept of existential dread and the reality that someone even in a happy marriage is likely going to spend some time at the end of their lives alone. But somehow the song doesn’t come off as maudlin; it’s romantic, sentimental and just beautiful.
The song “Something In Common” from Dawes also strikes me as a perfect tune. I love the way Taylor Goldsmith writes in general, and how deliberate he is with his rhythms when he’s singing. There’s a fantastic key change towards the end of the song where he’s been singing low and quiet for most of the song, and then just belts out the same melody in a higher range. It just makes it so much more powerful and gives me chills every time I hear that part. I play that song at home a lot for fun, but there’s no way I could ever perform it. He’s a way better singer than I’ll ever be.
Now for perfect albums, I’ve got to go with Aimee Mann’s Lost In Space. It keeps an underlying tone throughout the album, the songwriting is phenomenal, there’s amazing guitar work on it, and anytime there’s a female vocalist with a male voice singing harmony under it I’m sold.
What have you missed about touring?
I’ve never actually been on tour. I know that sounds crazy for a musician, but being a solo artist is an extremely new thing to me. I’m 40 years old. I spent 14 years teaching music at a public high school in New York City, starting at 23. So when I was doing that, which was both rewarding and incredibly draining, I wasn’t recording or putting out my own music. I was in a band that still is around in New York, called The Buffalo 24, where one of my best friends is the singer and songwriter, and is also a public school music teacher. So we played local gigs, but never really went that extra step of booking a tour. And now that I’m a stay-at-home dad here in Michigan, I don’t really have the opportunity to leave my kids (7 and 4) for any stretch of time like that. And I wouldn’t want to. I love being able to support my wife’s career by taking on those responsibilities. Back in my 20s I wanted to go on tour more than anything. Now I’m happy being able to write and record music at home and raise my kids.
How are you using your platform to support marginalized people?
I guess it shows my privilege that I haven’t ever thought about that question, to be honest. And in fairness, I’m not sure that I currently have a very large platform as a performing artist. I’m not famous and I doubt many people care about anything I have to say right now.
But I do think about my fourteen years teaching high school music in NYC, and I think that’s where I was able to have more influence. I taught in Staten Island, not far from where Eric Garner was killed. A lot of the time when people think of Staten Island, they think of Jersey Shore, and that’s certainly true of the South Shore, but my school was on the North Shore, not far from the ferry. We served the projects that Wu-Tang Clan came from (and I think I may have had some of their kids in my classes), and a lot of immigrants, many of them I’m sure undocumented. I remember making sure that kids with names unfamiliar to me didn’t let me get away with mispronouncing their names, and told them I didn’t care how many times they had to correct me, it was important that I get it right.
I also made sure that as a chorus teacher I wasn’t doing the traditional dead white composer repertoire. It always annoyed me that somehow that was the gold standard, when there was so much valid music being made now. So I had them give me lists of songs they wanted to sing in class, and when I wanted to show them examples of good singers, I wasn’t just showing them Classical music. We listened to John Legend, Alicia Keys, and talked about Quincy Jones, Tito Puente, and the ugly history and connections between slavery and American music. I wanted to arm them with the knowledge that they were important, that their history and experience was important, and that their culture was valid. In the educational system, it can often seem like pop culture and in particular the culture of minorities, takes a back seat to the more European models. I felt that music class was a perfect place to show how valid everyone is.
Unfortunately, there’s only so much someone can do as a teacher. The problems these kids faced were social and societal. Me trying to help their confidence and give them context is ok, but these were kids coming from overworked single moms, charged with watching their siblings because the mom had to work two jobs. Or they were kids living in projects where there were shootings on the weekends, or there wasn’t enough food, or for whom education was a luxury they just didn’t have the time for. It’s hard to get an education and escape the cycle of poverty when you can’t do homework because you’re watching your siblings, or where there just isn’t an adult at home to nudge you to succeed. When you’re just trying to survive, anything that doesn’t help you through that moment can seem superfluous.