JOE KAPLOW IS STRUMMING AT THE RIGHT TIME
By Deann Armes
Music
Joe Kaplow band. Image courtesy of Joe Kaplow
Ten years ago, folk-rock singer/songwriter Joe Kaplow packed everything in his car and headed west to follow a dream. Raised on a farm in New Jersey, where he often escaped into the woods to write songs, he found a more spacious forest in Northern California and planted roots in Santa Cruz as a full-time musician. Through his twenties, gentrification (addressed in his song “February Prorated Rent”), and chasing gigs he’s stayed true to the goal—to ultimately make enough money through music to support a life. The currency is time.
“It’s the way I want to spend my time here,” Kaplow says. “I’ve identified and objectified myself so strongly as an artist and a musician that it satisfies my ego more than any other activity in life.” He says that people need to be extremely lucky, talented or selfish with a one-track mind to keep at it. “There are a lot of sacrifices that have to be made.” He gives credit to his independent father, a veterinarian with his own practice, for his determination.
Kaplow spends his time “just being” by the ocean, or in cities where the buildings and people “conjure stories in my head.” But his emotive folk/rock music style is about feeling, rather than places, with story-telling lyrics that resonate like old blues songs. “Cassette” brings back that “feeling you get” from the dusty mixed tape in a drawer. And “Roses” is laced with beautifully painful prose, “You left your smell in my bed / thoughts left in my head / but I told you not to leave anything behind.”
At age thirty-three, he’s starting to see some payout. He recalls a show in Portland that brought a good sized crowd of people who knew his music, a first occurrence in a place he doesn’t live or visit much. “There have been a lot of times where I’m like ‘I’m doing all the right stuff, why isn’t it working?’ That was the first time I felt like it’s starting to work.”
A turn is happening, he says, since “music as a whole shifted from being self-serving, to making me feel at peace and good, and knowing that it does help people it adds to the purpose.”
Kaplow has released two albums, “Time Spent in Between,” (2019) and “Sending Money and Stems” (2021) and is currently on a Western Tour across seven states and nineteen cities with his full band.
The tour is passing through Utah on Thursday, September 22 at Brue Haus Bar in Ogden. Tickets and details available here and at the door.
Follow Joe Kaplow’s tour and music at joekaplow.net and on all streaming services.