We recently connected with Joshua Vern and have shared our conversation below.

Joshua, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

I’ve always had an affinity for music– After all, it’s a universal language. I spent my childhood trapped inside my head in more that one way, not only because I was a closeted trans-nonbinary person, but also because I had terrible allergies and a Ritalin prescription that turned me into a virtual zombie. I would come to only to discover I had been having a conversation for five minutes already. Whether this was a factor that contributed to the abuse and neglect from my mother’s partners, I can’t say, but the effects certainly compounded. I found escape where so many creatives have — I spent my waking moments singing and humming, noodling on any piano or guitar I could find, and even having a pretend radio station with my sister, which we recorded onto cassette tapes. Eventually, I found my way into theater, which gave me so much more than I ever thought I deserved. I had a community of loved ones who looked out for me, and who lifted me up.

I got to working professionally as an actor, and had decided to move to Chicago in 2019 with a dear friend. We were set on following our dreams together. Unfortunately, I had severely overestimated the state of my mental health. Severe depression set in almost immediately, and now I had taken myself away from my support system. I could barely hang on. I would drive with a rideshare for 14 hours a day, only to pay rent and be $800 overdrawn the next day. It was only as I felt myself nearing the breaking point when I realized that I hadn’t sat down and played a song since arriving. Sitting in my room for what felt like days, I wrote and recorded my first single, Be Someone Else and Floating. Just me, a guitar, and a USB microphone. I had worked for a record label in previous years, and so I knew just enough tricks to get a commercial release without even having to leave my apartment.

The second wind really came around when I got a call from a producer I had previously worked with. They asked me if I’d like to go up to Wisconsin to do their Christmas show. I couldn’t have said yes to anything faster. I packed up a couple of bags and took a train to what turned out to be a wild and lifechanging year.

No rent. No utilities. No strings. I was being put up by the theater for as long as I worked there. For the first time since my senior year of high school, I didn’t have to worry about where I was going to rest my head at night. The stability was enough that I could finally start to focus on my mental health, and not just my survival. This did, of course, present its own set of problems, and as these stories are wont to do, these problems presented themselves in the form of a girl. I was head over heels, in the bad way. It started innocently enough, but as I spent more time with her, I spent less time with myself. I ended up driving myself crazy, and doing things that put everyone in an uncomfortable position. I caught myself too late, and the damage had already been done. That’s when I got a psychiatrist and started therapy. This was in February of 2020. Things were starting to look up.

I had less than a month of time where I felt safe and in control. On March 15, only three days after opening my most recent show, the country shut down. The theater closed and told everybody to go home. Everyone did, except for a select few of us. We didn’t have a home. We were stuck. We spent the year squatting in this motel, nothing within walking distance but a bar and a strip club. We hung on to each other and took care of each other in a way that is difficult to put into words. I kept scraping up whatever I could, and begging friends and family for a couple bucks so I could keep seeing my therapist. I couldn’t count on unemployment, because as I would find out earlier this year, my identity had been stolen and someone was already getting my benefits. Yikes.

This year in almost abject isolation, resulting from all of these impossible coincidences, was the most difficult and painful year I could have imagined. Somehow, however, it also gave me the most beautiful and precious moments; moments I carry with me every second of every day.

Over the summer of 2020 I wrote, recorded, and produced my debut album, “Person, Woman, Man, Camera, Album”. I wanted it to be a testament of that year, and all that it meant to me. The album is chaotic and inconsistent. There were no rules. No two songs are within a mile of the same sound or genre. It’s an album that doesn’t know what it wants to be, and it’s okay with that. It’s an album that shows my emotional growing pains.

We’re all defined by our trauma, and even more so by how we handle our trauma. This is the knowledge that I want to convey in my music; in my story.

Joshua, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a singer/songwriter based in Arizona. I grew up in a musical family, singing and dancing at all hours of the day and night. According to my mother, by the time I was two years old, I knew the entire Barney catalogue, choreography and all. I suppose there are some things that are just a part of us whether we like it or not, and for me, it’s music. I was always noodling around on anything within reach that made noise, but I didn’t consider actually writing music until I was in high school. I really loved screwing around and genre-hopping, finding ways to make old sounds new again. I have such a wide range of influences, from what I affectionately refer to as “Dad-Rock” (Zeppelin, BTO, and the like) to Oingo Boingo to Kpop. For a long time I worried that there was no way to reconcile all of these influences into one cohesive sound, but every day that’s something I worry about less and less. I don’t have a label or a producer to tell me what my music is supposed to sound like– why should it sound like anything? My music is authentically me, and whether my next release is hyperpop, boy band, or metal, it will be my voice.

I’m not a big or successful musician by any metric. I’ve yet to break a thousand plays on any of my songs. But the thing that keeps me going is that when people do listen to my music, they hear it. They really hear it. Even at my level, I’ve had people reach out to me to tell me that a song of mine has helped them in some way; provided some form of catharsis. I wrote “Floating” long before I considered ever actually coming out as trans. The message, though, has resonated with others in a way that I couldn’t have anticipated. I thought I would just be showing people who I was, but the listeners hear themselves in those words, too. I think that’s a beautiful thing, and that’s how I know I’m doing it right. Somewhere, I helped someone feel less alone. I want to hang on to that feeling for as long as I can.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Something I think most people struggle with is our mindset surrounding productivity and self-worth. I was taught, through my upbringing, to believe that I was only as valuable as my contributions. There’s a massive danger here, and it ends with an adult who is hesitant to try to do anything, because every failure is an existential threat. For some, this is more manageable. For an artist, though… Many of us are not recognized at any point in our lives. Most of us will never have an audience greater than one or two. Hours upon hours of dedicated passion culminate in a beautiful but momentary expression of the deepest parts of the self, yet so many of us couldn’t even pay someone to take the time out of their life to appreciate it. It took me well over twenty years to even begin to reach an understanding that, merely by existing, my art has value. My music matters because it is mine.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

When someone tells me they aren’t creative, I let them know that they are lying. We all create. We all perform. We are all artists. The only difference is that some of us create with intention to create. The potential rests in all of us, and if you are driven to create — just do it. Don’t stop to worry about what is “good” or “correct”. Make something, and then put it down and make something else. That’s really all there is to it.

If you have a friend who is a musician, let them know you’ve heard their music. Give them a specific comment about a song of theirs, something that proves that you were paying attention. It’s a small gesture on your part, but that piece of music was an idea that occupied our entire consciousness at one point or another, so it is a very big deal for us.

Contact Info:

• Website: joshuavern.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/schlibbity/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jawschlarsen
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/schlibbity