Pick up your hard copy of the new album at – the Josh Rosenthal Store. Or, you can pick up a digital copy at iTunes.
Album #2 of the Villages Suite releases today – Even the Strongest Hero.
Even the Strongest Hero (ETSH) is a live, acoustic album. Meaning, I recorded this album with a guitar, chair and microphone at Jeff Pardo’s studio – the Track Shack – in Nashville. At the helm, Josh Wilson. He produced this acoustic EP and even cowrote two of the songs with me.
This whole Villages Suite thing comments on community, right? ETSH examines our life as a victim of the cowboy myth. No doubt, we’re overwhelmed with things that glorify life alone. Every old western tells the story of the cowboy who defeats the bad guys alone and rides into the sunset alone. And we romanticize it. We put ourselves in their boots and wish we were the ones disappearing into the sunset. But alas, we’re not. The old westerns rarely take it to the absurd. The cowboy who rides alone also sleeps alone and dies alone.
ETSH is my stab at rejecting that notion in my own life. Lyrically, the songs reject the cowboy myth and embrace my need for help outside myself.
Sometimes the things we need the most are the things we want the least. We need people, but sometimes they’re the last thing we want. Lonely is safe. There’s very little risk in it. If we fail, we’re right where we started anyways.
With this album, I hope:
1. you enjoy it
2. you call someone next time you feel lonely
3. you tell your friends about it
Stay tuned, in the coming weeks, I will explain why I chose the songs I chose for this album.
[...] Released September 15, Even the Strongest Hero, the second album in Josh Rosenthal’s Villages Suites is a solo acoustic album that debunks the lone wolf mentality of our culture—people were not meant to be alone. Using the force of his voice and a guitar, Rosenthal stresses, “Solo acoustic albums always force the imagination to add other instruments and other people to the song. While acoustic albums are good, the listener would always benefit from more–while living life alone, we benefit from being surrounded by more people.” (Read more about Rosenthal’s motivation at his blog). [...]