Fresh Holiday Music From Josh

If you’ve only bumped in to my orbit within the last couple years, there are a few things you might not know about me.

The mystery item of primary importance for this post would be that I am a musician.

Before I dove into the rabbit hole of company culture and making organizations great, I was convinced I wanted to be a performing musician (i.e. “rockstar”). This is one of the reasons I ended up in Los Angeles, in fact, almost nine years ago. But after moving to California I decided that music, while a great way to feed one’s soul, wasn’t actually a very good way to do things like, say, feed myself food, and I fortuitously discovered the seeds for the career I currently have soon after arriving here.

But back in the day, man… music was IT for me. In many ways it still is, I suppose — it’s just not the way I make money. If you were to come to my office, for example, you’d find Spotify playing constantly in the background. I take my baby daughter to music classes on weekends. And I still believe with all my heart that there’s something about music that speaks to the soul of a person in a way that nothing else does.

Back in 2004, when I lived in Denver, my friend Dom asked me to write an original Christmas song for their Warm & Fuzzy Christmas Show, a special radio morning show on 100.3FM where the hosts bring in local artists to sing holiday music live on the air.

I accepted Dom’s challenge, but I wanted to create something from a different angle than all the other holiday music out there. I racked my brain for weeks, and finally came up with something I thought was unique: I figured most people have probably heard of the nativity story, with Mary and Joseph (and Jesus, of course), and, while there have been a few really great songs written from Mary’s perspective, there weren’t any that I knew of from Joseph’s point of view (if you know this one, it came out the year following).

So this tune is from the perspective of Joseph, writing a love song to Mary.

No matter what day or time you live in, I figure marrying a girl who’s gotten pregnant by someone other than you is a pretty noble thing to do. I like to think that ‘ol Joe must have been pretty smitten with Mary.

Finally — a full ten years after this song debuted on Warm & Fuzzy — earlier this year I was able to go back and give this song the production treatment it deserved with the help of my friend J. Benjamin Kesler.

I hope you enjoy this brand new version of “Mary.”

Happy holidays!

Get “Mary” on iTunes here. 

Listen on Spotify here (or below).

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