The production on this track by Portland-based songwriter Joshua English is so crisp and clear (listen to it with headphones) that kick drum sounds like a banging on your front door. Before you know it, English (who owes a stylistic debt to similarly-minded DIY popster Ted Leo) has broken a window and chased you into your bedroom, screaming right into your face and demanding sincerity: “I know the difference between the life you live and a line you lifted from a book you read.”

If there’s a jealous ex-lover in the song, though, he’s tempered with self-deprecating wisdom: “See, I know enough to know I don’t know a thing,” English quips to end the song. That’s an amazing mantra that can apply to pretty much every aspect of one’s life, and it surmises just what gets my feet stomping along to this tune.

“Miles” reminds me of Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros’ “Johnny Appleseed,” and especially that song’s hallmark lyric, “If you want the honey/ then you don’t go killing all the bees.” There’s outrage in these songs—aimed squarely at the folks at the top: the trust-fund kids, the boss, the ruling class—that is so deep-seated and true that it’s a relief just to hear someone singing about it. The music, as fed up as it is, actually becomes celebratory.

In addition to all his everyman muckraking, Joshua English gives Portland a shout out. He says of “dip down Portland town:” “We are fly-over country, somehow stuck between what’s allowed and what we need to be.”

For fitting all that into a two-minute pop song, Joshua English, I salute you.

Joshua English plays Missippi Pizza on March 24 with Frank Turner (UK) and The Dimes.

Joshua English on the ’space.
Welcome Home Records

Photo: Joshua and his neck tattoo, from Myspace

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