The Sit down with josh mitcham
Kentucky-based singer-songwriter Josh Mitcham has announced the release of his next album ‘Gonna Be Alright’ on June 6th. This album will be one of the first releases from new label Alabama Sound Company, run by industry veterans Ritch Henderson and Brett Robinson.
Mitcham caught the eye of ASC after his independent release “A Few Cries and a Laugh” made waves in the Americana/Alternative Country circles in early 2025. He followed that up with extensive touring, with multiple trips to England, including The Long Road Festival, and spots on national festival stages like Gulf Coast Jam, The Valley Music Festival, among others.
Mitcham caught the eye of ASC after his independent release “A Few Cries and a Laugh” made waves in the Americana/Alternative Country circles in early 2025. He followed that up with extensive touring, with multiple trips to England, including The Long Road Festival, and spots on national festival stages like Gulf Coast Jam, The Valley Music Festival, among others.
With ‘Out Of My Mind’ which will be the lead single from the album, dropping on January 30th, we caught up with Josh over Zoom to talk about the whole project and his plans for the year.
Let's start by going back to last year where you came over here to experience our wonderful country, our great beer drinking culture, baked beans for breakfast and driving on the correct side of the road. Did it all feel worthwhile making a couple of trips over?
“Initially, I just wanted to come over there, because so many of my friends had made that journey and were like, man, these people just really like music and artists, you don't get caught up in the same kind of genre struggle, where you're not this enough, like we do over here. I reached out and got some contacts, then it really was just, if I get some shows, great, but I just want to go over. The initial first trip, my son was about to graduate high school and my wife was able to come with me, so it's like, if the music stuff doesn't go well, we got a cool little vacation. So, I just played a few shows, they went really well, got a good response and then the plan was to come back in November to have a long tour but then, I got on The Long Road. With that one, I didn’t really get an opportunity to book before and after shows so I flew over, did the festival and flew back home but that was great because that led tov a lot of the gigs that I had in November when I came back over. Look, I could bang my head against the wall and play the same ten venues within a two or three hour geographical area here and essentially make the same money that I made in England. I just feel like there was some excitement around it over there, and I've been playing here for twenty years, so it's like, I don't know, you gotta do a record, great. Even my fans are, like, I've seen you play 500 times, so it was refreshing to just to get to meet some new people and see some of these things. At this point, with my music career, if I'm gonna tour, I might as well be curating an experience. If I'm gonna get away from home, let's go to some cool places, take a little bit extra time to see the sites and kind of do the thing. I've been taking my father with me on a lot of runs too, because I've been doing it solo, he's 70 and I'm in his shop right now working on old trucks, just trying to spend as much time with him also. I'm trying to have my cake and eat it, too, as far as working.”
The last time we saw each other was at The O2 where Tyler Childers was playing and we were talking in that bar about how we are both such big fans of his. I know he is a fellow Kentucky boy but what is it for you about Tyler that makes him an artist that you respect so much?
“Well mostly it’s that we kind of were playing at the same time and we're contemporaries. He speaks the Appalachian Kentucky language, where I'm not really from the mountains, I'm a couple hours west, but he still speaks our language. It was refreshing to have an artist that you respected, that you knew was out there grinding and working really hard, almost in the same way that (Chris) Stapleton was able to bypass the normal trappings of industry and somehow cut through. There's a lot of factors, but main thing is that the songs are great, he's definitely an artist and he surrounded himself with super awesome musicians who were also part of the Kentucky scene. It wasn't just like, let's go get the best cats in Nashville, it's a true brotherhood, right? I mean, Jesse (Wells), his fiddle player and band leader, I’ve known him from when he was doing other projects and I was doing other projects, it’s cool to get like, heck yeah, man, I'll get you tickets if you're in town. For sure, Kentucky brothers have to hang out.”
Let's get on to the main bit for us to talk about as we've got the first single off the project coming on Friday. Tell us a bit about ‘Out Of My Mind’ and why did you decide that it was going to be the lead for the album?
“So, for the 1st time in a while, probably four or five years, I’m not working with a label, I’m working with a producer and they're very independent also, which was what appealed to me, but the landscape right now is engagement. I feel like you release a whole record at once, you'll get that initial traction and then it goes away. Super fans and super listeners will continue to listen to it but the concept of an album, look I'm glad people were buying physical copies and stuff, but as far as listening habits, as people we have the attention span of a goldfish. We’re actually going to do five singles, so we will do January, February, March, April, May and the album in June and a lot of country records get released in June. Another thing too and not that it’s a huge consideration for me, but if you release a record in January, which I did last year, you'll get some press but then when you get to the end of the year, where they run their best albums of the year, or whatever, people have already forgotten about it because you get buried by a hundred and fifty other records so we positioned ourselves in the summer. That's a big listening time for people anyway, whether they're on boats or being outdoors and there are lots of festivals, so you can piggyback on some festival stuff too. As far as that song being released first, I don't know, that was kind of a decision from the label folks. They were like we really like this one, it's not a summery song, it's not a ballad or anything, it's just a nice first song to release. Everything on this record kind of has a groove and a vibe that I wouldn't have done if I recorded it, if I'm being honest. That's been the other thing it's like being an only child, I've gotten so used to doing my own recordings and all that, I had to kind of retrain myself and humble myself to the process, because they'd be like, I don't think I want to add fifteen guitars to this, which is what I would have done. I really fell in love with the vibe though, I have a tendency to want to cover up my voice because I don't like hearing myself and he's like, I just will not add anything. Just guitar, drums, bass and vocal so a lot of space in the songs, it's very sparse. The place that we were recording, Alabama Sound Company, it's like a hundred year old, which I know that doesn't mean anything to you Brits.”
I was gonna ask you about the studio because I swear I read you posting something about a 1930’s analogue setup, that must have been really different to how you’ve been used to recording before.
“Well, I mean, I'm using 1930’s RCA ribbon mikes, so I had to watch it because I'll feedback them if I yell too loud. You're kind of having to move more like you would have been with live recordings in the old days. A lot of his console stuff is old, we send all that to, you know, a modern thing, in the box, but he really doesn't do a lot of effects in the box. It's mostly all the analogue and then it's in a hundred year old former black elementary school outside of Alabama. You gotta turn the air conditioner off in the room when recording, so it gets hot but it's kind of romantic and I think that kind of comes through. It’s like, let's just make this simple and you think how would they have done it at Stax, or Motown, or any of those places where, you didn't have all the digital capability. I’ve done hyper-produced stuff where you do a hundred vocal tracks and then they comp all the good stuff into an unsingable, perfect version. If you can get a good full take and it sounds like you, especially in an AI world, to have some imperfections in there, where you can hear, okay, this is a real person, that's good.”
Had you worked with Brett Robinson before doing this record and if not, how did you find his methods and what did you think was really good or really fresh about working in this way?
“I knew Brett, only through him being a famous steel guitar player. He toured Whitey Morgan for like ten years and he’s a stud. When he decided not to perform anymore and wanted to do this, we hadn't really spoken in years and he reached out with like a cold DM on Instagram saying he'd really like to do a record with me and at the time, I just released one. I was like I just did a record, I don't want to do another record right now. I tried to talk him out of it, I'm like, I'm not your guy, I'm not gonna go two or three hundred days a year, I'm not. I’m stubborn and you’re not going to make any money so what are you even thinking? But he said that's what I want, I want somebody who just wants to make the record and make good music. Then when we get down there, it's simple mike setups and he did a lot of work with me on songs. He didn't want to do a lot of pre-production, he wanted it to kind of be fresh, but we would take a song and just work at it. There were some songs that the reason I hadn't recorded them yet was because I knew they weren't just right and he was able to kind of find those things that I never could kind of crack. He was very old school, like go to another room and work on this for a while or play a part a hundred times before we record it, he wanted to do a full take and get it right. It made it a bit long because it’s six hours away and I had to go down multiple times and could only stay two or three days at a time but hopefully all of my complaining and bellyaching, where there were some times too when he would send me a mix and I would say I don’t like that. Then he would tell me why he did it this way, I would be hearing it a certain way in my head and he is giving it to me in a different way where he would say I think this is the right way. He produced, he said I'm gonna challenge you on this and we're gonna do it this way.”
All in all, this first half of the year is leading up to ‘Gonna Be Alright’ which will have ten tracks on it. Were they all songs that came in the pocket between the last record and this, or were some of them some older songs that Brett helped you find a way to make them work?
“He basically said send me all your songs! I don't think you expected like forty songs, but I just sent everything that I either hadn’t recorded or something I had written and a lot of these happened over the summer. He just kind of started going through them, and he would star the ones that he thought were okay and then started giving me notes. Most songs come like this and I’ve had a lot of luck over the years where a song happens in thirty minutes, you get through it and it’s pretty much done. The ones that took longer, almost to the point where I had to just finish it or abandon it but there were a couple floating around where I really liked something in the song, if I could just figure out the rest of it. It's like you stuck with something so he was able to give me some outside perspective. At least four of these songs, including this lead single and the next one were songs that were written after the process started, which happens a lot. You'll have the 10 songs that you think you're gonna do and then you just kind of keep one upping yourself or you start to see a pattern of this is the vibe of this record, that doesn't work anymore, I need to write something in this space. In my job that I do for a living outside of music, I run a summer camp. I have 2500 to 3000 high school kids coming through every summer over the course of six or seven weeks. Brett had challenged me to quit writing about forty year old dads with three kids, he's like, that's fine but it's a very myopic approach. I know it's personal, but you can write an authentic song that appeals to more people. With these kids, there would be crushes, you know, like camp love where they meet each other on Monday and by Friday they're crying because they're leaving each other. So, I was able to like, without it sounding like I was a high school kid, write some of those emotions and it was fun. It was a cool exercise and my family usually doesn't stay with me during the summer, because there was a residence for me there. Once I’m done with the kids at like ten o'clock, I go to the house, I'm by myself, the guitars are there and I'll write until eleven or twelve, which I can almost do it every night, so actually my job, where you would think it would interfere with the music process, actually, gives me a ton of material to use in the fall.”
Let's start by going back to last year where you came over here to experience our wonderful country, our great beer drinking culture, baked beans for breakfast and driving on the correct side of the road. Did it all feel worthwhile making a couple of trips over?
“Initially, I just wanted to come over there, because so many of my friends had made that journey and were like, man, these people just really like music and artists, you don't get caught up in the same kind of genre struggle, where you're not this enough, like we do over here. I reached out and got some contacts, then it really was just, if I get some shows, great, but I just want to go over. The initial first trip, my son was about to graduate high school and my wife was able to come with me, so it's like, if the music stuff doesn't go well, we got a cool little vacation. So, I just played a few shows, they went really well, got a good response and then the plan was to come back in November to have a long tour but then, I got on The Long Road. With that one, I didn’t really get an opportunity to book before and after shows so I flew over, did the festival and flew back home but that was great because that led tov a lot of the gigs that I had in November when I came back over. Look, I could bang my head against the wall and play the same ten venues within a two or three hour geographical area here and essentially make the same money that I made in England. I just feel like there was some excitement around it over there, and I've been playing here for twenty years, so it's like, I don't know, you gotta do a record, great. Even my fans are, like, I've seen you play 500 times, so it was refreshing to just to get to meet some new people and see some of these things. At this point, with my music career, if I'm gonna tour, I might as well be curating an experience. If I'm gonna get away from home, let's go to some cool places, take a little bit extra time to see the sites and kind of do the thing. I've been taking my father with me on a lot of runs too, because I've been doing it solo, he's 70 and I'm in his shop right now working on old trucks, just trying to spend as much time with him also. I'm trying to have my cake and eat it, too, as far as working.”
The last time we saw each other was at The O2 where Tyler Childers was playing and we were talking in that bar about how we are both such big fans of his. I know he is a fellow Kentucky boy but what is it for you about Tyler that makes him an artist that you respect so much?
“Well mostly it’s that we kind of were playing at the same time and we're contemporaries. He speaks the Appalachian Kentucky language, where I'm not really from the mountains, I'm a couple hours west, but he still speaks our language. It was refreshing to have an artist that you respected, that you knew was out there grinding and working really hard, almost in the same way that (Chris) Stapleton was able to bypass the normal trappings of industry and somehow cut through. There's a lot of factors, but main thing is that the songs are great, he's definitely an artist and he surrounded himself with super awesome musicians who were also part of the Kentucky scene. It wasn't just like, let's go get the best cats in Nashville, it's a true brotherhood, right? I mean, Jesse (Wells), his fiddle player and band leader, I’ve known him from when he was doing other projects and I was doing other projects, it’s cool to get like, heck yeah, man, I'll get you tickets if you're in town. For sure, Kentucky brothers have to hang out.”
Let's get on to the main bit for us to talk about as we've got the first single off the project coming on Friday. Tell us a bit about ‘Out Of My Mind’ and why did you decide that it was going to be the lead for the album?
“So, for the 1st time in a while, probably four or five years, I’m not working with a label, I’m working with a producer and they're very independent also, which was what appealed to me, but the landscape right now is engagement. I feel like you release a whole record at once, you'll get that initial traction and then it goes away. Super fans and super listeners will continue to listen to it but the concept of an album, look I'm glad people were buying physical copies and stuff, but as far as listening habits, as people we have the attention span of a goldfish. We’re actually going to do five singles, so we will do January, February, March, April, May and the album in June and a lot of country records get released in June. Another thing too and not that it’s a huge consideration for me, but if you release a record in January, which I did last year, you'll get some press but then when you get to the end of the year, where they run their best albums of the year, or whatever, people have already forgotten about it because you get buried by a hundred and fifty other records so we positioned ourselves in the summer. That's a big listening time for people anyway, whether they're on boats or being outdoors and there are lots of festivals, so you can piggyback on some festival stuff too. As far as that song being released first, I don't know, that was kind of a decision from the label folks. They were like we really like this one, it's not a summery song, it's not a ballad or anything, it's just a nice first song to release. Everything on this record kind of has a groove and a vibe that I wouldn't have done if I recorded it, if I'm being honest. That's been the other thing it's like being an only child, I've gotten so used to doing my own recordings and all that, I had to kind of retrain myself and humble myself to the process, because they'd be like, I don't think I want to add fifteen guitars to this, which is what I would have done. I really fell in love with the vibe though, I have a tendency to want to cover up my voice because I don't like hearing myself and he's like, I just will not add anything. Just guitar, drums, bass and vocal so a lot of space in the songs, it's very sparse. The place that we were recording, Alabama Sound Company, it's like a hundred year old, which I know that doesn't mean anything to you Brits.”
I was gonna ask you about the studio because I swear I read you posting something about a 1930’s analogue setup, that must have been really different to how you’ve been used to recording before.
“Well, I mean, I'm using 1930’s RCA ribbon mikes, so I had to watch it because I'll feedback them if I yell too loud. You're kind of having to move more like you would have been with live recordings in the old days. A lot of his console stuff is old, we send all that to, you know, a modern thing, in the box, but he really doesn't do a lot of effects in the box. It's mostly all the analogue and then it's in a hundred year old former black elementary school outside of Alabama. You gotta turn the air conditioner off in the room when recording, so it gets hot but it's kind of romantic and I think that kind of comes through. It’s like, let's just make this simple and you think how would they have done it at Stax, or Motown, or any of those places where, you didn't have all the digital capability. I’ve done hyper-produced stuff where you do a hundred vocal tracks and then they comp all the good stuff into an unsingable, perfect version. If you can get a good full take and it sounds like you, especially in an AI world, to have some imperfections in there, where you can hear, okay, this is a real person, that's good.”
Had you worked with Brett Robinson before doing this record and if not, how did you find his methods and what did you think was really good or really fresh about working in this way?
“I knew Brett, only through him being a famous steel guitar player. He toured Whitey Morgan for like ten years and he’s a stud. When he decided not to perform anymore and wanted to do this, we hadn't really spoken in years and he reached out with like a cold DM on Instagram saying he'd really like to do a record with me and at the time, I just released one. I was like I just did a record, I don't want to do another record right now. I tried to talk him out of it, I'm like, I'm not your guy, I'm not gonna go two or three hundred days a year, I'm not. I’m stubborn and you’re not going to make any money so what are you even thinking? But he said that's what I want, I want somebody who just wants to make the record and make good music. Then when we get down there, it's simple mike setups and he did a lot of work with me on songs. He didn't want to do a lot of pre-production, he wanted it to kind of be fresh, but we would take a song and just work at it. There were some songs that the reason I hadn't recorded them yet was because I knew they weren't just right and he was able to kind of find those things that I never could kind of crack. He was very old school, like go to another room and work on this for a while or play a part a hundred times before we record it, he wanted to do a full take and get it right. It made it a bit long because it’s six hours away and I had to go down multiple times and could only stay two or three days at a time but hopefully all of my complaining and bellyaching, where there were some times too when he would send me a mix and I would say I don’t like that. Then he would tell me why he did it this way, I would be hearing it a certain way in my head and he is giving it to me in a different way where he would say I think this is the right way. He produced, he said I'm gonna challenge you on this and we're gonna do it this way.”
All in all, this first half of the year is leading up to ‘Gonna Be Alright’ which will have ten tracks on it. Were they all songs that came in the pocket between the last record and this, or were some of them some older songs that Brett helped you find a way to make them work?
“He basically said send me all your songs! I don't think you expected like forty songs, but I just sent everything that I either hadn’t recorded or something I had written and a lot of these happened over the summer. He just kind of started going through them, and he would star the ones that he thought were okay and then started giving me notes. Most songs come like this and I’ve had a lot of luck over the years where a song happens in thirty minutes, you get through it and it’s pretty much done. The ones that took longer, almost to the point where I had to just finish it or abandon it but there were a couple floating around where I really liked something in the song, if I could just figure out the rest of it. It's like you stuck with something so he was able to give me some outside perspective. At least four of these songs, including this lead single and the next one were songs that were written after the process started, which happens a lot. You'll have the 10 songs that you think you're gonna do and then you just kind of keep one upping yourself or you start to see a pattern of this is the vibe of this record, that doesn't work anymore, I need to write something in this space. In my job that I do for a living outside of music, I run a summer camp. I have 2500 to 3000 high school kids coming through every summer over the course of six or seven weeks. Brett had challenged me to quit writing about forty year old dads with three kids, he's like, that's fine but it's a very myopic approach. I know it's personal, but you can write an authentic song that appeals to more people. With these kids, there would be crushes, you know, like camp love where they meet each other on Monday and by Friday they're crying because they're leaving each other. So, I was able to like, without it sounding like I was a high school kid, write some of those emotions and it was fun. It was a cool exercise and my family usually doesn't stay with me during the summer, because there was a residence for me there. Once I’m done with the kids at like ten o'clock, I go to the house, I'm by myself, the guitars are there and I'll write until eleven or twelve, which I can almost do it every night, so actually my job, where you would think it would interfere with the music process, actually, gives me a ton of material to use in the fall.”
That’s Awesome. I guess lastly and most importantly, are there plans in the pipeline to come back and see us, even if not to tour, just to come drink beer with us?
“Oh yeah. Obviously, I tried to get on C2C as an indy person, I was able to make some contacts and do some stuff, I tried to work with my affiliation with CMA and I was probably just a little bit too late on some of those things, which is fine. Like, I missed some festivals this year in Kentucky that are large, but I'm like, you know what, I've got two or three of them, I'm gonna need one to get on next year. You know, I'm gonna need some of these things next year, so my goal now is to come back probably around the same time again, this fall, maybe a little earlier.”
The new single ‘Out Of My Mind’ from Josh Mitcham will be released on January 30th via Alabama Sound Company which you can pre-save HERE with the new album ‘Gonna Be Alright’ coming on June 6th. You can also keep up to date with what Josh is up to through his socials on INSTAGRAM and TIKTOK.
“Oh yeah. Obviously, I tried to get on C2C as an indy person, I was able to make some contacts and do some stuff, I tried to work with my affiliation with CMA and I was probably just a little bit too late on some of those things, which is fine. Like, I missed some festivals this year in Kentucky that are large, but I'm like, you know what, I've got two or three of them, I'm gonna need one to get on next year. You know, I'm gonna need some of these things next year, so my goal now is to come back probably around the same time again, this fall, maybe a little earlier.”
The new single ‘Out Of My Mind’ from Josh Mitcham will be released on January 30th via Alabama Sound Company which you can pre-save HERE with the new album ‘Gonna Be Alright’ coming on June 6th. You can also keep up to date with what Josh is up to through his socials on INSTAGRAM and TIKTOK.
