June First Friday: Joshua Lee & The Nice Dream

This free, DORA-friendly event will be held on Putnam Street in front of Peoples Bank Theatre. No tickets are necessary to attend. Lawn chairs are welcome!

After 14 years of fifteen-passenger vans, tour buses, and side man gigs, Joshua Lee left Nashville with his young family and headed to West Virginia, trading screaming fans for screaming kids. After a difficult transition, Lee nearly left the music life behind entirely, but he began to write again and, in doing so, found his own musical voice. In his old life, Lee might have sought collaborators to start a band, but initially having difficulty finding enough like-minded musicians, he focused instead on discovering himself as a solo artist, something he’d never tried before. Playing solo shows in the Ohio Valley area led to a new confidence in his ability as a singer-songwriter and to a new group of musical collaborators.

On his debut EP, Promise Land (June 2017), Joshua wrestled with questions of loss and cautiously reached for hope rather than despair. Recorded mostly at home, and self-produced along with Trae Gunter (Randy Montana, Jacob Thomas Jr.), he found himself searching for his own sound by mining the territories of folk rock and heartland rock and blending in synths and ambient guitars. Hints of The National supplement more traditional song forms in the spirit of Ryan Adams and Tom Petty.

Now based in Marietta, OH, Joshua Lee is performing solo and as a full band with The Nice Dream (Shane Henthorne, Justin Arthur, Dan Lee, Vinnie Mele, and Andy Hall) in the Mid-Ohio Valley region as he’s finishing work on his next project to be released in the summer of 2023.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.