The professor was correct, although – as has been the case for many a UNT student – Zarbo’s time in Denton became as much about the local music scene as education.
But during his freshman year as a music student at George Mason University, Zarbo’s upright bass instructor said he really belonged in Denton, Texas, at the storied University of North Texas School of Music. Zarbo first took up music, formally speaking, the summer before high school in his home state of Virginia. “As strange as it is to start calling myself that.
“Creating things from the kind of happy surprises that happen when you’re working with keyboard textures and keyboard sounds, that’s really where my heart and soul is at right now as a songwriter,” Zarbo says. But, similar to Sir Paul, he plays every instrument on LUNA, including guitars, programmed drums, and most of all, MIDI keyboards. “Bass is the lens through how I’ve seen and experienced being a musician,” says Zarbo, with such bassists as Phil Lynott, Andy Fraser, and Paul McCartney among his role models. From the bubbling grooves and horn-like synthesizer riffs of “Mister Rock” – a wry, appropriately robotic meditation on the personas of both flesh-and-blood rock frontmen and rock show holograms – to the epic, blood-rushing anthem “Monastical,” LUNA is the veritable first record that took a lifetime… and will leave you wanting more. Like a character actor seizing his first romantic lead, or a sous chef finally opening his own restaurant, the 48 year-old Zarbo – a key member of Spoon for nearly a decade who has also played with the likes of Sondre Lerche and Fred Armisen – is announcing himself as a headliner, compressing all of his passion and experience into five songs about loss and hope and rock’n’roll and Brooklyn. It’s a product of divorce, Music For Airports, talk therapy, and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. It’s a keyboard record by a lifelong bassist, and a pop record steeped in teutonic rock. It’s a New York City record, by way of Austin and Nashville. But it’s also a lot more than that, and many things at once. Joshua Zarbo wrote and recorded LUNA by himself at home over the past two years.
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