Joshua Burnside – It’s Not Going to Be Okay – Album Deep Dive
by Liam Griffin

Belfast’s Joshua Burnside, experimental folk artist, grapples with one of life’s greatest tests, navigating grief, on his sixth full-length album ‘It’s Not Going to Be Okay’ released 20th March on Nettwerk. The songs are more pared back than those of his previous releases, which allows for his journey through grieving the death of a close friend to take centre stage.

We so often feel that we’re utterly ill-equipped to handle the challenges we encounter in our lives. Funnily enough, though, we feel this as we actively handle them. The truth is that the way to handle any challenge is to just handle it as best you can. On ‘It’s Not Going to Be Okay’, Burnside is able to hold and express the contradiction ingrained in feeling like he can’t go on as he goes on, and he lets his listener in on what that’s like.

The only way to begin to heal is to acknowledge the presence of the storm and darkness residing within. Only then can the first step on the journey toward calmness and light be taken. On the opening track, ‘You and Me’, Burnside takes this first step and never lets the flickering light of hope die out as he explains that things will eventually take a turn for the better, even if he’s not sure when: “after the storm the sea is gentle / even the longest night must end.”

Once our loved ones have passed on, it’s the being with them that we miss. In one of the most arresting and deeply affecting moments on the album, on ‘With You’ Burnside takes us graveside at his friend’s funeral and lets him know that “when they lay your body low / I felt like crawling down there / to lie with you.” His transparency and frankness here are unsettling. Hearing the desperation drip from his unachievable desire to be with his friend one last time unsettles your emotional equilibrium as a listener.

Burnside truly has a keen eye for the absurd, which he adroitly shares at various points on this album. For instance, on ‘Nicer Part of Town’, which circles around the refrain “how strange it is this life”, he draws from the deep well of his lyrical talent to convey the oddness of existing. He pairs the humdrum, “lemons on the old wallpaper”, with the bizarre and disturbing, “scraping old blood off the radiator”, which creates a jarring juxtaposition.

Depicting the customary alongside the strange is, though, a true representation of life. Another example of Burnside’s propensity toward seeing the absurdity in life is heard on ‘The Last Armchair’ where he again presents the ordinary alongside the extraordinary, this time drawing attention to the oddness of carrying out the mundane tasks of the everyday amongst objects of personal significance. He illustrates a day’s commonplace act, eating eggs on toast in the morning, carried out on a piece of furniture of great symbolic import, the last armchair his friend sat on before he overdosed. Life is depicted here as what happens in and around the ceaseless series of clashes between those things that are significant and those things that aren’t yet significant (for all insignificances are just significances in waiting).

He goes on to admit that at times he regresses to the point of feeling “just like a child”, and he suggests that “we’re all just playing house/ firemen and nurses / waiting for someone to pick us up and say / ‘ah, you’re okay.” Burnside assures us that we’re not alone in feeling as if we’ve not fully landed in our lives; that we’re not alone in feeling like we’ve not got it all figured out. Sometimes all we need is for someone to tell us that it’s all going to be okay, and it’s at the times when we don’t think they are that we need to hear it most.

Working through the agony of accepting that we couldn’t do enough to save our loved ones once they’ve passed can be a major obstacle to living a life no longer defined by grief. It’s only when we accept the limits of our capacity to help others that the feelings of guilt stemming from thinking we could’ve done more start to diminish. On ‘Moon High’, Burnside stares his helplessness in the face whilst admitting that he’s “not really sure how much help I could have been.” That extant ray of hope still shines, though, as he knows he’ll see his friend again “at the end of time.”

On ‘It’s Not Going to Be Okay’, the best is truly saved for last. ‘Remake’ is tender, deeply moving, and evokes a whole host of tangled and profound feelings attached to
bereavement. The production, and Burnside’s performance, are so intimate that it sounds like you’re sat across from him as he’s committing the take to tape. Your sense as a listener is that the tune is so close that if you reached out your hand, you might just touch it. You wouldn’t dare, though, as it’s so delicate it would likely evaporate if you were to make contact with it. At points, however, there’s a part of you that hopes it does vanish into thin air as Burnside’s depiction of the close relationship he shared with the deceased is so poignantly sketched that it’s just about too much.

‘Remake’ shines a light on how the past imposes itself on the present when the pain of grief is at its most acute. At that time, even life’s minutia seem to trigger memories of the person who’s passed. Each recollection that comes to mind brings with it waves of emotions, and you get the sense that Burnside is desperately trying to not drown in these waves on the album’s closer. He stands strong, though, and grants them the freedom to flow through him and his song, however painful it may be.

On the track’s most stirring moment, Burnside recalls his late friend proposing, whilst they roved around a woods inebriated, that all of life is “just a remake, scene for scene” and if so, then Burnside wishes that “maybe next time I’ll play you / and you can play me.” When we see someone we love with every fibre of our being suffer, we desperately wish we could bear the weight of their pain, if even just for a second. This lyric captures the purity and anguish bound up in that wish. That wish that’s made in the knowledge it can never be fulfilled.

This album really is a triumph: a refined, profound, and sincere portrayal of the nuance of grief. It’s his closeness to his grief that permits Burnside to get inside it and report what it’s like in there, but it’s his maturity and talent as a songwriter that allows him to step outside of it so that he can impartially probe it and paint its depths in such poignant and vivid detail.

This album is assured and accomplished, and it unveils Joshua Burnside as a songwriter with the dexterity to handle the thorniest of themes with a sensitive, but never timid, touch. Not only that, but his proficiency as a songsmith has led him to put together an album that’s a truly heartfelt and heartening tribute to a late friend that will reverberate through time. It’s an album that others going through a similar experience can draw on for strength and use as their anchor as they navigate their own process of grief. Of all the things that Burnside reminds us of in the ten songs that make up ‘It’s Not Going to be Okay’, of which there are many, the most salient and far-reaching is that if we want to find that path forward, we’ll find it where we least want to look and where’s hurting most. As always, the way out is through.