Joshua Bley // Blazing Star, 2025
www.joshuabley.com
RIYL: Elliott Smith, Tori Amos, Ben Folds, Florence and the Machine

After a translatlantic adventure last October, my flight landed back in Ohio. In a jet-lagged, liminal emotional space, I watched the skyline against the river as the car zoomed down the highway to take me home. I felt in-between worlds and lifetimes and unsure of what came next. I saw a glimmer of hope after such a long darkness, but I still felt unmoored.

I sat quietly in the back seat and I downloaded the five tracks that West Coast-based musician Joshua Bley had so kindly sent me by email to hear before the December release. As I arrived home and collapsed on my bed, I pressed play on the first track and settled in to listen.

WOW.

Joshua broke and put my heart together in just under a half hour.

Bley’s 2025 release, Blazing Star, is a labor of love that took 10 years to birth and meet the world. An intensely personal but universally relatable collection of songs, Blazing Star is about trauma and healing, addiction and recovery, and the shining hope that we can find in the muck and dirt of our own pain if we only look closer. It is one of the most moving records I’ve heard in quite some time.

Recorded in Wales with producer and engineer Tim Hamill, Blazing Star captures some kind of supernatural fleeting moment in time, much like a comet passing through the sky. In his notes about the EP, Joshua talks about his grandmother’s cousin, Fannie Bell Fleming, a famous burlesque performer, and how her life and spirit became a touchstone for this project and his own life journey. You can hear Fannie’s legacy in these songs, gently coaxing you along while holding a lantern to guide you both through the dark.

Blazing Star is anchored by Joshua’s beautiful piano composition, his gentle and inquisitive songwriting and vocals, and the soaring violin of British musician Rachael Birkin. Hamill’s simple, effective production and engineering gives these songs room to breathe, and still the listener might close their eyes and imagine themselves sitting next to Joshua on the piano bench.

The EP opens with the stunning “Seven Heads;” Bley sings “I can’t run anymore… when my heart broke – I tried to fix it with all that dope,” a truly devastating lyric punctuated by Birkin’s beautiful violin swells. “The Fall of Icarus,” much like closer “Lantern,” describes a loss of faith, but also of unexpected redemption. Midway through this set, Bley includes an absolutely stunning reworking of Sting’s “Fields of Gold.” He makes it his own with his reminder to the listener, “there are rows and rows of love.” We don’t have to be alone in our grief; there is still love to be found here.

Rounding out the record, “Crystal Ball” whispers “I think I can” as it recounts Bley’s return from the land of the walking dead and his rise out of the ashes, those tentative baby steps in the first year of recovery. He communicates the humility necessary to admit there’s a problem, to start over, and to cheer yourself on when other people won’t.

The hopeful “Lantern” closes out the collection, imploring us to take the lantern from Joshua for ourselves, for our own difficult journeys. Another voice joins Joshua’s here; he is beautifully accompanied by Welsh musician Steve Balsamo on background vocals.

Joshua’s conversational delivery makes this EP an intimate, heartbreaking, but ultimately uplifting experience. His writing and performance here is honest and earnest but not hackneyed or trite. Even though this is a sophomore effort, Bley shows a depth and maturity that many more prolific writers don’t quite possess. Bley knows how to draw in the listener and keep them engaged. His heart is firmly on his sleeve and he invites you to walk with him, as he holds up that light to our deepest wounds and points the way to healing.