Josh Cockerill
heart bleeding country straight outta jazz school
Josh Cockerill sings like an angel, and delivers rich, emotional songs that seem far beyond his youthful experience. A studious kid, he grew up in up Christie Estates in southwest Calgary and went to Sainte Marguerite Bourgeoys becoming fully fluent in French. Older brother Greg helped to immerse him in singing and with the guitar which, in turn, led to studying jazz at Humber College in Ontario. But after pouring through the arduous task of learning the theory of comptemporary music along with practicing guitar for five hours a day, Cockerill headed out to the bars croonin' and pullin' heart strings with his country ballads.
"I first went head over heels for John Lennon. 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun', 'Julia', the White Album, and 'I Am The Walrus' with those lyrics, 'Boy, you been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down.' Even as a little kid, I knew those lyrics were a bit riske."
After running through the gamut of grunge and 70s' amped-up, arena rock, Cockerill returned to Lennon and started listening to what Lennon himself was fond of—artists like Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zant.
"My favourite period of Dylan is when he stared going electric. Bringing It All Back Home occurred the same time he was writing a bunch of poetry and Dylan realized he could put all that to music. Stuff like 'It's Alright Mom I'm Only Bleeding' is tip-top! From there I started to search out those poeple Dylan himself would have been into, like Johnny Cash, Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers."
His real foray into country music, though, began when he left Calgary for Toronto. "I was 18 and wanted to get out of here as fast as I could. But when I hit Toronto it seemed that nobody is actually from there, they come from all these other different places. This is something I've talked about with people not from there, and they felt the same as me in ways. I had no particular feeling about being Calgarian or being from here until I landed in Toronto, then country music and its culture and all that started to crawl out.
"I love Blue Rodeo, probably the first country band, if you could call them that, I really liked. So I started a folk-country band, The Suburban Banjos, and from there really got into the tradition.'
Even though he's still in his early 20s, Cockerill rubs elbows with some of Toronto's country heavy weights including Burke Carroll and David Baxter, impressing them enough to join his band. "What first opened up that door was hanging around my brother whose record was produced by David Baxter. This is where I meet a lot of respected players. I get asked sometimes 'How did you get these people in your band? You must write great songs?' Nah, I just hang out and drink in the right places, the rest takes care of itself."
Written By Brad Simm. Beatroute Magazine. August 2008