Culture Cabinet

When a band that classifies its style as an ode to its background in “Jazz and Classical, Golden Age musicals, big bands of the ‘40s, singer-songwriters of the ‘60s, dewy indie rock of the early 2010s” comes across your desk, how can you not be intrigued? How could a band possibly pull off such an eclectic blend of sounds and make it sound coherent? 

Enter The Bygones: the eccentric duo of Joshua Lee Turner and Allison Young, whose debut self titled album, The Bygones, will release on April 4. 

The Bygones’ origins can be traced back to a simple collaboration between Joshua and Allison, when they covered Willie Nelson’s “Crazy.” The cover became a viral sensation, garnering the duo over 800,000 YouTube subscribers, and a fan base dedicated enough to raise over $57,000 on Kickstarter to produce their debut album. 

The album features twelve tracks, all written by Joshua and Allison, and include singles “Whatever That Is,” “If You Wanted To,” and “Glad,” which were released earlier this year. Given that Allison and Joshua were first introduced to each other virtually, the album is an ultimate testament to the shifting change in how music is not only produced, but discovered.

“I think both Allison and I have a kind of conflicted relationship with the way that music is discovered and disseminated these days,” Joshua explains in an interview with Culture Cabinet. “Obviously, I think we’re both kind of indebted to the new way of things because neither of us have industry connections. So, I mean, the very fact we’re able to discover each other because the likelihood that I would have come across Allison in Nashville, when I live here in New York City, is very low. So obviously, that is pretty irrefutable it’s great. I really like how easy it is to discover new musicians on on social media. And I think a lot of musicians do this, I use Instagram now kind of like a Rolodex. If something gets fed to me of a great new player, I follow that person. And it’s not like I just want to see all their content. It’s like, ‘Oh, I would like to work with this person in the future.’” 

While Allison and Joshua are not even located in the same city, hailing from Nashville and New York City respectively, the digital age of the way music is produced and created has worked to their advantage. 

“I think it was a blessing and a curse,” Joshua says. “Because most of what we’re doing, we’re just sending Voice Memos back and forth. And iPhone notes of lyrics and things like that. And one person would send a voice memo, and then the other person would iterate and send another voice memo back, and voice memo, and voice memo. And that is fine. It’s not the most efficient thing in the world. But it also does give a person a chance to kind of sit with something and send something back when they really have time to think about it. And so a lot of it was done kind of piecemeal. Then, right before we went into the studio, we had a couple of days to prepare. And there were a couple of gaps in songs where we knew we wanted them included, but didn’t have time to finish them or hadn’t found a way to get them done.”

The album itself somehow manages to achieve the exact sound that The Bygones are seeking. It’s an eclectic blend of indie folk, that feels heavily influenced by alternative indie bands of the 2010s, á la Belle and Sebastian or She & Him. Yet, as promised, there’s no limitation to one particular genre or sound. “Glad” almost feels like a more stripped down track by The Cranberries, and “Whatever That Is,” seems influenced by Simon and Garfunkel, which feels fitting, given that Joshua was previously toured with a Simon and Garfunkel tribute band. 

“I’m still relatively new to writing songs, generally speaking,” he says. “Most of my career has been built on playing covers, which is still what the vast majority of my YouTube channel is.  And it’s what a lot of people know me for. So, it took a long time for me to kind of stumble into a type of songwriting that worked for me. And what I’ve found over the course of the last four or five years has been that just basically writing the truest to life, things that I can possibly think of tend to be the things that people other people find to be the most emotionally resonant. So, I have very emotional attachment to everything that I write, because it’s all true, and it’s all stuff that I’m experiencing, or have experienced, or I’m processing.” 

With an upcoming tour that is already sold out in multiple locations, including additional stops opening for The Wood Brothers, the success of The Bygones is all but certain. But for now, Joshua is just content with the chance to be able to put this album out in the universe. 

“I don’t think I get to decide what people take away from us as a band. I mean, I hope that people come away wanting more, and I think that we’ve we’ve opened a lot of doors for ourselves creatively with this album. And so I hope that we can gain an audience that isn’t just indie rock people, and it isn’t just folk people. I hope that for a band, we can we can make kind of a big tent basically because Alison and I are just like, really stoked about a lot of different types of music and we try and bring that out in the original stuff that we’re doing and so whatever we as a band can do to make like kind of a kind of a big tent.”

If this album is any indication of that goal, then I believe it’s safe to say we can expect much out of The Bygones. 

You can stream The Bygones below. Their debut album, The Bygones, is out April 4.