Stagefrightened and Enlightened

[March 30th, 2005] "If I had my way, I would never perform at all," Josh Hodges explains. Watching the 25-year-old fidget nervously while sitting at the Hollywood Bowl snack bar, it's not hard to imagine why.

The only concerts Hodges can remember enjoying are the imaginary ones from his youth. While playing the family piano, he would pretend he was performing on an alien planet for a species that had never heard music before. "So no matter what I played it was amazing to them."

Despite Josh's hang-ups, Sexton Blake (named after a turn-of-the-century fictional British detective, a trashier version of Sherlock Holmes) performs seamlessly together in front of human audiences. Hodges' shyness is a part of his onstage persona, and it plays to his advantage. He sings quietly, staring out just above the crowd while right-hand man Ryan Bjornstead tries his best to steal the spotlight. Bjornstead switches between keyboards, guitar, turntables and an old AM radio, creating a thick layer of sound behind Hodges' guitar while Ryan Dobrowski (drums) and Tom Homolya (bass) tether the music's tightly woven rhythms.

A Sexton Blake show is an exercise in closely controlled madness. The musicians are best when working within the confines of Hodges' tightly constructed songs. When they lose that control, and try to "rock out," things get a little awkward. Elaine-dancing-at-the-office-party awkward.

Most of the band's material is drawn from Hodges' debut solo album, also called Sexton Blake. The songs on the album run the gamut from sad, roaming, bass-driven ballads to very danceable electro-pop numbers. Instead of being a disjointed mess, though, the songs on Sexton Blake ebb and flow nicely, with Josh's hushed vocals tying the material together.

He wrote the songs after returning from a trip abroad, in which he "haphazardly" went around the world after a friend bought him a ticket to Thailand. It was there that a fellow traveler told him about Vipassana, a 2,500-year-old Asian meditation technique. Despite his skepticism, he enrolled in the free course, which, among other regulations, prohibits students from masturbation, drugs, alcohol and lying.

Hodges credits Vipassana for making him feel more at ease than he had ever felt in his life. When he returned to New York, he immediately began to write new material. "It was natural," he says of the songwriting process for the album. "It was just totally what was inside me."

Hodges, who moved to Portland last fall, still has reservations whenever he receives praise for Sexton Blake. "I don't know if I like it as much as other people do," he says, still fidgeting. "I feel like it's a hump to get over, and then maybe there is some good stuff after that."