At nine months old, Josh Epstein used to hum in his crib. A prodigy? No, “just an infant that hummed”, he humbly clarifies. From little things big things grow, and now he is the lead singer of Detroit band called The Silent Years who have just released their third album The Globe.

Their new album is “about the universality of everything,” Epstein explains, “Everyone’s got these problems, and I’m not saying that one is more real than the other, but they’re both equally real to the person who’s experiencing them at the time. The really rich kid in Long Island who’s upset that he didn’t get a BMW for his 16th birthday and the really poor kid in Harlem who’s really upset that he didn’t get, you know, breakfast. They’re both really upset. And while you might say the latter example has the real conflict, they’re both real to those who are experiencing them and the person in Long Island has absolutely no clue in most instances that there’s someone else with a problem that’s greater than their own and that feeling of pain is very real.”
    
This kind of honest perspective and analysis is not new for Epstein, whose second album, Stand Still Like A Hummingbird focused on someone lost in America, searching for their place in the modern world. In comparing the two collections, Epstein muses: “Hummingbird is a little bit... younger. It was kind of like, I’m getting into college, trying to grow up and I don’t know what I’m doing. Versus recognizing that: this is what I’m doing and there’s all this going on everywhere. It’s actually going on everywhere in the world and everywhere in the universe”.

Epstein wrote The Globe with an arc from big to small “and then realized that it was all the same and mixed it up intentionally. “The reason I put the line in the first song ‘Microscopes and Telescopes End Up Showing the Same Thing’ is because that’s something that I realized after writing all the lyrics”. Although he feels that writing lyrics is different from writing poetry, the songs by The Silent Years are undeniably poetical. “I think that that’s in me. I enjoy writing poetry, I enjoy writing lyrics and expressing thoughts. I really think that it’s important. Otherwise I would prefer to be in an instrumental band. Some bands, talk about nothing.”

This difference, according to Epstein (who claims his biggest flaw is his tendency to take things too personally), is life experience: “The more experience you have the more you are able to put into a song, or the more options you have. Options are always good.” As far as new bands on the scene, the options seem to be endless. In trying to name his own influences, Epstein, who gushes a little over Andrew Bird when his name comes up, admits that there are “too many to count. I think we’re influenced by almost anything we hear. When it comes time to record and write an album we try really hard to not listen to anything for a while so that we’re not directly influenced by anything.” That is perhaps how they manage to maintain their own unique sound.  

“I don’t think that we set out intentionally to try to be different. I think what’s exciting is when you play something that sounds different. Someone could probably make a claim that everything sounds like something, just because there’s a finite number of notes and chords to play and combinations of them. But personally, what excites me is playing something and being really surprised at the fact that it sounds different.”

Even so, with so many deserving bands out there vying for attention, Epstein admits he doesn’t know how any achieve success.

“You know I thought about it for a really long time and it kind of stressed me out. I don’t know, if there’s a formula. I think some bands are just in the right place at the right time and in front of the right people. You know sometimes I think it has to do with where you’re from, like cities go through different times in the sun. I mean Detroit 15 years ago was that and maybe it will be soon. I think it should be because there a lot of bands in Detroit right now that I think are really good.”