JOE MCGOWAN

Joseph Wilson McGowan, IV is an American singer-songwriter and pianist who released his debut Americana album, Dirt Road Revival, in 2016 under his own independent label. Music offered the perfect healing adjunct to his already thriving medical career. While it was a leap of faith for him, he realized “it was undeniably the missing piece to finally feeling like myself and a much-needed canvas for self-expression.”

Then in 2021, McGowan reprised with The Good Life—combining soulful Americana with evocative cinematic ballads and an intentional vintage Billy Joel vibe. 

McGowan was born into a very musical family—his grandmother was an opera singer and both of his parents were piano virtuosos. As a child, Joe remembers, “melodies just [kept] pouring out of me, for as long as I can remember.”   He describes an intrinsic desire to compose, create and escape through piano improvisation—something that felt “intuitive and reflexive, while also haunting and compulsory.” 

By age 3 years, Joe was already playing the piano by ear, with formal lessons to come soon thereafter. And while he was mesmerized by the dazzling showstoppers of Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, Joe was bored by the “predictable, formulaic works of Bach, Mozart and Haydn.” In fact, Joe exhausted quite a catalog of piano teachers, all incensed by his tendency to transpose, improvise and embellish his assignments. “I was a rebel,” McGowan says, “and I guess I didn’t want my teachers to control that creative part of me that was mine.”

During high school, McGowan attended the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts, under the instruction of his piano teacher, Dr. Anthony Lenti.

DR. JOE

After graduating, life took a turn for soon-to-be Dr. Joe, who excelled in medical school, and then completed a residency in dermatology and fellowship in Mohs Micrographic Surgery and Cutaneous Oncology. “I’m a fixer, so it made sense that surgery was my niche.”

When asked about his day job, McGowan admits, “I guess I always wanted to heal and help others … I felt a natural calling to be a doc."

McGowan says when his patients ask, “Dr. McGowan, is your music just a hobby?” he replies, “No, it’s a little more complicated than that.” 

While in training, McGowan started experimenting with lyric writing, and while living in New York City, he recorded his first album, Dirt Road Revival, with the help of his producer Michael Lewis Levey. 

RECORDING ARTIST

When asked about a specific genre, McGowan describes his music as “more thematically Americana than stylistically—I can’t really say I totally fit into the Americana prototype … but then again, I’ve always been annoyingly nonconformist.” He adds, “each song seems to become an experiment with melodies, words and production techniques. I’m lucky to have my good friend and producer Michael Lewis Levey to provide a suitable sonic landscape to enhance the message I want to deliver.”

While drawing from various stylistic genres, Dirt Road Revival and his latest release, The Good Life, represent a crossover of vintage or “alternative retro pop” and soulful Americana. “It’s impossible to classify my music,” McGowan says, “there’s way too much going on … and I’m unfortunately verbose.”

NEW ALBUM : THE GOOD LIFE

Undercurrent echoes of early Elton John, Billy Joel and Ray Charles undeniably permeate McGowan’s music; however, melodic piano motifs draw from his early classical inspiration—specifically Rachmaninoff and Chopin—and a deep love for John Williams’ movie scores which he says “are melodically engraved on my heart because of the memories they evoke”. 

This “melodic nostalgia”—as McGowan describes it—appears most prevalently in the first track on The Good Life, “1982”—which is “supposed to be a soundtrack with words … an homage to my hero John Williams [and] a lyrical sequel to E.T.” McGowan recounts the vivid memory of attending E.T., the Extraterrestrial, when he was 4 years old, accompanied by his father. “I think there’s a certain sentimental pride that my fellow 40ish-year-olds and I share to describe in words what it was like to see that movie in the theatre when it first came out, or [furthermore] what it’s like to see reruns and feel like a kid again during the bike scene”.

“The Good Life”—the title track—is intentionally evocative of a Frank Sinatra-esque, Big Band vibe. McGowan wanted to tell his personal struggle with self-sacrifice in his personal relationships— “I wanted to let the past be the past … [as seen] through a cloudy, sort of antique lens … and paint a hopeful picture of the future.” McGowan attributes his producer, Michael Lewis Levey, adding “Mikey totally nailed it!” 

McGowan wrote “A Song for the Mockingbird” in June of 2020 while in pandemic-stricken New York City. Stylistically, McGowan and Levey collaborated to combine lyrical imagery and a sonic landscape of a near-apocalyptic, desolate New York. Pipe organ and a 16-part chorale harmony were used to capture the essence of Westminster Abbey. McGowan considers this track a “sort of hopefully unnecessary requiem for humanity” in which he exposes the hypocrisy of “A Song for the Mockingbird” lullaby from the perspective of a parent to an honest representation of life. McGowan intentionally chose the very dark and dreary Eb-minor (relative D#-minor) key signature “to convey solemnity and realistic melodrama” reminiscent of two of his favorite piano works—the Rachmaninoff Élégy (Op. 3, No. 1) from the Suite Morçeaux de Fantasie and the beastly Scriabin Prélude in D# minor (Op. 8, No. 12: Patético). Producer Michael Lewis Levey contemporized and brightened the track using Beatles-style production motifs with the Rhodes and a slightly untuned vintage Steinway upright piano to balance the pipe organ. While seemingly incongruous and unpredictable in many respects, both men consider this to be their finest work. 

“The Good Life,” McGowan says, “is the story of landing back on my own two feet after failing miserably repeatedly throughout my life. I guess we all felt a little struggle and desperation this year… but the key to enjoying a good life, even during chaos, is not feeling guilty about the ways in which we fail, or the ways in which we may falsely present ourselves. We get the chance to do it better, bigger, brighter and more vibrantly every day. So the failure was really just a myth…an illusion. It never really happened. It’s all a fat piece of chocolate cake called LIFE.”