Metric bassist Joshua Winstead has been with the band through all six of their recordings and now he’s stepping out for a solo effort that will be offered as a pay-what-you-want album through his website joshuawinstead.com. MMXX will release June 3rd via Royal Cut Records and Winstead made the record as an effort to establish his own unique voice and to explore dealing with racism as an empathetic person.
Winstead explains that “MM stands for Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., while the two X’s have a double meaning representing love and death. These two men loved you in different ways and fought for you in different ways, and they essentially died for the same reasons. Growing up as a biracial person, it was a deep and difficult thing to figure out what it means to be both black and white. The record among other things has a lot to do with coming to terms with racism and generally being an empathetic person.”
Winstead has a sweet, soulful voice and it’s partly because he missed singing that he made MMXX. “I grew up singing and I played in a number of rock bands where I was always a singer/guitar player. I realized that I really missed singing, and knew it was time to make an album.”
Today, we are sharing Winstead’s new video for “One Heart”, a sincere, uplifting slice of soulful pop, a feel-good song. Winstead says, “there are many things that can inspire a new song, ‘One Heart’ was inspired by the birth of a good friend’s daughter. As I held her for the first time, and I watched her parents work, it made me think of all the things she would encounter in her life. I looked at the song as a song or message to a sleeping child about her future. The term lover in the song is more in the sense of people who are not afraid to love.”