DJ Ron Slomowicz: Where were you born?
Josh Harris: St Louis, Missouri.
RS: Growing up, did you have any musical training?
Josh: Yes, I did. I started taking classical piano lessons at age six.
RS: Did you also get involved with computers and stuff like that when you were growing up?
Josh: Yes, when I was about twelve or thirteen years old I started getting into synthesizers.
RS: Did you study music in college?
Josh: I went to a small school in Appleton, Wisconsin called Lawrence University where I got a Bachelor of Arts in music, with an emphasis in theory and composition. I continued studying classical piano while I was there as well.
RS: From St Louis and Wisconsin, how did you get to Nashville?
Josh: After I graduated from college and before I moved to Nashville, I llived in Chicago. I initially wanted to get into the jingle side of the music business, but after spending a few years in Chicago I realized that it really wasn't my scene. Although there’s some really talented guys doing it, I wanted to be more in a song-driven environment. Nashville seemed like a great next step because I didn’t feel ready to go to New York or LA at that point, around the end of ’96. When I was in Chicago I never really got as far as doing jingles, it was more hanging out and meeting people that were doing it and watching it. I spent a lot of my time in Chicago playing in bands and building up my studio and then learning the tech side of engineering and so forth.
RS: When you came to Nashville, what happened next?
Josh: When I got to Nashville I really wanted to focus on my songwriting and I had a pretty good studio so it was a great way for me to actually produce my own songs. Then, as I was there, I though it would be a good idea to get out and play live a little, to meet people. I started to meet a lot of people that weren’t really involved with country music and I got involved with Chris Mitchell and Linda Regan and started playing with them. I also got involved with the recording side as well with them, although Chris more so than Linda.
RS: So you're gigging with Chris Mitchell and Linda Regan, and then I’m guessing you started working on some of the dance stuff with Linda and then started working with Kristy Kay from there?
Josh: Yes, that’s where I met Kristy, she was singing backup for Linda. I’ve always been into dance music, sort of kicking it around but never worked on a project from beginning to completion. Chris’s group is very dance-driven and even though we worked on a CD, it was really more about the live show. So Kristy was really the first situation where I worked on a dance song that we would try to get signed to a label. Prior to working with her, I started visiting New York, going up here once a month for about a week throughout most of 2000. That’s when I met Doug Beck and the Soul Solution guys as well as my soon to be partner in the studio, Omar.
RS: Doug Beck, of Boris and Beck, right?
Josh: Yes, that’s correct.
RS: So you're in New York making contacts, meeting people, and while you are in Nashville you hook up with Kristy K, you do the amazing song “Who’s That Loving You Now?”
Josh: Right. As I was working with Kristy in Nashville, I knew that I wanted to move to New York. Everything was sort of geared towards getting here and right around the time that I moved here in March of 2001, our song got picked up by Universal. I believe Bruce Carbone signed it.
RS: That’s sort of like your introduction to New York.
Josh: Basically, yes. The interesting thing was that when I moved here I basically had all of my gear and about four or five bags of clothes and I crashed with a friend on the couch in Spanish Harlem for eleven months. I knew where I was going to work because Omar had been working with Ernie Lake and Bobby Guy of Soul Solution as their studio manager. We had agreed that we would set up a room together in that facility and see how things went. I knew I was going to have a place to work but there was really no game plan, was nothing set in stone. Then in my third week here, I met Mike Rizzo.
