Ten minute tea with Afternoon Tea. Spend ten minutes with Afternoon Tea. In the time it takes to boil one kettle, and let one cup of tea steep, we will have your daily art + music fix covered. Take your afternoon break with our Afternoon Tea curators. Need an extra lump of sugar? One more sip? If you have five minutes more (or ten), we have one more hit.
Today’s tea + soundtrack + visuals curated by Joshua Joyce.
Toronto-based singer-songwriter Joshua Joyce has released his debut album, A Tender & Violent Nature – a collection of poetic, melancholic, and soul-searching folk songs exploring the tension between past and present, tenderness and turmoil. Anchored by the stirring focus track “High Tide,” Joyce‘s first full-length effort marries literate songwriting with sparse, cinematic arrangements.
From the dusty edges of Americana to the windswept intimacy of alt-country, A Tender & Violent Nature explores the uneasy dualities that define us. “It’s a record about provenance, about forgiveness, about making peace with what and where you come from,” Joyce explains. “Sand and gravel, so to speak.”
Written during a particularly introspective period in 2024, “High Tide” was the very first song penned for the album, and laid the thematic groundwork for what would follow. “In the interest of keeping things fun and sexy, I had a few months where I’d been thinking quite a lot about dying,” Joyce says with a wry smile. “‘High Tide‘ is what fell out of those inquiries.”
The song balances lonesome lyricism with warm fiddle lines performed by Ellen Daly, resulting in what Joyce describes as “the feeling of getting very bad news while looking at a rather pretty sunset.” Producer Rylan Smirlies helped shape the track’s sparse, atmospheric arrangement – allowing space for acoustic guitar, humming chorus vocals, and Daly‘s fiddle to create emotional resonance without overproduction.
Stream + share A Tender & Violent Nature feat. “High Tide” in full:
For fans of raw storytelling and finely-crafted folk music, A Tender & Violent Nature marks the arrival of an artist who understands the weight of a quiet moment and the beauty of laying one’s burdens down in melody. If you like your music bittersweet, reflective, and full of lived-in wisdom, Joshua Joyce‘s debut is essential listening.
One piece of music: “Colorado Girl” by Townes Van Zandt:
One visual:
Type of tea: “Les Rois Mages”, Black Tea with Cinnamon
I’m not exactly a young man anymore, and I’ve moved around enough to know that I’m a city person, and big cities most especially. There’s nothing about a big city that I find overwhelming—if anything, I think the chaos that accompanies city life matches the pacing and stylings of my inner subjectives, as it were. All of this is to say that I’m most certainly not a cowboy, though I occasionally find myself wishing that I was, or even that I really wanted to be, if that makes sense. Maybe if I was a cowboy I could write something as stunningly and stupidly beautiful as “Colorado Girl”, which is a piece of music I feel contains every emotion I know and then a few more that I’ve yet to learn about.
Given my propensity for talking too much, I am deeply envious of artists who can say a lot without saying much at all, and that’s how I feel about Townes Van Zandt. “Colorado Girl” is a simple little three chord ditty that just so happens to be the perfect Sunday morning meditation on love, longing, and feeling lonesome. Similarly, that’s why I chose this piece by Matt McCormick to accompany it—much like the song, the painting is about what isn’t there, rather than what is.
Why is it sometimes the things we aren’t that appeal to us so? That’s something I’ll be noodling on for long after the tea is gone. Speaking of, I drink coffee in the morning but I am fond of the occasional cup of tea in the afternoon, usually something black and spiced like this box of “Les Rois Mages” from Compagnie Coloniale.
Tea + Me 