Sunshine Coast musician and composer Josh Searles flies to Spain next week for the creative adventure of a lifetime. Searles will spend the following six months studying six days a week at a university in the Mediterranean port city of Alicante, following his successful audition for the exclusive Masters Interpretation of Classical Guitar program there, which accepts only about a dozen students from around the world each year.
The remarkable thing is, the talented Gibsons resident just recently started playing the acoustic guitar again after virtually abandoning it for 20 years.
Searles, 40, grew up in a musical family in Owen Sound, Ont., studying piano and French horn. He started learning guitar when he was about 14. “My dad died when I was 20,” Searles said in an interview. “The last time I played guitar was at his memorial. I didn’t make any conscious decision to stop playing, but I just put it down after that.”
Searles started working as a composer and dance-club DJ/performer of electronic music, first as a solo artist and later with his brother, Ben, in the dubstep, bass-music duo Daega Sound. “Things really took off. I probably have 70 or 80 tunes now released on international labels around the world. We toured the States and Canada.”
But Searles said the demands of that career started to wear thin. “That industry has changed a lot in the last few years. As far as making money, it’s a pretty tough go,” he said. “There was a lot of stuff that came into it that wasn’t really my cup of tea.”
Searles, who’s lived in Gibsons for eight years, is also an avid mariner and ran a part-time water taxi business around the southern end of the Strait of Georgia, “which gave me a lot of time to think,” he said. “My goal in life is just to play music, whatever that looks like, however I can make a living out of that. I have no interest in being famous. I just want to make ends meet and do what I love and what my passion is.”
One day in January 2018, Searles spontaneously picked up a guitar and started playing and a new life-chapter opened up. “Since that day, everything seems to have fallen into place,” he said. “I was just so completely re-enchanted by the guitar, its simplicity, its sound and the feel, everything it was. It was like rediscovering myself, in a way.”
He managed to persuade Gibsons virtuoso Celso Machado to give him some lessons, and soon made contacts with other B.C. master players like Daniel Bolshoi and Ileana Matos, which led to the notion of formal study at an exclusive – and expensive – school, like that in Alicante.
“I leave January 7th,” said Searles. “I’m going to have to hit the ground running. But in some ways, it’s not hard for me to take this risk because I’ve been doing it all my life, risking everything for music.”
