By Meltdown
I caught up with Josh Katz, the frontman for Badflower, and what started as a standard interview quickly turned into something deeper. As Josh put it, “This is truly therapy for me. I haven’t found the right therapist… so doing all of these is actually really good.”
That raw honesty pretty much sums up the vibe of Badflower’s new album, No Place Like Home, which drops this Friday.
“I tried really hard for it to be therapeutic,” Josh told me. “And I had moments of it… like on ‘Pause’ or ‘What’s the Point’—there was a lot of crying and emotional tension released. But overall it was more difficult than ever.”
We got into that creative wall artists hit when success starts to cloud the hunger. “There’s never a point where you’re like, ‘I’ve made it, now I can just chill,’” he said. “It doesn’t exist.”
Josh talked about working with producer Nick Raskulinecz for the first time. “I had produced the last album myself… but I just didn’t have the confidence. So we brought Nick in to help jumpstart it… and then toward the end, I kind of took it back and was like, thanks Nick, I’m gonna do this my way again.”
Fun fact: Nick’s family saw Badflower open for Incubus and told him, You’ve gotta work with this band.
We also talked about dogs, grief, and one gut-punch of a song—“Paws.” Josh lost his dog Maggie, which hit him hard. “I don’t think I’ll do another one for a very long time,” he said. I brought up Chris Stapleton’s “Maggie’s Song” and Josh was floored. “I didn’t know someone else wrote a song about a dog named Maggie.”
Beyond the emotional heaviness, there’s storytelling on this record too. “‘Don’t Be a Stranger’ is one of my favorites,” he said. “I like to tell stories.”
And yes, the track “Detroit” finally made it onto a record. “That’s right,” Josh smiled.
Josh now lives on a 21-acre farm outside of Nashville with horses and—get this—ten cats. “We have a family here who boards horses, a lot of them are retired movie horses… I honestly don’t know how many are here. Somewhere between 8 and 10.”
As for the title track? “It just felt right. It sets the mood. There’s no other song on the album like it, but it sets the tone for where I’m at.”
No big concept here—just a deeply personal collection of songs written in a chaotic time.
Badflower’s gearing up for shows with 311 this summer and Three Days Grace in the fall. They’ll be mixing in new tracks along the way, but no big headline tour just yet. “We’re supporting, so we can’t do the big album release tour—but we’re excited to play some of it live.”
No Place Like Home is out this Friday—and yeah, they’re skipping the dog for now.
