Josh Urban is on the search for good in the world, and this Friday, May 31, he’ll be looking for it in Charlottesville. His stop is part of the Josh Urban Rail Tour, also known as “The Search for Good Tour-finding those who rock the world,” which involves playing music (a mix of blues, rock, and pop) on street corners and places where it’s seldom played, like children’s hospitals and veterans’ centers. At 3pm he’ll begin playing at the UVA Cancer Center, and later move to the Downtown Mall before he catches the train to the next stop on his east coast tour.
The idea behind the tour is to change our narrative about the world we live in by seeking out and highlighting the good. Urban encourages people to follow the tour online and to share their own stories and photographs, tagging them with the hash tag #JURT (Josh Urban Rail Tour). A one-man music show from Washington, DC, he first developed the idea of sharing the stage with the audience and their own stories in 2012 when he launched his Interactive Rail Tour. In his words from his blog last year, “It’s the world-on tour.” But this time the focus, the theme, is finding the good in and around our own lives, in our own communities. It’s about making art and using it to connect, in person and through social media, with each other’s stories. He writes, “At the end of the tour, I’ll be collecting all of the media generated, and assembling it into a big collage of all the good that’s been found.”
Friday 5/31, 3pm. UVA Cancer Center, 1300 Jefferson Park Ave, 6th floor. 924-9333.