There’s something quietly powerful about watching a musician pick up a red telephone on a bridge and simply talk. No studio, no PR spin, no crowd. Just a voice, a moment, and the hum of the city behind them.

That’s the beauty of A View From A Bridge, Joe Bloom’s project that strips away the layers of fame to reveal the human underneath. It’s part street performance, part social experiment, part confessional booth, and, lately, it’s been giving us some of the most honest conversations in music, arts and culture.

Beyond the Spotlight

Recent features have seen Simon from Biffy Clyro, Sir Paul Smith, David Byrne, Kae Tempest, Kojey Radical, Self Esteem, Myles Smith and Sebastian Murphy of Viagra Boys all step up to the bridge. Each one brings something different, exhaustion, curiosity, gratitude, doubt.

These aren’t interviews. They’re reflections. The bridge becomes a space where artists can speak freely, no script, no headline to serve. Just raw thought, spoken into the void.

When Sebastian Murphy opens up about substance abuse, and Self Esteem reflects on potential motherhood and menopause, you hear a shared pulse of struggle, questioning, and self-reflection, themes often woven subtly through their music.

Music in Its Most Human Form

A View From A Bridge feels musical in itself, the timing, the pauses, the tone. There’s rhythm in the hesitations and honesty in the silences. Joe Bloom’s camera doesn’t rush; it listens. It gives the same respect we give to a song we truly love, space to breathe.

The setup might look simple, an old red telephone on a bridge, but it’s deceptively profound. Like an acoustic performance stripped of production, it exposes the voice beneath the noise.

This echoes performance theorist Richard Schechner’s notion that performance is both “restored behaviour” and living presence, an act that replays the self while revealing something unrepeatable (Schechner, 2003). On the bridge, each call becomes a new kind of performance, one where the audience witnesses authenticity in real time.

Between Sound and Self

What Joe captures is what we at Resona are always chasing, that emotional frequency that exists between sound and self. These calls aren’t about fame or aesthetic; they’re about resonance. About how music shapes how we see ourselves, and how artists make sense of the world when the spotlight fades.

Bloom’s project also resonates with psychologist Carl Rogers’ ideas around authentic expression and congruence, the alignment between who we are and how we present ourselves (Rogers, 1961). The bridge becomes a literal and metaphorical crossing point between the constructed persona and the genuine self.

Each voice becomes part of a collective composition, a sonic portrait of what it means to be creative, vulnerable, and alive in public.

Resona’s Take

In a landscape crowded with performance, A View From A Bridge feels like an exhale, a reminder that conversation can be just as expressive as a song. It bridges the gap (if you pardon the pun) between artist and audience, star and stranger, performance and presence.

Joe Bloom’s project reminds us of something simple yet profound, that artists, creatives, and musicians are everyday people. They walk the same streets, feel the same doubts, and experience the same moments of beauty and uncertainty as the rest of us. Beneath the spotlight, they’re human, and that’s exactly what makes their voices resonate.

Check out this series of shorts, you’ll find yourself lost for a good few hours!

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