My name is Joseph. I am a drummer, a kindergarten teacher and a photographer. As a teenager I dreamed of becoming a rockstar and traveling the world, playing music. I also fancied the idea of becoming a music journalist. I’ve always been a decent writer and I love music, so I thought it’d be fun marrying the two: interviewing musicians, attending concerts, and sharing my thoughts on the latest albums.

I formed Will Not Fade during my time at university in 2014. It was slow going to begin with, but eventually I gained momentum. I taught myself some basic skills required for running a blog, figured out the nuances of various social media platforms, and picked up photography so that I could add a visual component to the website. It still blows me away that people from all over the globe choose to spend their time reading my reviews.

One of the major highlights that have come from running WNF was when I spent some time traveling in America in 2017. I reached out to some of the musicians I’d been in contact with to see if they’d like to meet up while I was in their country. CJ Blessum invited me on tour with his band Ranges. I took on the role of roadie/photographer/tour blogger as we spent two weeks on the road. It was one of the best things to ever happen to me. I met some amazing people on that tour and at dunk!fest, many of whom I still consider my close friends.

I don’t write as much these days, choosing instead to focus my energy on other projects like my own bands and booking gigs for local artists.

I am not taking submissions at this stage. I am available for photography services if your band wants to do a shoot though.

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Will Not Fade can also be found on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Some examples of photography can be found on Flickr.

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AI statement (July 2026): The writing on this site is genuine, written by people. Most of the content on the site predates AI, so that is obvious enough, but I promise you that I take pride in my work, so I have no desire to pass off soulless AI generated writing as my own.

I understand that technology is a tool, and isn’t inherently good or bad. I’ve used voice-to-text in the past to transcribe interviews (pre-AI era), saving me a lot of time. I never thought this was unethical or undermined my integrity.

Likewise, photos taken by Joseph James are usually edited using Adobe Lightroom, which now uses AI for features like denoising and masking, and Adobe is pushing for more and more AI features that are getting harder to avoid if you use their programs. It appears that this will fast become unavoidable.

It is frustrating to see more and more companies taking this route. Google searches are less reliable now and prone to providing misinformation. Microsoft operating systems are insufferably bad. Most “customer service” are bots that can’t find actual solutions. And they’re chewing up more resources and reducing jobs to provide worse service. The world doesn’t need an AI powered toasters.

There are ongoing debates about the ethics of AI. These machines are built on data fed to them without the consent or awareness of most of the people who created the data. Our photos are fed into the machine to train privacy-nightmare facial recognition software that gets abused by law enforcement. Art gets fed in, that gets churned out as piss-yellow slop posters full of mistakes, which will ultimately lead to the demise of graphic designers who first created the art that was fed into the machine. The Atlantic recently ran an exposé about how the AI machine has scraped millions of songs for data, without permission from the musicians who wrote and recorded the music. AI corporate lobbyists around the world are spending big bucks trying to buy off politicians, enticing them to relax or undermine copywrite laws. And then we have the environmental nightmare of the data centres – which churn through untold amounts of electricity and water, polluting the local area.

My overall policy is to celebrate human creativity and craftmanship. Just as I prefer to see full bands with musicians playing live, rather than backing tracks and pre-programmed music, I also want to see gig posters, band logos and album art created by designers and artists.

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Joseph with Evan Weiss AKA Into It. Over It. at The Rev in Melbourne Live Review: Into It. Over It. at The Rev, Melbourne, Album Review: Into It. Over It. – Standards