The path of a musician has always been a bit like jumping off into the unknown. Sometimes, if you are lucky, a moment comes along that grants clarity. Songwriter and music maker, Joel Dobbins, had such a moment last year. After a two-hour set of just him alone playing his original songs, at the Solid Rock Café in Chalfont, Pennsylvania, he left the stage with doubt in his mind, “There were only a handful of people there that night. It was as ordinary a performance as there ever could be. After the show, this older woman started talking to me. Somehow, after only a couple minutes of conversation, I was telling her about my uncertainties about the future and about the doubts that I struggle with. She smiled at me and said, “I’m 80 years old, and I still struggle with that stuff. It never goes away; I’m just thankful we don’t have to be perfect!” I was worrying more than usual that night about where I was headed in life and how I was going to get there, and here was this woman four times my age taking the time to stand in the middle of a coffee shop less than two hours from midnight, telling me not to worry. As we were walking to our cars, I said, probably for the first time in my life, “I don’t think I ever got your name.” She opened the door to her car and said, “My name is Barbara Miracle.” I was blown away. She had definitely been the miracle I needed that night.”

With three older siblings, ranging from two to twelve years older than him, Joel was the baby of the family. “I was born in Cherry Point, North Carolina, but my family moved to Brunswick, Maine a year and a half later because my papa was in the Navy at the time. In my preadolescent years, I seemed to be able to hear where songs were going, pick up the melody, and sing along before the song was through. I would sing for church and school. One day I was talking to some people after I had finished who said I sang in key very well. I can remember pretty specifically being confused and saying, ‘I thought everyone could sing in key.’ That was the first time I began to realize that not everyone had the same relationship with music that I had.”

“In Maine, my father retired from the Navy after 21 years of service when I was around five. I went to a private Christian school for Kindergarten, was home-schooled for first grade, tested into third grade the next year, and continued from third to sixth grade in private school. During sixth grade, I went from being a straight-A student to simultaneously falling behind in all my subjects. I was suffering with a huge amount of pain. It turned out that it was due to flat feet and something called fibromyalgia. One of the hardest things to understand is why God allows suffering, but what I grew up hearing, and what I know to be true from my own experience, is that times of pain allow us to grow in ways that times of pleasure never could.”

“From seventh grade to graduation I was home-schooled again. Through my teenage years, one of my greatest loves was music. I picked up the guitar at 11, and figured out just about everything I could possibly do with it, but put it down. Because I was home-schooled, I was able to speed through my work and spend a lot of time learning music, as well. I started playing electric guitar with my church’s music team when I was 12 or 13.. I graduated at 16, and it was around that time I began songwriting. I’ve learned just about everything I know from watching and listening to other people. My mama tried to teach me piano when I was pretty young. She was a good teacher; I was just a bad student. I do want to learn to read music. Musically, that’s probably what I most need to improve upon.”

After graduation, Joel went to visit his sister, Leigh Anne, in Pennsylvania. “She had recently given birth to her second daughter, and half-jokingly invited me to come live with her in Pennsylvania and help baby-sit the girls. Later that summer, the idea started weighing more and more heavily on my heart until through a few crazy coincidences and miraculous events, it became very clear that I needed to go.” He says, “When I moved to Pennsylvania, I continued to look for ways I could play music, although, at the time, all I wanted was to join a band and tour the world. I never thought I would be making all my music myself, and I never realized that I would love it so much. I remember some of the first stuff I recorded was laughed at. The first time I ever recorded was as half of an acoustic duo. A while later, the little duo dissolved, and I started recording on my own. A couple of months later, I recorded my first project, ‘Fishing For Piranhas’.”

Joel is now promoting his next album, lending his smooth vocals to his melodic melodies, “I want my music to be everyone’s music. I want people who wear cowboy hats and people who wear tight pants and people who wear baggy hoodies to all find something enjoyable in it. I would describe my music as ‘something you might definitely like’.” He adds laughing, “Especially if you listen to enough of it.”

“My dreams and my desires are mine for a reason. If I don’t chase them down and use them to their fullest potential, I have ignored not only my gifts, but the Giver as well. No one who hears me play can deny that music is my gift. Birds fly, fish swim, and I make music.”