Well, we didn’t mean for that to happen…

When we were playing John and Peter’s a couple weeks ago, on March 18th, only our second show of the year, we were having a blast and doing our thing. We followed our BFFs, The Extensions, who absolutely rocked their set with great energy. And the opener, Heavy Flow, set the stage for the night with their powerful brand of new grunge.

We were playing our second-to-last song, “Slayer Jazz,” which was getting a little wilder than usual. John often bends the neck and hammers on the body of the guitar to get extra sounds and distortions during his huge sustained chords (maybe the next guitar should have a whammy bar…).

At the show the night before, at Prototype in Paterson, he did this and most of his guitar strings dropped about a half step, so I had to scramble and find the new key. So this night, at J&Ps, he was about to do the same, and I looked at him and shook my head ‘no.’ He laughed and went to hit the guitar, but then lightly tapped it with his fist.

But then, he had to make up for this acquiescence after the sax-drum break down, with a rather unique re-entry… This was luckily captured on video, so, you can see what happened.

Anyway! With backup guitar in hand, we’ve got some upcoming shows we are very excited about! We’ll be returning to our favorite stomping grounds of Prototype and John & Peters next weekend, Friday 4/21 and Saturday 4/22 respectively. Then the following weekend we’ll be at Puck in Doylestown, PA on Saturday 4/29. More dates and info below!

• Friday, 4/21 – Protoype in Paterson, NJ, with The Extensions, Those Looks and RNA
• Saturday, 4/22 – John and Peter’s in New Hope, PA, with Alpha Rabbit, Lasso Kelly, and Brunswick
• Saturday, 4/29 – Puck, Doylestown, PA
• Friday, 5/5 – Pino’s in Highland Park, NJ
• Friday, 7/28 – Prototype
• Saturday, 7/29 – John and Peter’s

In a beautiful setting, there is fear of the unknown. Men with lanterns and pitchforks chase after a creature that may or may not be a monster. The video that Daphne Bacon and Cody Synder created to accompany “In Speaking Like Thunder” is a work that features beautiful cinematography and emotive direction. (Also love the donkey). We are so happy to (finally) share this with you all!

“In Speaking Like Thunder” comes from our 5th album, Unknown Cities, released in December of 2021 on Procrastination Records. We are currently working on a new record, and new pieces to perform in spring of 2023, looking forward to seeing you then!

We’re so thrilled that our music video for “Unknown City” won Best Animation, and was runner-up for Best Music Video, at Brighton Rocks Film Festival, July 2022!

Here is an updated list of shows for the rest of the year!

Aug 5—Baltimore, MD: Joe Squared
[Aug 6 in DC has been postponed]
Aug 19—Trenton, NJ: Mill Hill Basement
Aug 26—New Hope, PA: The Barn
Sept 10—Paterson, NJ: Prototype 237
Sept 23—New Hope, PA: John & Peter’s
Oct 8—Fair Lawn, NJ: Stosh’s
Oct 15—Boston, MA: Scorpio
Nov 10—TBA
Nov 11—New Hope, PA: John & Peter’s
Nov 12—Paterson, NJ: Prototype 237
Nov 18—Easton, MD: Stoltz
Dec 9—New Hope, PA: John & Peter’s

Our most recent release on Procrastination Records, States of America, is #45 on the rock charts of the Roots Music Report, two weeks in a row: Top 50 Rock Album Chart for the Week of Jul 2, 2022 | Roots Music Report

Dates in support of States below!

Thinking about the Vibe while thinking about touring this summer

The Vibe is still in my driveway.  It no longer runs, doesn’t even have a battery, but the roof box is still attached to the roof rack, and it is in this car that Joy on Fire has done much of its (packed-to-the-gills) touring.

The drum set that Chris had during the pre-Covid times he called his “Russian Doll Kit”—each smaller drum fit into a bigger drum, every drum fitting into the bass drum.

So, we were able to fit two saxophones, a bass, a guitar, the drums, clothes, food, etc, all into my Pontiac and hit the road!  (The mellotron we had to leave behind, but that’s a story for another day.)

We pull up in the Vibe to a gig in Winston-Salem, NC.  And there’s the band we’re going to be touring with, Bag of Humans, leaping Leaping LEAPING out of the back of their van, the smoke—willowing billowing clouds of pot smoke—enveloping them as they jump out.  Our friend Nick—who engineered and co-produced the first Joy on Fire album—and his partner in crime Jimmy: Bag of Humans!

“You came in the Vibe?” said Nick.

“Yeah, we came in the Vibe.”

“They came in the Vibe.”

“The Vibe, the vibe the Vibe, the vibe.”

(There is no mellotron.  We have yet to use mellotron on our albums.  But many of our influences—King Crimson, Miles Davis, Truly, Herbie Hancock—have used it.  A monstrous instrument, it’s the size of the Vibe itself!)

What is “the vibe”?  I’m no longer talking about my old car.  It doesn’t run anyway.  The vibe is what we created that night, at Test Pattern in Winton-Salem playing what our friend and the sound man there calls “cinema rock.”  Bag of Humans also has the vibe; they do the scary vibe—I remember Nick slowly crawling, slithering really, across a pool table at a gig in Maryland, like he was clawing into the felt of the table.  It took him two verses and a chorus to make it across—he was really digging in!

The Vibe broke down on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, after a gig at the Stoltz Listening Room at the Avalon Theater in Easton.  It was February.  It was 3am.  There was no Uber to be found at the time.  We huddled against the cold.  There’s more to this misadventure, but the question: was it worth it?  Well, it was a good show.  The Stoltz often features Americana, but we brought something different, a different vibe.  We ended up in Bear, Maryland, the next morning, eating breakfast at The Bear Café and renting a car to finish the tour, as the Vibe went up on a lift. Went down to Bear a few weeks later to retrieve the Vibe and pay the bill.

Joy on Fire will be touring in July and August—with local bookings into October and beyond—but, like I said, not with the Vibe.  We will certainly bring the vibe to our dates in Boston and Easton and Greensboro and Louisville, as well as to all our “local” shows in New Hope and Paterson and Trenton and Princeton but the vibe won’t be in the Vibe.  The Vibe, like I said, is still in my driveway, one call to the tow truck away from the graveyard.

We’re super excited to release our latest video and single, Happy Holidays!

The video for “Happy Holidays” was directed by Anna and me, and we were able to spin off some of Dan’s lyrical gambits, especially “A hood-up is not a phone booth / A phone rings inside a hood-up” as well as the repetition of “graveyards.”  We also spun off the spinning motion invoked in the main riffs of the tune. So the video, surreal and playful a la Spike Jonze’s days working with the Breeders and the Beastie Boys, has a lot of spinning in it — spinning cameras, spinning musicians (that’s us!), and people rolling down a hill in a cemetery (us again!). 

The video was filmed both outside of Washington, DC and in various spots in Trenton, New Jersey.  The busted up payphone that’s featured throughout the video is in Trenton, near band headquarters, and, well…what is it doing there?  The thing hasn’t worked in at least five years!, and the receiver — as seen in the video — is split in two.  I guess it was there waiting for us to film it!  It’s in front of a church of sorts — one of those somewhat ungainly urban buildings that calls itself a church — and as Anna and I were filming, some members of the congregation came out and told us we’d been there too long and that we had better head on out, pronto!  No problem, they came out just as we were wrapping up.

After the poet Dan Gutstein sent me the song “McFlurry” by British punktronika duo Sleaford Mods, I was inspired to write the riff for “Thunderdome”—the second track on our forthcoming LP States of America (June 11)—and I then contacted Dan, who wasn’t yet in Joy on Fire.  “Do you want to try some lyrics?” I asked in an email, after praising the Mods’ nutso live performance of their scathing and hilarious satire.

            This was in 2018, and Anna and I were in Princeton and Dan was in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC.  So, I drove down to DC with my amp in the trunk, my bass in the backseat, the riff for “Thunderdome” in my head, and headed to a bar in Petworth where Dan and some of the shady characters he associated with watched soccer—specifically the Welsh football club Swansea—on Saturday mornings.

            The place was called DC Reynolds.

            What a dive!  What a lovely dive!!  Dan’s cronies were artists and writers like Dan and myself, and they hung about like they owned the place.  In fact, the place opened early on Saturdays just for them to watch the Swans (not the band, the team).  It was like church!  (Again, not the band, nor the chicken joint.)  I got some funny looks upon arrival.  I was an intruder on the ritual, not a true aficionado.  Nonetheless, it was easy to get into the spirit of it all.  It was easy to get into the spirit of having your first pint at 11am.

            Swansea may have won that day, but even if they didn’t, let’s go with they did.  There was some songwriting to be done.

            It didn’t take long, that first song out of six that Dan and I wrote over the course of two weekends.  We’d stopped off for beer on the way from Petworth to his apartment in Adams Morgan, and when we got the gear and the beer up from my car, we plopped the gear down near the couch—Dan’s windows in that room looking out on The Washington Monument and toward Washington National Airport—and got to work.  As I looped the riff, Dan reworked some verses he had in a folder of poems and, when we came up a verse short for the structure I wanted, the decision to repeat the opening verse—now over a much heavier and harmonized version of the riff at this point in the song, “Mack Truck Jazz,” if you will—came easily and naturally.  Breaking the riff down to three notes to open the door for Anna’s wonderful extended solo came next, and there it was, “Thunderdome”!  (The title comes from the parodic reference in Dan’s refrain, “What’s love but a second-hand emoticon?”)

            Since completing the song, “Thunderdome” has been one of two pieces that JoF has played at every gig.  A “staple” as the lingo goes.  (Though, for some reason, that word bothers me.  I can’t help seeing a single physical Swingline staple, like the one I’m flicking off my desk as I write.)

            Our first songwriting session was not without interruption.  For one thing, we interrupted it about nine times to get another bottle of stout.  For another, there came a knock on the door.  Predictable shit, but whatever.  “Can you turn it down? It’s Saturday,” said the woman at Dan’s door, a young lady should have been much hipper; didn’t she know Washington DC was built by Minor Threat and the Bad Brains in 1982?  But, again, whatever, Dan was polite.  Until he noticed her feet.  “Nice slippers,” he said.  The woman was wearing bunny slippers.  Turn it up is more like it!

And in case you missed it, here is the video for “Anger and Decency,” which is a radical remix of both the song and video “Thunderdome”!

“Anger and Decency” is one of two tracks on our upcoming record States Of America (June 11) that interpolates and re-contextualizes the punk-funk riff and spoken word vocals of “Thunderdome”, a song originally premiered on Bob Boilen’s All Songs Considered.  Like “Thunderdome”, the video for “Anger and Decency” was done by Damien Davis.  Damien did wonderful work once again, especially in that, like the song itself, the video shares material with “Thunderdome” while transforming it into something fuller and wilder.  As Anna’s remix, subtitled “Waves Mix,” takes what was once rock’n’roll and turns it into lush electronica, Damien paints a picture of music as something beyond the auditory.  Beautiful sound and psychedelic overlayed imagery take Joy on Fire into new connections of visual and sonic territory!