JOY ON FIRE is proud to announce the rerelease of THREE RED CROWNS’ debut album on PROCRASTINATION RECORDS and would like to thank Tommy Hambleton of PROCRASTINATION for putting the album back out into the world.
Three Red Crowns is a group that Anna and I started in 2011.
The group began with a simple three-note riff. I tried to develop the part with an early (the second) incarnation of Joy on Fire, but it wasn’t taking flight as I’d imagined with JoF’s three-piece instrumentation. Thus, the idea of adding a string quartet to the trio was born, and so was a new group.
A rough go at first. I was naïve enough to think there was a string quartet ready and waiting for us at Peabody – the conservatory Anna was attending at the time – raring to go on this new material. And also naïve enough to think this imaginary quartet would be able to pick up the music by ear, sans sheet music.
So this was my introduction to the world of scored music, and it took some time and trial and error to find the right musicians for the group. When we did, we ended up with some very wonderful people, including Domenica Romagni, Ruby Fulton, Martha Morrison, Caleb Johnson, Rob Parrish and Rajni Sharma. When Three Red Crowns was ready to record, Ruby introduced us to Mat Leffler-Schulman at Mobtown Studios, and we have since worked with him on three other albums—two Joy on Fire albums, and the second Three Red Crowns album.
The first Three Red Crowns piece, “Cells and Gates,” was a collaboration between Anna and I, where, as she scored some of the structural ideas I had, she took the harmonic and melodic development much further than I had envisioned. I was enthralled! I learned a lot from seeing and hearing what she did with the development—a lesson that informs my writing, collaborations, and Joy on Fire’s music to this day.
Anna—as many of you reading know—is a composer studying Music Composition at Princeton. Two of her earliest pieces, composed while still at Peabody—“Third Crown” and “In the Right Light”—are on Three Red Crowns’ debut. She has grown as a composer since then, and has developed many new ideas and worked with many instrumentations since, but I still think these pieces are wonderful.
This album also marks our first collaboration with a singer and lyricist—Rajni Sharma—and the piece she sings on, “Second Crown,” which closes with the line “In this light, rebirth” sung in Punjabi (“ਇਸ ਹਲਕੇ ਪੁਨਰ ਜਨਮ ਵਿਚ”), remains one of my favorite collaborations with Anna (she has two very good solos on baritone sax in the piece, and improved the first violin part greatly) to this day.
Though Chris, Joy on Fire’s drummer, wasn’t in JoF at the time, he has played on two Three Red Crowns pieces: “World Systems,” which became a Joy on Fire song, appearing on 2018’s Fire with Fire (featuring Shelly Purdy on vibraphone); and “Spring Song,” as of yet unrecorded.
