DISRUPTING THE MINDSET OF COMMONPLACE APATHY: JOY ON FIRE’S “WEEKDAY AVE.”

Behold “Weekday Ave.” I sometimes consider it to be the jewel of Joy on Fire’s hard-charging (and mildly charting) 2022 album States of America. Your humble blogger served as lyricist and vocalist for said album, and as you might imagine, Dear Reader, I brought some poetry to the mix. In this regard, you might detect echoes of Robert Hayden and Paul Celan. See below for those details, as well as the full lyrics, but first let’s have a look “under the hood” at the fabulous musicians who provide “Weekday Ave.” with its formidable pulse.

Songwriter and guitarist / bassist John Paul Carillo directs the highly textured musical expedition of “Weekday Ave.” — one that seamlessly enters a variety of idioms. The song burns low-medium (or straight up the middle) with some notable climbing action. While JPC may describe the overall sound of Joy on Fire as “punk jazz,” this piece resists category. Ultimately, “Weekday Ave.” offers a potent urban elegy, but not without the energetic stripe of optimism that courses through the band’s catalogue.

Enter saxophonist Anna Meadors, who displays enviable versatility throughout. She doubles the vocals, chants in opposition to the vocals, and confers the sort of lyrical statement on saxophones (alto and bari) that endows the song with most of its emotional content. (She also audio-engineered the proceedings, including the addition of some synth keyboards.)

Drummer Chris Olsen delivers propulsive, off-kilter percussion, which amply contradicts the typical enervated rhythms found, these days, on a typical American weekday avenue.

The outro is sheer magic, and owes to John’s guitar communicating with psychedelic themes as well as futuristic content. It should be retroactively added to the sci-fi flick Blade Runner.

As for the lyrics, they are mostly original, but borrow from two twentieth century poets.

If you know Robert Hayden’s masterpiece “Those Winter Sundays,” then you might recall the phrase “weekday weather” as it applies to the speaker’s father, whose hands cracked selflessly during manual labor in just such climatology. From there, I arrived at “Weekday Ave.” — the typical American thoroughfare capable only of generating “glassy condos,” “cute t-shirts,” and symbolic outrage during a crisis. The enjoyable play between “Weekday Ave.” and “weekday haven’t you” ensued straightaway.

I drew a little more from post-Holocaust European poet Paul Celan, whose lines “Die Welt ist fort // ich muß dich tragen” (“The world is lost // I must carry you”) ring outward from his 1967 collection, Atemwende, or Breath-Turn. I invert and jumble these thoughts, with the singer (me) requiring the burden of being carried. Much of everything returns to love, and the inward turn we all take, when we lose someone. While Celan may have intended his lines to read with centripetal gravity, the genius of his language may reside in its elasticity — and universality.

As John’s outro proceeds, the concept of feeling inwardness springs forth. I suppose there is a difference between inwardness and feeling inwardness. The way there is a difference between “Weekday Ave.” and “weekday haven’t you.” The way we might trip along, numbly, without forming “a thinker’s word.” 

The lyrics follow below. States of America can be heard and purchased [here]. As always, Dear Reader, we urge you to don sensible attire, alter your mindset responsibly, and hardly resist when your body begins to move without any inhibitions. Oi.

     Weekday Ave.


     Scream, a siren
     The scream alone
     “O” of outrage
     & secondhand time

     [Chorus:]
     Weekday Ave.
     Or weekday haven’t you?
     Weekday Ave.
     Weekday Ave.
     Weekday Ave.
     Or weekday haven’t you?

     Yeah! / Yeah!

     Glassy condos
     & cute t-shirts
     Never require
     A thinker’s word

     [Chorus]

     Da-da da-da! // You must carry me
     Da-da da-da! // The world is lost
     Da-da da-da! // And if the world is lost
     Da-da da-da! // I feel inwardness!

     [Da-da da-da! + Chorus]

     I feel inwardness […]


     personnel

     John Paul Carillo: bass guitar, electric guitar, songwriting
     Anna Meadors: Vocals, alto sax, bari sax, sound engineering
     Chris Olsen: Drums, percussion
     Dan Gutstein: Lyrics, vocals

     “Weekday Ave.” & States of America appeared on Procrastination Records (2022). 

JOY ON FIRE RELEASES AN ALBUM -- STATES OF AMERICA -- THAT WILL THROTTLE YOU (AS IT SHOULD) WITH SOME HARD-CHARGING JAZZPUNK.

 
We don’t say “throttling” anymore, but if we do, we mean giving you a good, solid “rattling.” These songs have hands. They will reach out, through the streaming device, and “throttle” you. They will “rattle” you in your waistcoats & petticoats. Normally, we’d urge you to flee, but we believe that, after a good, solid throttling & rattling, you will want to play States of America again.

Click [here] to purchase States of America at Bandcamp

Click [here] for the Joy on fire website / more info 

Personnel: John Paul Carillo (bass, guitar, songwriting); Anna Meadors (sax, vocals, lyrics on “Dangerous Whimsy”); Dan Gutstein (vocals and lyrics; backup vocals and lyrics on “Dangerous Whimsy”); Chris Olsen (drums).

Some recent press:

Bob Boilen noted the band’s “fiery sound” when debuting “Thunderdome” and its video on NPR’s All Songs Considered.

American Pancake cited the jagged punk eruptions for song and video “Happy Holidays.”

Jammerzine described the Joy on Fire song and video “Selfies” as being “sonically decadent in all the right spots.”

Kendra Beltran posted a great interview with the group at ZO Magazine.

The video for “Uh Huh” has been an official selection, or better, at more than a dozen international film festivals, including Obskuur Ghent Film Festival, where it won.

Thanks for your support! Oi. 

UNKNOWN CITY.

 

Hopefully, 2022 will be a transcendent year for Joy on Fire. The group intends to release its full-length album, States of America, which features lyrics and vocals throughout. It’ll be the first such album in the band’s history and I’m proud to be the bloke at the microphone. In the buildup to States, however, I collaborated with the group on a couple songs that appear on another album, Unknown Cities. I wrote lyrics for the title song (above) in French, actually, before situating them in English. While I can’t fully vouch for my Francophone accuracy, I do think that the overall voyage between French and English helped the word formation to be more adventurous. The lyrics in both languages appear below. On the one hand, the song is about a split between two people, with the singer seeking a rapprochement, and on the other hand, it is about loss, about writing the names of the lost in an unfamiliar locale. (For the sake of anonymity perhaps or to be astray within the sorrow?) We are living in an era of loss, even as the song attempts to be timeless. I can only hope that the lyrics match the virtuosity of the music, which is beautiful, and operates in time signatures more moderate than some of our grinding and jumping punk songs. I hope you enjoy the listen.

Unknown City

Did you sleep that night?
In the morning
a wooden bird sang
in a language
that had forgotten its weapons.
You know nothing but
my name in your voice,
the gray light of the rain
behind the door,
clouds in the false river,
the river
where your grief met
the sound of my footsteps.

I write your name
in an unknown city,
write your name
in an unknown city.

Well yes so what
god is a factory.
At the end of a sentence
I put a period.
That’s the dead hand,
that’s my madness.
The despair so beautiful,
a bouquet of stars
on the rooftops.
Leave the door
open.
Leave the door
open.

I write your name
in an unknown city,
write your name
in an unknown city.

Your name
your name.


Ville Inconnu

Dormiez-vous cette nuit?
Au matin,
un oiseau de bois a chanté
dans une langue qui a perdu ses armes.
Tu ne sais rien que
mon nom dans ta voix,
la lumière grise de la pluie
derrière la porte,
des nuages dans la fleuve faux,
la fleuve
où ta doleur rencontra
le bruit de mes pas.

J’ecris ton nom
dans une ville inconnu,
ecris ton nom
dans une ville inconnu.

Eh bien oui et alors
dieu est une usine.
A la fin d’une phrase
je mets un point.
C’est la main morte,
c’est ma folie.
Le desespoir si beau,
un bouquet d’étoiles
sur les toits.
Laisser la porte
ouverte.
Laisser la porte
ouverte.

J’ecris ton nom
dans une ville inconnu,
ecris ton nom
dans une ville inconnu.

Ton nom,
ton nom.


Personnel: Anna Meadors, John Paul Carillo, Chris Olsen, Dan Gutstein. Visit the Joy on Fire website for more information.

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE “THUNDERDOME” VIDEO SHOOT.

 

Have a watch, then learn about the mayhem, below. 

As I recall, the video shoot lasted from about 3 p.m. until 5 a.m. We got Chinese takeout somewhere in the middle. It was warm in November (2019). It rained. By the morning, it was much cooler. The script called for the official Joy on Fire cat, Funz, to participate at the very end. The fabulous director, Damien Davis, asked us a famous question: “Will Funz cooperate?” (You’ll have to watch the entire video to find out.) Damien and Chris work together; it was Chris who recruited Damien for the video and the results speak for themselves. “Thunderdome” debuted on NPR’s All Songs Considered, hosted by Bob Boilen, Nov. 17, 2020.

Everything took place in John and Anna’s living room, in Trenton. We assembled a collage. (Can you identify my two additions, Paul Celan and Clarice Lispector?) I did my best work as a purveyor of Air Bass. All of us wore sunglasses, except Anna, until the song’s final sequence, when she appears (movie magic!) in shades. The music in “Thunderdome” never stops walloping. To the best of my ability, I’d describe the lyrics as equal parts interpersonal and societal outcry. “We Are Full of Anger and Decency.” Hasn’t that been obvious, lately?

The final still photo is just a gratuitous pancakes image. It was taken after Joy on Fire played a week earlier at Silvana, in Harlem. We wound up later at the Seinfeld diner. So I did what anybody would do under those circumstances. Sensibly, I ordered the blueberry flapjacks. Thanks for having a look, if you’ve had a look, and thanks for any thumbs-ups, if you’ve given us any thumbs-ups. It is our dream that Tina Turner will come across our video and have herself a fine little chuckle. What’s love, but a second-hand emoticon?

key to the still photos, in order: damien davis; chris olsen; john paul carillo, anna meadors, and chris; john; the wall collage; anna, john, and chris; me and funz; chris; damien, anna, and chris; me and pancakes.

this post is part of a double-issue focused on joy on fire music videos. for a look at our anti-gun protest video “uh huh” click [here].

UH HUH: JOY ON FIRE’S ANTI-GUN ANTHEM BECOMES AN OFFICIAL SELECTION AT SIX INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVALS (AND COUNTING.)

 

Have a watch then learn about the mayhem below. 

John kept playing combinations of “dinn-dinn-dunn” on the bass and I kept saying “uh huh” after every iteration. This was 2018, when he and I first started adding words to music, in my old apartment up the hill, in Adams Morgan, D.C., where you could see the Washington Monument from the living room windows. The amp was thumping; the neighbors must’ve been going crazy. Were there bottles of stout? Why, yes there were. “dunn-dinn-dunn!” // “uh huh!”

I said “uh huh” because I dug the bass line, but it became a regular part of the song’s opening cycle, and eventually the title, too. A change in the lyrics would appear after one of the song’s thumping, electrified transformations. There, the words would speculate on the unknowable: the songs not for the dead but of the dead. Ultimately, “Uh Huh” is an anti-gun anthem. In it, we challenge murderers to atone, by returning the bodies (of those they murdered) to the earth.

 

Importantly, other hands touched the song. Chris Olsen would add the metrical necessity of drums. Anna Meadors added both dirgeful and enraged saxophones; she also devised the refrain (the little loop of singing) at the outro; she engineered the entire recording. In the fullness of time, Mark Isaac and Gabriela Bulisova interpreted the song visually, through a combination of thermal, rippling water, video game, marching, and corporeal imagery. It seems quite accurate.

Even as Covid-19 has prevented us from performing, the video has been gaining traction at several international film festivals. A special thanks to our friends at the Oregon Short Film Festival, London Rocks Film Festival, L.A. Rocks Film Festival, Brussels Independent Film Festival, Hollywood Verge Film Awards, and Rome Independent Prisma Awards. Yo! With a dozen more submissions yet to go! We didn’t have ginormous resources for a big push, thus the level of interest has been especially surprising.

If you are inclined, travel to YouTube and give us a thumb’s up. Give us an “uh huh.” Thanks.

this post is part of a double-issue focused on joy on fire music videos. for behind the scenes at the “thunderdome” video shoot, click [here].

JOY ON FIRE // “UH HUH” // OFFICIAL VIDEO // 2020.

“Uh Huh” is a protest song, during a protest year, during a baffling era.

The lead instrumentation—John Paul Carillo’s bass and guitar; Chris Olsen’s drums and percussion—alternates between harrowing restraint and thumping outcry. Anna Meadors plays the song’s dirge on her alto saxophone; the song, then, absorbs the universal lamentations of people who’ve been deprived of other people. When all four of us participate at once, including the howling vocals, there is a variety of madness that we could call liberation, or honesty. Listeners will be rewarded again and again by the virtuosity of the musicians. The outro, in particular, estimates the emotional quandary of marching forward, despite a societal environment that cannot remediate its own destructiveness.

“Uh Huh” refers to brothers in the universal sense: close and distant family, comrades, colleagues. We are protesting an inexcusable societal blight like gun crimes, on the one hand, but many protests can be echo-located in “Uh Huh.” (What’s your protest?) In the lyrics, a gun is pointed at an unarmed person. This fundamental inequality can transfer from one situation to another. You’re powerless at a crucial moment, you fear for your life, you lack a basic resource. You struggle to envision a future, uh huh.

                                                                 

The artists who created the video—Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac—have stamped their narrative on the song. By turns eerie, disturbing, and deeply righteous, the video commences with the thermal imagery of headless bodies trudging toward a blank destination, at an orderly pace, their backs to the viewer. Without being told, we know that many of them are doomed. There is a gun-scope encircling a partial portrait, and an incongruous flag unfurling, and a litter of human shapes strewn upon a stained ecosystem that’s struggling, itself, to persevere.

“De voi depinde,” said the poet Paul Celan: “It’s up to you.” What he meant was: the individual really matters. By design, the band does not appear. Our faces don’t outweigh the importance of the protest. What will our brothers be singing? What will our, what will our brothers be singing? If we deaden ourselves to loss, we’ll never challenge the status quo.

Play this song loud. Expect punk-jazz. Topple the establishment.

Joy on Fire is

John Paul Carillo (bass, guitar)

Anna Meadors (baritone and alto saxophones, vocals)

Chris Olsen (drums, percussion)

Dan Gutstein (lyrics, vocals)

“Uh Huh” composed by Carillo / Gutstein / Joy on Fire (2020)

Joy on Fire formed in Baltimore 12 years ago and is currently headquartered in Trenton, N.J.  Featured last year on NPR's All Songs Considered, the band is scheduled to play a Tiny Desk Concert in July.  Its most recent release is the Thunderdome EP, which features "Uh Huh," and is available on vinyl only at the Joy on Fire website.  Maryland label Procrastination Records will release the band's next full length album, Hymn, in June. States of America, the band's first full length album with vocals, and which will also include "Uh Huh," is currently being mixed with release plans to be decided.

Video and band photograph by Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac (2020). 

“Uh Huh” is an official selection, PRISMA Rome Independent Film Awards (2020), London Rocks Film Festival (2020), and L.A. Rocks Film Festival (2021). 

MEET YOU AT THE JOY ON FIRE CORNER OF THE WORLD.

Somewhere in the (recent) tumultuous moments of my life — ". . . waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again. . ." (Frank O'Hara) — I received an embassy from John Paul Carillo. May you be so fortunate as to receive an embassy from John Paul Carillo. He came calling as a representative of his band, Joy on Fire. 

Scant weeks earlier, I had witnessed Joy on Fire batter two buildings to pulp: An die Musik and The Crown, both in Baltimore. I have written about this experience. What else can I say but when you hear the thing you've always wanted to hear, two outcomes are possible. The first is: nothing further transpires (but you have the memories!) The second is: you're invited to write lyrics — and deliver them. 

Meet You at the Jazz Corner of the World is a two-volume live album recorded by the Jazz Messengers and their leader, Art Blakey, in 1960. The sets are phat, and this version of the Messengers that graced the New York jazz club Birdland — Blakey, Morgan, Shorter, Timmons, Merritt — was perhaps the finest in that band's storied history. I love the title of those volumes. 

And Joy on Fire would describe themselves, in part, as jazz. Noisy, counter-punching, and full of late-day sunlight, the band is also punk, metal, and alternative. In comparison to a musician like Wayne Shorter, Anna Meadors has thoroughly established her tone on the bari and alto saxophones. Chris Olsen, drums and percussion, rattles the buildings across the street. And John shreds his bass guitar strings — bass guitar — as if he were Duane Eddy playing the Sex Pistols songbook. 

In the song, "Fizzy," Sleaford Mods front-man Jason Williamson howls, "I fuckin' hate rockers / Fuck your rocker shit / Fuck your progressive side, sleeve of tattoos / Oompa Loompa blow me down with a feather / Cloak and dagger bollocks!" I think I can speak for the others when I say that we admire those blokes and that sentiment. 

I say "we" because together, we are recording works that will become an album (hopefully albums) and I will be appearing with the gang on a mini-tour that begins December 14th at Mooselab in DUMBO, Brooklyn. On December 21st, we'll be at Champ's in Trenton, and on December 22nd, we'll be at Rhizome in D.C.

Therefore, I will see you at the Joy on Fire Corner of the World. Come join us.

Suddenly, the future is Jazz Punk. Hoy hoy!




References:

"Mayakovsky" by Frank O'Hara, from his collection Meditations in an Emergency (Grove / Atlantic 1957). 
Meet You at the Jazz Corner of the World, Vols. 1 and 2 by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (Blue Note, 1960). 
"Fizzy" by Sleaford Mods off their album Austerity Dogs (Harbinger Sound, 2013).