INTERVIEW // Joe P is On Fire
As it did for many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the life of singer-songwriter Joe P. Prior to the pandemic, Joe was in the band Deal Casino. In March 2020, as the U.S. began to go into lockdown, Deal Casino broke up. Joe didn’t abandon making music though. No longer held back by the implications of posting solo while in a band, he began to post the songs he recorded in his basement onto TikTok. His TikToks soon began to gain traction. Eventually, a NYC-based label, Neon Gold, reached out to him, and Joe P signed on with them for his first EP, Emily Can’t Sing. The EP garnered the attention of his current label, Atlantic Records. Working with Atlantic Records, Joe P put out his second solo EP in October 2022, titled French Blonde.
Joe P’s music can be described as indie with notes of alternative rock and pop, often sounding like it’d be featured in a coming-of-age movie. His music is as upbeat as his humor is dry. On March 27, 2023, I had the pleasure of zooming the artist. As he sat in his New Jersey living room, Joe P answered my questions about going solo, his recent projects, and his current musical taste.
Despite Joe P’s name sounding straightforward, the artist came up with “a billion other” stage names before settling on it. The decision to settle on Joe P was a stripped-down and genuine choice: “That’s my actual name, that’s what people called me growing up, it can’t be uncool or cool because it's just the truth.”
The title Emily Can’t Sing came about in a similar way. In addition to being the name of his first EP, it’s also the title of two tracks — one on each EP. Each “Emily Can’t Sing” track is a voice memo of Joe’s girlfriend — you guessed it, her name’s Emily — that Joe secretly taped. In each track, Emily sings and attempts to recall Joe’s songs “Off My Mind” and “All Day I Dream About”. After each track, the respective official recording follows. The tracks are delightful interludes where the listener gets a glimpse of the loving banter between the couple. He plans to continue the crafty tradition on future projects.
Authenticity guides Joe’s decisions. “The more of your own truth you put into that stuff, making stuff and titling, the more there is to feel good about. It’s authentic, at least to me, so then it has to be authentic to other people,” he reflects.
Joe P’s most recent release is a version of his hit song “Off My Mind” featuring singer and GRAMMY-nominee K. Flay. Aside from the original and K. Flay's renditions, Joe P has also put out an acoustic version of the song. The singer describes the acoustic rendition as the most dejected, K. Flay’s rendition as the most confident, and the original lying somewhere in between.
“The acoustic one… I wanted to hit people in a more emotional way. The lyrics have time to breathe, it’s much slower… so it takes on a whole new meaning, I think, for certain people. ‘Cause the main version you're saying someone’s “off your mind”, but by saying that you’re literally contradicting yourself. So there’s a confidence to it, ‘cause it’s kinda fast and then also the lyrics are also kinda like, oh no this is sad.’ And then in the acoustic, you don’t even get that confidence so it’s a little more, like, you’re just admitting that you’re destroyed.”
Joe went on to praise K. Flay’s spin on the song and how she brought out even more confidence in it. “The way she sang it was so different than how I sang it so it made me hear the lyrics in a way that I was like ‘oh cool, I didn’t ever hear them that way or hear them feeling like that.’ The happiest part of it is her singing it. I have brought it into the sadness as far as I could, but she took it the other way which was really nice and refreshing.”
Music isn’t Joe’s only creative outlet. Upon releasing French Blonde, the singer also came out with the short horror film, “If We Run”. The film runs for just over 30 minutes and follows a group of friends going to a party in the woods only to have their plans deterred by a rampant, masked killer. Don’t worry horror lovers, the music doesn’t distract from the gore of the film — (spoiler alert) less than 5 minutes into it a knife is impaled through a woman's throat, pinning her to a door. Alongside the gore, the film features the songs “French Blonde”, “All Day I Dream About”, and “Happy People” from French Blonde, as well as “Fighting in the Car” and the acoustic version of “Off My Mind” from Emily Can’t Sing. Joe chose the horror genre for the film because of the genre’s unserious nature: “With a horror movie, you're kind of aware you're watching a movie or else you’d be losing your mind watching this monster. I think that lighthearted [attitude] allows for this kind of music idea that I wanted to inject into it.”
For Joe, making the film “was the most fun I ever had in my life creating anything.” While he’s not certain if he’d create another film in the exact same style and format as “If We Run”, he described being “past the point of making standard music videos”.
“It’s just so boring now,” he passionately explains. “We’ve seen a billion of them, I’ve made a billion of them… I kind of would rather always try to push it a little and make something that’s a little different.” With Emily’s frequent features on his EPs, maybe she can make a guest appearance in the next film. (Might I suggest a rom-com spoof featuring the duo? )
As Joe P’s solo career evolves, so does his process. He described the process of creating Emily Can’t Sing as one with complete freedom and “no rules” compared to the more meticulous, thought-out creation of French Blonde. In writing both EPs, Joe has begun to explore and decipher who he is as an artist.
“I didn’t know what I was doing [with Emily Can’t Sing] 'cause I’d only ever done stuff with a band, so to fully do everything on my own was, like, this extreme freedom, but also, like, who am I… I felt like I just needed to make something and get it out of me so that I could start the process of figuring out what I am and what I want to sound like,” he shares.
He’s found working solo liberating, allowing him to mix things up from song to song. “When you’re in a band, it’s always that guy playing the drums or this person playing bass or whatever. But for me, it was like, I’m gonna get this guy to play drums in this song and then I’ll play drums in the other song… there were no rules, I could just kind of do anything. So it was a lot of searching for what I wanted to do.”
Conversely, Joe P went into the making of French Blonde with more of “a clear idea” and less of a need to search, “dialing in” on the process. Though he hasn’t completely dialed in yet: “Every time I record it’s just getting a little closer to ‘that’s what I want to sound like!’ You know, it’s never fully right,” he exclaimed.
Newfound freedom isn’t the only thing going solo has changed for Joe P. A solo career comes with more responsibility. Joe explains that going solo means suddenly having to manage emails and be in contact with his manager who he had virtually never talked to before. When Deal Casino broke up, Joe P delightfully recalls calling his manager — who stayed with him — and saying “I guess we have to be like best friends now, it’s just me and you.” Joe went on to add, “But I think I like that,” explaining that with more risk comes more reward.
The biggest difference between being in a band and performing solo for Joe P has been performing live shows. He explained, “I always remember with the band I would feel more like everyone could throw tomatoes at us and it doesn’t matter ‘cause we have each other, and we’ll go in the greenroom and we’ll be fine.” That same in-this-together mentality doesn’t exist when he’s on stage alone. Instead, he explains, “My name is on the door, they’re just looking at me… I look over at the guys I play with, who are like my best friends, who are really invested in it, but it’s just different.” He went on to explain how going solo has led to him taking the audience’s reaction more seriously: “In a band, you can just be like ‘screw the crowd they didn’t get it’, but when it’s just me it’s a little more like, ‘oh my god, they hated me!’” His tone quivers as he imitates his fears.
Given the anxieties performing solo can produce, it’s not surprising Joe has a pre-show ritual to calm his nerves. “I have to go find an apple. I like to walk on stage with an apple. So I go find one around, and I usually always get lost, and there’s always chaos. Like I always just find myself just making it back to the show on time.” He thinks he gets lost on purpose, albeit subconsciously, because “it gets rid of the nerves ‘cause I just can’t stand around and think about it too much.”
Joe’s taste in music is old school. On top of a blossoming solo career coming from the pandemic, the artist developed an obsession with Jeff Buckley and has been listening to him what he bashfully describes as “an unhealthy amount” ever since. Joe P’s love affair with Buckley’s music started when he was going solo himself. “When the band ended… I started listening to solo artists ‘cause I never did before that. When you’re in a band, you just look up to other bands more because you can relate more, but now I couldn’t, so I had to find other people,” he reflects.
Certifying his mature taste, Joe P covered Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” on Emily Can’t Sing. When posed with the question, he also definitively asserted that analog formats are preferable to digital, claiming they’re “more fun”.
I got to talk with Joe P about what playing his dream show would look like, which was clearly a difficult decision for the singer. The artist countered, “Could I bring people back from the dead?” followed by an amused chuckle. Ultimately, alongside himself on the lineup, Joe decided on Radiohead, Fiona Apple, Bjork, Bruce Springsteen, and not surprisingly, a resurrected Jeff Buckley. Of course, this would all take place at Madison Square Garden.
Perhaps with that lineup, Joe P would find himself getting lost in conversation with one of the music icons as opposed to literally getting lost.
Words: Elizabeth Stormont // Photos: Hannah Roberts
Keep up with Joe P on Instagram and stream on Spotify and Apple Music.
