Joey Pollari

Hi Antonio! Thank you for this time to share together. I’ve been going through a sort of sea change over the last few months, so I don’t know. I’m in Minnesota, my home state, for a wedding and a funeral and a birthday. That seems correct.

Releasing it made me very happy, and it made me feel the same as before. Releasing this album has felt momentous, I said what I wanted to say at that moment, about that moment in time, and it has quickly been absorbed in a continuum. There is more to say, a new album will be shaped in response. But I did really let myself enjoy the release of this. I’m excited to share this final video for I’ll Be Romance and close the chapter further.

Now that you mention this motif, I guess I’m always thinking about light in terms of consciousness. What’s dark in me, what has no light, what is visible, what is shining. Good thoughts for progress. The idea for this video was: if I can’t have romance, I’ll try and be it. So, Andrew Hebert and I constructed set-ups around this idea, an idea that had a lot of longing, but that also felt sort of lost-and-looking. That maybe the stage is, or was, set for romance, but no one’s there but you. You’re alone and wanting. You can’t see, but you feel it. We were exploring the sensuality and possibility in that.

Yes, funny you say, the first words weren’t set to music. The first lyrics came because I was sitting on a public bench with my journal when I saw a homeless man walking through a busy intersection calling out for Maurice and holding out melted chocolate eclairs. When I was young, my family had a decades-long connection in helping with the homeless, so I grew up around that. When I saw the man in the intersection, I felt his wandering connected to something universal, and personal to me. After I wrote a short while, I noticed a voice in the lyrics. A kind of oracular voice, a revelatory voice. That voice thought of family, of history, of being seen and unseen, and that voice saw darkness and angels. Across my music, I do like lyrics that work being read, without music. I admire people who don’t really care about this.

I have intentions when I journal, but they’re broad: get to the bottom of this, try and see the other side of that, get real with yourself about this. I don’t do morning pages of free writing or anything, but no matter what writing I do, I’m trying to let in voices to speak where I don’t, where I say something unexpected. I don’t like writing gibberish or navel-gazing. I delete those.

I read a lot on psychology, so that’s my preference these days. With literature, I prefer prose that swerves or very plain language that hides things. Some writers that seem to have made an impact on me, when I read them again, are Donald Kalsched, Marion Woodman, and Virginia Woolf. I read a Kalsched book after I lost my father 7 years ago and I don’t remember the book at all, but I read some of it again recently, and I saw my art in it. I thought that was bizarre.

Well I wrote this song from my father’s perspective about his relationship with my mother because I had written a previous song, Corrode Silo, from his perspective about his day of death, and I liked those results, so I tried it here. One day, while I was making this record, my producer and mixer Theo Karon told me this should be the opener, and that really made me laugh. Theo was right. What porch does this album look out from? What’s getting passed down to me, in genre, in family, in history? The “Oh” is that wordless keepsake or mutation, a lens that sees but isn’t seeing, just like a birdsong.

The road trip came after I wrote this song, but it’s a song about disembarking, so that road trip made a good home under it. The video is our joint memory of a wonderful trip — an effort to outline soft routes across our friendship and our country. The song and the video, as explorations of a question, are kind of like that Zen thing of “you don’t get answers, you lose questions.” The video ends in dancing.

I only had the broad genre of Americana in my head when I wrote these songs, but then, more voices came in, different impulses, and, I don’t know, I get weak in the face of them. I like being weak and letting that happen. The mixing changed the songs drastically and I liked that too. It’s like, take it away from me, I already know what I said, so, show me something else, that’s good for me.

That’s interesting, I had never thought about that. I guess a lot of the references for this record were from albums around that time, and my producer and I discussed the mix being darker than most, so that probably makes sense. We also discussed my demos sounding like chicken scratch, unvarnished, and we felt through to how we could make the album reflect that in a refined way. The mix, to me, has an abstracted quality on closer listen. I pushed for that even further — I liked the impulse for big action-painting strokes against detailed little notches. That’s further away from our 2024 modern polishes, though I like that too.

That means a lot to me, thank you. It means a lot cause this song is about 3 minutes in time that changed me. I felt real love with my then-boyfriend, and we had this moment of staring into each other’s eyes while sitting across a table, a good 3 minutes of just looking, no touching — and I felt seen and like I was seeing him too. I was totally destabilised by it; love had come to me. When I wrote the song some 20 minutes after that moment, I had those words you mentioned come to me immediately, without a thought. “At the bend of any season / all war becomes a star”. I felt my inner turmoil had turned a corner in that stare, by power of him.

Yeah, I did actually; from past to future, from disembarkation to arrival to leaving again. An album story maybe sounds conspicuous to people, so I don’t talk much about that, but it was there for me to make sense of things and it’s for anyone else too, if they want that. To me, all my albums, past and future, are concept-albums in their form and narrative. I always feel like I’m playing with a mask, and this character has a story that it lives, it has parts it plays along that story, and it’s up to me to draw blood from it, to make it live. Conspicuous or not, I was an actor first, I can’t help but find an arc and carry it through. You can’t blame a dog for barking.

It was a great and unique experience of independent filmmaking, all hands on deck. I got very close with the crew that way. By the end, we were thinking like one mind, me and them. That takes a lot of trust. The director, writer, and star Max Talisman has fought for the movie to be seen in theatres, and against all odds, has a release date for next year where that could be a reality. He, and this experience, taught me something about having faith.

I’ve written a few projects I’m developing as a director. One’s a musical. I don’t know what will happen, but I like playing with them. It looks like I’m going to make another album by end of year. That’s up next.

That’s an interesting question. I think this wondering of mine, “Why do I feel I can’t do this?” is a mythological part in every process. I mean, if you have some dream, that dream will always ask you to do something you haven’t thought of, that you don’t think you can do. That’s what makes it a calling. That’s the hero’s journey, Joseph Campbell talked about. It calls parts of you forth that you don’t live out yet, or you don’t recognise in yourself, or you’ve pushed away for some reason. It’s also what they call shadow work. It’s dark stuff in that shadow, but it’s also greatness you don’t touch. Why don’t you? When I was younger and in relationships, there’s a lot of muck when you’re young, and there’s still and always is muck, but in your twenties, it’s like a hall of mirrors but you think you’re playing pinball. I mean, good grief.
Not to say it’s all bad or I was stupid, I just don’t think I knew how to enact whatever I understood. I knew I could be loving and care deeply for someone, but I didn’t know why it didn’t work out. Anyway, that means that my artistic approaches, to let in other voices, to make believe like I can tackle something I don’t know how to tackle, those approaches have made me realise that my approach to love isn’t so bad. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, a relationship goes away, a song or album never coalesces, but you learn a lot by trying. You only learn by trying. And it does good to ask ourselves why we think we can do it. Dreams carry us forward.

Track listing is like coursing and making a meal. That steak is going to dampen the evening if you put it up first, or that acidity is necessary after that sweetness. So I think about those things a lot, and the track listing is a story, like I said earlier. But I like a lot what you said about Riddance and Peach Blossom — I agree. I think Riddance sort of resolves the album’s conflict, and then Peach Blossom opens it back up. Fantasy is crucial to the record, what we dream could happen, those fantastic stories of love we learn, and the album closer, the final line you mentioned, is both an undoing of fantasy and the promise of it. It reminds me of a phrase I heard my father say my entire childhood, ““I see” said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw.”

All That Heaven Allows.

Endless love, but these days I think more about joy.

Thank you!