by Brett Leigh Dicks
What is the measure of success? A shelf full of Grammy Awards is perhaps one indication, but while accolades have come thick and fast for the members of the Boston-based outfit Joy Kills Sorrow – collectively including wins at the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, Winfield’s National Flatpicking Championship and a Canadian Folk Music Award – the greatest insight into their musical accomplishments undoubtedly resides with their new album, This Unknown Science. The album offers a very contemporary take on a traditional sound. Layers of rustic instrumentation beautifully ebb and flow allowing the each of the five respective talents ample opportunity to shine. And shine they do. Formed by guitarist Matthew Arcara in 2006, the band originally started out in a more traditional vein. Its name is actually a tribute to its bluegrass beginnings, referencing one of the first radio stations to broadcast the music of Bill Monroe. Through successive comings and going within its lineup, Joy Kill Sorrow has since adopted a more modern musical approach and, with a little help from an old barn in the Maine countryside, has delivered one of the standout albums of the year. Joy Kills Sorrow brings their new album and infectious yet emotive sounds to Santa Barbara this month when they headline the January installment of Sings Like Hell. Music! Sounds of Santa Barbara recently spoke with singer Emma Beaton about what it is like to harbor traditional values in a modern world.
You are headed to play the January installment of Sings Like Hell. What is Joy Kill Sorrow’s musical history with California?
Quite a bit actually. Three of us are from the west coast of Canada so we have played there a fair amount.
The band has been through quite an evolution since its beginnings. What was the process that brought it to its current configuration?
This lineup has been together for about three years now. Matt, the guitar player, is the only original member of the band. He started the band with two other guys in 2006 or something. Then Bridgette, our bass player, was the second of the current line up to join. About four years ago, the previous banjo player left and Wesley joined, and I came in about six months after that. Our mandolin player, Jacob, joined about three years ago.
What do you think accounts for the chemistry of this line up? Why do you think it has worked so well and has been so musically fruitful?
I think we all have a very similar idea of how we want Joy Kill Sorrows to sound, and we’re good at working together to get there. It’s as simple as that really. The band before this line up had a pretty different sound. There was a lot more traditional material, and they were definitely very traditional sounding. But, we all agreed that we wanted to take it further than that.
In what way?
Since this line up has been together we have been doing a lot of original material. Bridgette, our bass player, writes a lot of the music, and I write some along with Wesley, our banjo player. We definitely approach the music with the idea of layering and orchestrating and having different parts and all that then comes out sounding a lot more like some of the acoustic folk indie rock music that’s out these days.
Your sound does have a traditional anchor to it, but it also sounds very contemporary.
That’s reflective of the music we listen to. We all have roots in traditional music, but we all listen to a lot of rock music and new music that’s out there. We want that influence in what we play as well.
There is an incredible fusion of tones to the sound you produce. It is a mix of so many different elements – there is folk and jazz and rock and pop. You mentioned the music commonality, but do different members have different musical tastes in that regard?
We all have different musical personalities within the band. We all like a lot of the same music and we listen to music together a lot, but, at the same time, we all come from different musical backgrounds, so that also comes through in the arrangement process. When we are working on material, we really do want to showcase everybody and their interests and work hard to do that.
What is your musical background?
I actually grew up playing Scottish music on cello, which I still do a lot of. I also play a lot of other styles of music on cello, but it’s instrumental folk music. That’s where a lot of my earliest influences come from, but now, as a singer, I listen to a lot of blues music and pop music. That’s what I bring to the band through my songwriting and to the way we’re playing the music.
So what was the transformation that took you from being a cellist playing traditional Scottish music to fronting Joy Kill Sorrow?
I started singing while I was in high school, and my mom is a musician and she noticed that I started singing a little bit and encouraged me to take singing lessons. I started doing that midway through high school, and I already knew a couple of the people in Joy Kills Sorrow, and they actually asked me to join the band as their singer while I was still in high school. That was before I even considered myself a singer at all. So, really, my journey to become a singer has been exclusively with Joy Kills Sorrow.
Being an instrumentalist in an ensemble must be a very different experience from being front and center of a musical collective?
It is very different. As a vocalist, when you’re up there on stage, you play a very different role. I’m doing most of the MC work and, therefore, connecting with the audience in a very different way than an instrumentalist does. But even in the arranging sense, as the singer, I obviously have a lot of input into the arrangements. There are a lot times when there are technical things the band needs to overcome; that’s when I just sit back and let them figure it out. But once I get to know the melody and the words, my job is to then just get better at singing it. So in that regard, my part is pretty much set.
With upright bass, guitar, banjo and mandolin, Joy Kills Sorrow is essentially a string band. What sort of challenge does that present to arranging?
There are a lot of times when the logistics of figuring out what parts the instruments are going to play and, particularly in Joy Kills Sorrow, when the instrumentation is different, and since it’s all plucked instruments most of which have frets, it is kind of difficult to make it sound not just like a bunch of strings being played at the same time!
Being the front person, you are also the focal point of the band. Was that a difficult thing to transition into at such a young age?
I was actually doing that before I joined the band so it wasn’t a new thing for me. I had done a fair amount of it before. But, it is something you always want to get better at because you are the center of attention for the band a lot of the time. It’s a big job to take on.
Talk me through the recording of the new album. I believe it was recorded in barn in Maine?
It was recorded at Sam Kassirer’s (who has produced records for Josh Ritter, Erin McKeon, and Langhorne Slim) studio in Maine; he has this big old house that we all stayed in for ten days. We chose Sam because we really wanted to have a rock influence in the music, and he really had a big impact on our sound. We reworked some of the arrangements, and we cut a song from the album that we were planning to have on it. It was nice to be able to be somewhere for ten days and be able to focus on the task at hand.
How does the writing work? Do you all get together with an album in mind and work toward it or do songs arise along the way?
It kind of varies. We don’t usually sit around and write together, but we do work stuff up as group once the material is already written. It comes and goes sometimes. There will be a phase when there’s a lot of new material floating around to work on and then sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes people bring songs in, and sometimes we all write together. The great thing about Joy Kills Sorrows is that we take all different approaches to everything we do.
