Riding the Joywave
When, and where, is the moment that a local band is no longer a local band?
The point at which it has moved from selling out the tiny Bug Jar on Monroe Avenue to playing a national mega-fest such as Lollapalooza? Followed by a seven-month tour deep into the hip clubs of New York City, London, Paris and Berlin? With the band answering the questions of eager radio interviewers, its music played at the X Games and between innings of the Dodgers-Mets National League playoffs?
Perhaps it was the group’s first national television appearance that warned Rochester the world is threatening to snatch Joywave from us. NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers in July of 2014. Joywave was to be playing its hit “Tongues” to wrap up the show. But first, the band’s enigmatically charismatic frontman Daniel Armbruster was onstage with their pal Big Data, a Brooklyn musician named Alan Wilkis, to help out on his song “Dangerous.” Like “Tongues,” it’s an infectious, upbeat, electro-pop hit.
Standing out of view, in the wings of the stage, were Joywave bassist Sean Donnelly and guitarist Joseph Morinelli. “I’m looking at Daniel performing on national television,” Morinelli says.
“And I’m thinking: 'Is this a fantasy? No, this is really happening.' ”
“I was literally shaking,” Donnelly says. “My teeth were chattering.”
“It was so live,” Morinelli adds. “We were right across from the desk where he conducts interviews.”
Wow. Five guys who grew up in Greece, standing right across from the desk where Meyers chats with celebrities. It is very much like the desk where Jimmy Kimmel chats with celebrities on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live. Which is where Joywave was last March, playing “Tongues” and “Somebody New,” the opening track from its new album, How Do You Feel Now?
Joywave is an overnight success that’s a decade in the making. Three of its members — Armbruster, Brenner and Morinelli — have been chasing this for more than 10 years if you include their former band, The Hoodies.
(See Photos: A look back at The Hoodies)
They are riding the Joywave. Momentum that the band relentlessly stokes through social media. “Tongues” hit 1 million views on YouTube a few weeks ago and can be heard on a Nexus commercial. The band’s music is a backdrop for "Madden NFL" and the soccer-oriented "FIFA," the biggest-selling video game in the world. And the posting on Twitter of an unidentified high-school band playing a Joywave song? “That stuff gives me goosebumps,” Donnelly says.
Its seven-month tour done, the guys are now home in Rochester. How do they feel now?
“When I got home, I just sat in my car in the driveway,” Ben Bailey says. Two years ago he quit his job in a local coffee shop to play keyboards with Joywave. “It just felt so good to be there,” he says. “I looked over at the house, and my mom was holding the door open. She’s looking at me like, ‘What are you doing?’ ”
Yes, Hanna Bailey was wondering what he was doing. “Maybe he was kind of collecting his thoughts,” she says: “ ‘All right, I’m home now.’ ”
Collecting his thoughts because, while the tour is done, there will be little time for Joywave to catch its breath.
Some of Joywave’s Rochester pals are playing the Bug Jar Saturday night: KOPPS, Ishmael Raps and Dangerbird. Afterward, it’s Cultco DJs spinning records. Cultco is Joywave, and the DJs in that crowd are usually Armbruster, Donnelly, KOPPS lead singer Patricia Patrón and Joywave road manager Bud Budinski.
And band members will get no break from each other. “My phone has been dying with all of the group texting,” drummer Paul Brenner says. Joywave hits the road in February for a five-week tour with the similarly shimmery-pop-minded Metric. Twenty-three dates. Kansas City, Seattle, New York City.
“It’s more of a job than I imagined,” Brenner admits as the band gathers in its studio, inconspicuously tucked away on the southeastern edge of downtown Rochester. Armbruster’s puttering over the studio coffeemaker, grinding the beans. This is a coffee-fueled band. Pour Coffee Parlor, just off of Park Avenue, roasts the beans every Monday morning and sells them as the band’s special blend. “Joewave” is a mix of Guatemalan and Ethiopian beans. It is very, very good.
“There’s a super amount of radio engagements we have to do,” Armbruster says after he joins the rest of Joywave, which has squeezed itself onto one of the plush, sagging couches found in all band studios. “I never thought we would be a band played on the radio.”
Despite sold-out shows on the tour, and the beats of “Tongues” so omnipresent that you are unaware of its presence in your daily lives, it’s too early to tell where this is going. Today’s pop music is dominated by single figures. Taylor Swift, Mylie Cyrus, Drake. The Killers, whom Joywave has opened for, are as big as any band this decade but couldn’t carry Justin Bieber’s bong. So there’s a job opening here. Music publications and blogs — and fans of upbeat, body-moving beats backing real songs — are now reviewing Joywave’s résumé. We need another Coldplay. But one you can move to, not mope to.
“The band has pretty good buzz all over the country,” says Donny Kutzbach, who books acts for the Buffalo-based Funtime Presents. “They’ve reacted really well in large settings, especially in big-market, bigger tours. And when they’ve played in festivals and have had interactions with radio.
“There’s an undercurrent of alternative rock that’s happening right now. Things have turned from straight-ahead guitar rock to almost a more poppy, alternative rock subset that has taken root. They seem firmly ensconced in that world.”
For balance, Joywave also remains firmly ensconced in its hometown. Armbruster doesn’t like the defeatist attitude that good things can’t possibly come from Rochester.
“I think it’s a shame so many people from here move to another city and never even acknowledge they’re from Rochester,” he says. And he says it emphatically, waving his coffee mug. The very idea that someone would deny their Rochester roots seems to irritate him. Joywave does not hide behind the vagueness of describing itself as being from “New York,” shorthand for the cosmopolitan city that breeds trendy bands in the same manner you would a show dog. Nor is Joywave from that mapmaker’s blank tundra of “Upstate.” Even in interviews with British music publications, the band makes it clear: It is from Rochester.
The Joywave guys are no hypocrites. When the 2016 tour dates were announced in Facebook, someone complained: No Rochester? “Hang tight” is the band’s reply. “Something coming 4U in the next few months...”
Nor did they did ignore their hometown on the recently-completed tour. With a small hole in the schedule following a gig in Buffalo last spring, Joywave went to social media on a Monday morning to announce to local fans that it was returning that night to its old home, the Bug Jar, for a surprise show. In fact, it played two shows at the Bug Jar that night.
And as the tour was winding down, Funtime Presents had booked Joywave to play the new East Avenue club, Anthology, during the first week of October. The space was still under renovation, partitions were being knocked down to accommodate the anticipated big crowd. Indeed, there appeared to be about 1,000 people in the club that night, and the band was at the top of its game. With a huge banner behind it declaring “Why Be Credible When You Can Be INCREDIBLE?,” the beats hit people in the breastbone and traveled all of the way down to their shoes. Armbruster swayed and sashayed across the stage, waving one arm, pounding his chest with an open palm, his voice sometimes climbing to a fluttering falsetto, unexpectedly swerving into a cover of Neil Young’s “Don’t Let it Bring You Down.”
Armbruster and his bandmates bounded around like jackrabbits, urging the crowd to do so as well. Which it did, fists raised in the air. By the time Joywave hit the encores, the opening acts were invited back onstage: Portland’s Grace Mitchell and Rochester’s KOPPS and the pop-harpist Mikaela Davis, plus local hip-hopper Ishmael Raps. He lost his cap in the midst of some crowd-surfing, but someone tossed it back onstage. Respectful folks, these Rochesterians. And provincial: A chant of “Kodak! Kodak!” erupted for a moment.
Armbruster, who handles most of the band’s social media postings, offered his own review on Twitter. “Rochester, last night was insane.”
Such insanity comes at a price, and most touring musicians would agree: Bus ambience is overrated. “It’s good to be in a bed that’s not moving,” Morinelli says. Armbruster marvels at the luxury of “turning on water at a faucet to brush your teeth,” as though he’s just spent most of the year in a third-world country. And the day after this interview, Armbruster lost his voice. A seven-month tour will do that to the vocal cords.
The relief at being back in Rochester means a reconnecting with personal things, like not having to miss a friend’s wedding. There are civic responsibilities. Armbruster returned from the tour to discover that he’d been summoned for jury duty. And there is baseball. They’re fans. This summer the band sponsored the Southside Joywaves, a Little League team of 8-, 9- and 10-year-olds. Rain ended the final game, tied at 6-6, and the Southside Joywaves settled for a co-championship. The Joywave guys, who happened to be passing through town, showed up at the game and autographed baseballs.
Joywave built its fan base through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Armbruster has been filing a set of blog posts on one of the most high-profile of news websites, The Huffington Post, detailing the creation of each song of How Do You Feel Now? “We had a lot of success online before it translated into real life,” Armbruster says.
Real life. That was the next step, becoming a viable touring band, and in some respects real life was getting in the way. “I worked at a very reputable grocery store chain,” Morinelli says. “Worked,” as in past tense. “It’s supposed to be one of the best companies to work for in the country, unless you’re opening for The Killers.” Armbruster says.
Yes. Morinelli, who had crept into the lower corporate levels of Wegmans, was fired, he says, because he needed some time off for an upcoming tour with The Killers and the Kimmel date. But no hard feelings. “The day after they let me go, I went there and spent $400 on groceries,” he says.
Wegmans. That’s how a lot of people looking in from the outside world know Rochester. Quite a few indie bands know the city for the Bug Jar, the longtime home of underground music, Joywave says. But most of the world doesn’t think of Rochester as a thriving music town. For that matter, nor do Rochesterians. Mostly, “Rochester is some place people say they pass through,” Morinelli says.
Donnelly: “They ask me if I know so-and-so, like this is a village of 500 people.”
Brenner: “I used to say it’s right between Buffalo and Syracuse.”
Donnelly: “Then you get a confused look.”
Brenner: “Lake Ontario? Niagara Falls? East of Tonawanda?”
Armbruster: “I always say, ‘Economic Chernobyl.’ ”
OK, so they’re not the perfect ambassadors. But according to Morinelli, “It does help if you drop the Kodak word.”
All five guys had parents who worked at Eastman Kodak. Brenner and his parents lived in Koda Vista, the company village in the shadow of the Kodak Park complex. “Kodak is one of the reasons we all know each other,” Bailey says. His family moved here specifically to work for Kodak. “The band wouldn’t have happened without Kodak.”
Kodak is reflected in the songwriting, mostly in subtle ways, says Bailey, whose father was a Kodak industrial engineer. “Smokestacks,” from Joywave’s 2012 EP, Koda Vista, draws its title from the images the band grew up with. And its mood. Their fathers were tucked away deep inside those plants, beneath the smokestacks. Those smokestacks may be fear-inducing to a kid growing up in their shadows, they may look monstrous. But they are the hope for many families’ livelihood.
Or were the hope. The collapse of Kodak is just as much a part of Joywave. Odds were good you or someone in your family worked at Kodak when it employed 60,000 people. Or you were a car salesman, existing off the humongous Kodak bonuses. Now, with Kodak employing only about two or three times the number of people here as showed up for Joywave’s show at Anthology, the livin’ ain’t so easy. You have to work harder to exist in this town, Armbruster says. You have to be more creative. Launch your own business. Start an indie-rock band.
The photo giant may be gasping for air, but its branding remains solid. The all-access pass from Joywave’s 2015 tour was done in the familiar yellow and red colors, with a Kodak logo. The producer of the band’s video for “Tongues” even scraped up some hard-to-find Kodachrome for the shoot. “We spent a huge part of the budget on film,” Armbruster says, but they wanted that cinematic effect. Something you’re looking for when making a video with a couple of dozen naked people running through the woods, chased by disapproving rednecks with guns that fire clothing at their targets. But here Joywave had to abandon its Rochester loyalties. The video was shot at a California commune, where naked people are easier to find than in Highland Park.
If the concept of guns shooting clothing sounds absurdist, bordering on ridiculous, that would be Joywave. The band could literally own this town, if Kickstarter hadn’t rejected Joywave’s proposal to raise $1.2 million on the crowdfunding site to buy the Medley Centre, which was supposed to go up for auction earlier this month. One of the band’s stated goals was to correct the spelling of “Centre” to “Center.”
They’ll overcome the disappointment of missing the opportunity to become squires of a nearly abandoned mall in Irondequoit, because these guys are smart and funny. Their patter has the fine comedic timing that is best developed during long rides from gig to gig.
Perhaps they can get away with tweaking the establishment while still working with it. The band is indie in nature, but signed to a major label, Hollywood Records. Hollywood Records is owned by Disney. So Joywave, seemingly nice guys who can be trusted with the icons of the American Way of Life, wrangled permission to use samples from some famous animated Disney properties on How Do You Feel Now? The voices of Bambi and Thumper, music from Bambi, Fantasia and Peter Pan.
Joywave is equally mocking of itself, taking self-deprecation to the heights. This shows up particularly well in the brief tour videos it was posting on Facebook. When two young women won tickets for a St. Louis concert but couldn’t attend, Joywave invited them to the pre-show sound check. “We told them, ‘Can you guys stand in front and look really, really bored?’ ” Armbruster says. The resulting video is sublimely self-deflating: The camera pans across the band rocking out onstage and down to the crowd, revealing an audience of two, looking like they’d rather be anywhere else.
“I think they have a future,” Donnelly says.
The band itself hardly reflects rock stardom. In some respects, it’s as if Joywave isn’t even happening. Bailey doesn’t have a bachelor pad, he’s still living at home. “He’s wanting to move out, we’ve had a few conversations, especially in the past year,” says his mother, Hanna Bailey. “I told him, ‘It doesn’t make sense, you have your freedom here, you’re doing what you need. Why pay for an apartment when you don’t live in it for months?' ”
Hanna admits she’s been slow catching on to this rock thing. She emigrated here from Germany more than 40 years ago and became a citizen in 2006. “It took me forever to actually discover Queen, I’m a big fan of Freddie Mercury,” she says. “And I like groups like the Bee Gees, but not really rock too much. I can take some of The Stones, some of The Beatles. But I was never one of those who followed those guys around, breaking out in hissy fits and crying.”
So now she understands the screams. Her son’s only 26, but as her youngest child he’s already an uncle. “I have two grandchildren at Greece Athena,” says Hanna. “When they talk about it in school, nobody believes Ben is their uncle.”
Morinelli’s father, Joe Sr., concedes there came a point where he could have advised his son to get on with real life. “I thought it, but I never said it,” he says. “I thought, you know, the worst thing I could do is step on his dreams, so I never did.” Even when his son took on some serious responsibility; he and girlfriend Nicci Morante have a 4-year-old child. “We were very concerned once he had the baby, how it would be once he was on the road,” Morinelli’s father says. “But they found a way to work it out. We even help babysit sometimes.”
“I know they have quite a following on social media,” says Deborah Morinelli, the guitarist’s mother. “When they were in Europe, they would send things home on social media about where they were. And it would show the amount of people, and when they would come out, with those cheers, I would get such a chill.
“Real rock stars, you know?”
Anti-rock stars, maybe. Inspired by Kodak, when virtually everyone else has written off the company. A serious rock band that shrugs at its art through the voice of Bambi. Selflessly sharing its success with other bands on the Rochester scene, such as KOPPS. After talking about his own band for an hour, as the interview is breaking up, Armbruster quietly says that Mikaela Davis, the harpist who plays on one track of How Do You Feel Now?, might be worthy of a story as well.
Joywave sampled, and then walked away from, the intoxicating lure of New York City, London, Paris and Berlin. It’s back home in Rochester. Back in its modest downtown studio, translating the sounds the guys hear in their heads.
“Sometimes you just do things for yourself,” Armbruster says. “If everything went to hell tomorrow, no one can stop us from making a record.”
jspevak@gannett.com
