Too Much Joy | Interview | New Album, ‘All These CENSORED Feelings’
Alternative rock band Too Much Joy, that originally formed in the 1980s recently released ‘All These CENSORED Feelings’ via Propeller Sound Recordings.
‘All These CENSORED Feelings’ is a deluxe version of the album with thirteen additional tunes recorded at the same time, including a few of the fan commissions that helped fund the whole thing in the first place.
Facing feelings, cursing feelings, shouting feelings over propulsive drums and unreasonably loud guitars, sneaking feelings into singalongs so gum-in-hair sticky that it might take a couple choruses before the people singing along realize they’re singing something raw and resonant and true: this has been the Too Much Joy approach for decades. Here’s a band that got ‘90s crowds to shout “La-la-la-la-la-la lonely,” pandemic-era streamers to belt “Men like Uncle Watson / will destroy us in the end,” and now All These Fucking Feelings listeners to holler “Talking about what pricks we were / and how much better we wanted to be.” (And that’s not even getting into this new LP’s synthy, sour-candy pop beauty about the lure of the void.)
“I’m a big believer in starting stoned and revising straight”
How much time and effort went into creation of the deluxe version of your latest album?
Tim Quirk: We funded the sessions for what became ‘All These Fucking Feelings’ with an IndieGoGo campaign, where one of the perks was the ability for a limited number of fans to commission songs about anything they wanted. While that campaign raised way more than we expected, it also resulted in a shit ton more work, as in addition to the two dozen songs we’d already written, we suddenly had another 17 commissions to write and record. Since three-fifths of the band live on the east coast, and 2/5 live on the west, it took about a year to finish them all and get them on tape.
Writing those fan commissions was a huge challenge. $500 got you new lyrics to one of the songs we’d already written, while $1,000 got you a completely bespoke tune. If someone gives you $1,000 to write a song about their wife or their life, you obviously want them to like it, but in order to create anything worthwhile you also have to kind of not give a shit whether or not they do. Maintaining a balance between those two thoughts isn’t easy. I probably spent more time on the lyrics for the fan commissions than I did on the rest, mostly because I had to put each one down and walk away from it for a while in order to make it any good.
The Deluxe version comes with thirteen additional tunes. What can you tell us about the songwriting process?
All 40 songs were written and recorded the same way, in batches. It wasn’t till we’d finished mixing them all that we started the complicated stack-racking process to determine which 13 should make the record. A lot of the calls were close enough that pretty much any of the 13 outtakes we’ve added to the deluxe version could have made the original cut if one band member had rated it just one point higher.
Back in the ’80s and ’90s, we always wrote together, in the same room. I might come in with a bit of a lyric already written, or go home with a new one to finish, but the bulk of the creative process happened as a unit. The pandemic changed all that — the last record (‘Mistakes Were Made’) was written and recorded without the five of us ever being in the same room together, so, for the first time, that record had what I think of as “Jay” songs, “Sandy” songs, or “Bill” songs, musically, as each of them would ask me separately for some lyrics to write music to, or send me riffs they’d been working on asking for lyrics. Everybody still contributed to all of the songs once we got around to recording them, but the initial demos were done by either Sandy at his house, or Bill at his, or me and Jay at his.
That process continued to some extent for this one, though we did manage to get four of us (Jay, me, Sandy and Tommy) together early in the process to write and record a few (‘Mercy Mild’ and ‘Minister of Loneliness’ began as the four of us jamming together), and then a different four of us (Bill, me, Sandy and Tommy) to record some more a few months later, and finally at the very end we got all five of us together in a studio in New Jersey to bang out the last few songs as a unit. But we all learned how to record at least our own vocals at home, whenever it wasn’t possible for one or more of us to be in the studio together.
In terms of writing the lyrics, I’m a big believer in starting stoned and revising straight. Maybe it’s just cuz I’m a repressed WASP, but I need to alter my brain at least a little to get to the true, scary stuff. I’ve found some edibles combined with a nice Tempranillo lead me to a fruitful place of inspiration. I don’t get blotto, just buzzed enough where EVERYTHING seems meaningful and interesting. Watching old silent movies with my favorite music on shuffle play is another part of that process.
The band has been active since the late 80’s, how did you originally formed?
The original four of us grew up in the suburbs of New York City. Sandy turned me on to the Clash and the Ramones and Joy Division in middle school, but we were pretty much the only kids in our grade who liked that stuff, so we used to bitch about how boring all the high school cover bands were, mauling old Stones and Led Zep classics, and how much more fun school dances and weekend parties would be if any of them played some punk rock. One night we were drunk enough to convince ourselves, in the midst of our bitching, that those songs didn’t sound all that hard to learn, so maybe we should form a band to do exactly that.
So he took bass lessons and I took guitar lessons (together, from the same middle aged dude named Mickey Martlett, who’d teach Sandy bass for half an hour while I watched, then me guitar for half an hour while Sandy watched). Two other friends were going to be the drummer and other guitarist. But Sandy picked up his instrument WAY faster than the rest of us did, and I guess he got impatient, because one day I heard someone in my neighborhood playing the Clash’s cover of ‘Police on My Back,’ and I decided to follow the sound to find a new friend, and it turned out to be Sandy, Tommy and Jay playing the song themselves in Sandy’s backyard, which was a little awkward.
But they said I could be the singer. So Too Much Joy was formed in betrayal. The other two guys in the original band stopped talking to us for a while after that.
When did you decide that you wanted to start writing and performing your own music? What brought that about for you?
We were 15 when all that happened. But since we were the only kids in our town who liked that kind of music, nobody had any idea who we were covering when we played our Ramones and Clash covers, so we figured if people were going to boo us they should boo our own music rather than someone else’s. We wrote and recorded our first 5 songs when we were 16, at an 8 track studio called the Loft in Bronxville, NY. We put a couple of the least terrible ones up on Bandcamp a few years ago.
I know this might be a big effort, but would love to hear about the making of ‘Green Eggs and Crack’, ‘Son of Sam I Am’ and ‘Cereal Killers’? What runs through your mind hearing those recordings today?
‘Green Eggs and Crack’ wasn’t really recorded as an album. It was a collection of demos we’d made between the ages of 16 and 21, all recorded at The Loft, though I think they’d upgraded to a 16 track machine for most everything we put on the LP. I can’t bear to listen to it today, it’s so embarrassing, but for anyone with a stronger stomach than me, you can pretty much hear us learning how to write songs over the course of the album, and shifting away from simply aping our heroes, toward finding our own voice.
‘Son of Sam I Am’ was our first attempt to record an actual album, with a set of songs that were well rehearsed and pretty road-tested, under the direction of a genuine producer. We’re still awkward kids figuring things out, but so overconfident we don’t sound as though we realize it in the moment.
‘Cereal Killers’ was made with a bona fide major label budget, so it’s the first time we sound like we’re getting anywhere close to getting the music we hear in our heads onto tape in a manner that lets the rest of the world hear what we do.
One thing I still like about all three of them is that, even at our lamest, we don’t sound afraid. There’s an energy to our music that I still find fresh and surprising and powerful. It’s inspired by punk without trying to pretend we’re gutter rats with no prospects. We’re pissed at the world because it can clearly be so much better, not because it’s left us aside. And we’re such big believers in Truth with a capital T that we’re constantly checking to make sure we haven’t unknowingly become the hypocrites we’re railing against. That tendency often gets misread as jockey, self-conscious meta-commentary, but I swear it’s just the natural result of a pure, punk rock distrust of pretense.
I first got to know your band while hearing ‘Mutiny,’ how do you remember those recordings?
That’s when Bill got sucked into our mini-cult, as he produced it. I remember he got the gig by saying two important things. The first was that, while the goal of the record was to capture the energy of a band playing live, that didn’t mean you actually had to play it live. That’s always been our philosophy — shows are shows, studio is studio. They’re related, but different. The studio is for helping songs achieve their ideal form that can persist through time; the stage is for using your songs to create a brief utopia with your audience that can only last that one evening.
So we were inclined to use Bill as soon as he’d said that, but then he clinched the deal by saying, “I know you guys say you’re inspired by the Clash, but you remind me more of the Who, which is who the Clash were trying to be in the first place.” Usually I hate it when people blow smoke up my ass, but that smoke felt pretty great!
We recorded that one in Manhattan, where we were all living at the time (except for Tommy, who was still in Westchester), so we were able to stretch the recording budget a bit more, as we didn’t need it to cover our food or lodging.
What about ‘…Finally’ and ‘Gods & Sods’?
‘Finally’ was started while we were still signed to Giant, and finished a couple years later, after we’d been dropped, and eventually picked up by another division of Time Warner, Discovery, which was run at the time by Jac Holzman, who was legendary for founding Elektra back in the day. So it was cobbled together at a variety of different studios — wherever we were able to beg and cajole for some studio time today we would gladly pay for next year.
Bill was producing again (and, halfway through, replaced Sandy on bass), so we were all very comfortable together. The individual sessions were always a pleasure, but the long grind of finding a new label after getting dropped was pretty demoralizing.
‘Gods and Sods’ is just a compendium of outtakes and demos and other ephemera, though I am confident enough in what we do that I feel comfortable stating that our outtakes are better than a lot of other bands’ official albums. In a way, it’s sort of like ‘Green Eggs and Crack,’ in that it’s a bunch of songs recorded at different times and different headpsaces, only it’s 12 years later and we actually know what the fuck we’re doing now.
“We decided to keep going, writing and recording one new song a month and pairing it with one old song we liked”
What led you to get back together?
Bandcamp and boredom. During the pandemic, Bandcamp started this First Fridays thing, where the first Friday of every month they’d waive their commission on all sales, to help musicians who were struggling with no way to perform. I put a bunch of old stuff that had never made it to any digital services up for one First Friday early in the pandemic (I think it was June of 2020), not really expecting anything, it was just a way to pass the time. But the response from old fans was kind of overwhelming, and that led Sandy to suggest trying to get an actual NEW song ready for the next month’s First Friday — he sent me a riff he’d been working on, and I wrote a lyric called “New Memories” for that, and we shared it with the rest of the guys, who quickly rewrote the verse music, making it much poppier. I suggested we pair it with an old tune we had rehearsal tapes of but had never bothered working up in an actual studio, Snow Day. Sandy and Tommy put on masks and laid down some rhythm tracks in Westchester, Jay and Bill and I added our parts separately from our respective homes, and we had the single ready for July.
The response to THAT was even MORE overwhelming, so we decided to keep going, writing and recording one new song a month and pairing it with one old song we liked but had never recorded — if we could keep up that pace through Christmas, we’d have a new album.
Before we knew it we had like 3 dozen songs. I think the pandemic had that effect on a LOT of artists: there wasn’t much else to do but sit around and write.
Do you often play live? Who are some of your personal favorite bands that you’ve had a chance to play with over the past few years?
We’d pretty much stopped playing live in ’96 or ’97. We did a one-off show at the Knitting Factory in NYC to celebrate Tommy’s retirement from the NYPD in 2007, and released that as a DVD, but that was the only TMJ show between ’96 and ’22. We’d discussed doing some shows for the 30th anniversary of Cereal Killers, but the pandemic killed that idea, and also killed any possibility of touring on ‘Mistakes Were Made’. So last October was our first time back on stage as Too Much Joy in 15 years.
We had Jay’s son’s band open for us on a couple of those dates, which was pretty wild. They’re way better than we were at that age.
What would be the craziest gig you ever did?
Crazy in terms of crowd would be the second WHFS-tival in Virginia, I think. There were 30,000 people in the crowd. It’s very hard to suck in front of that many people — the energy coming off of them almost levitates you.
Crazy in terms of “that-shit-should-NOT-have-happened” was a gig with the Darling Buds at the Whisky in LA. It’s a long story, but they were absolute assholes to us, we don’t suffer people being assholes with no consequences, so Sandy and Tommy made a point of destroying all their gear before they took the stage. Our manager, who’d watched things brewing between us for a couple of days and knew we were gonna blow, wisely hired bodyguards that night, who whisked us away to safety. But apparently those shenanigans lost us a spot on Lollapalooza, and got us banned from LA venues for a while.
Are any of you involved in any other bands or do you have any active side-projects going on at this point?
Yes. Jay and I have released three albums as Wonderlick, which you can find on all the streaming services.
William plays bass guitar and is the musical director in the Cyndi Lauper band, and also continues to produce and mix for a variety of artistes (he spelled “artistes” that way, because he’s British).
Sandy is working on solo recordings, and playing in power trio Surface Wound with Tommy. Sandy is also playing in his reunited college band, Beauty Constant, led by Chihoe Hahn (of Hahn Guitars) – with Tommy stepping in on drums as well.
Tommy currently plays with several local cover bands, and continues to record original songs sporadically with friends
Thank you for taking your time. Last word is yours.
The Golden Rule is wrong. Don’t treat people the way YOU want them to treat you. Treat them the way THEY want you to treat them. If you doubt me, just imagine if every masochist followed the golden rule.
Klemen Breznikar
All photos courtesy of Too Much Joy
Too Much Joy Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / Bandcamp / Spotify / YouTube
Propeller Sound Recordings Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / Bandcamp / YouTube
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