Apr. 08, 2009 - Issue #703: Spring Style 2009

The Joys

The Joys are people, too

Ken Ross sounds like a pretty happy guy. And why shouldn’t he be: with his band, the Joys, for which Ross plays bass, recently wrapping up an American tour that found the Joys playing at SXSW in Austin and making a pilgrimage to Hollywood’s famed Sunset Strip, he’s got plenty of reasons. His only worry now, as he’s checking in from just outside Las Vegas in Death Valley, is a rather daunting trek back to Canada before their musician’s visas expire. Asked how much time they have left, Ross laughs, before admitting: “About 24 hours, actually. And we’re looking at least at a 25-hour drive ahead of us. Its just been hard to leave. It’s so nice down here.”

 

The band is making a big push behind Unfold, its latest full-length from July of 2008, for which the band was able to enlist the help of producer Tom Treumuth [Big Sugar, Kazzer]. With the benefit of more time combined with the experience of Treumuth, the band was finally able to take its time and craft a record that fulfils the potential of its alternative rock stylings, and the members couldn’t be happier with the results.

 

“With Unfold, we were really able to focus on each part of the whole process with the time we’d been given,” Ross explains. “When we recorded [2005’s Demolition Sessions] we basically just set up and banged out the tracks right off the floor. There’s definitely something to recording that way as well—there’s a lot of energy in a one-taker. But this time around we really wanted the depth you get with building a record chapter by chapter, piece by piece.”

 

With vocalist Sarah Smith drawing comparisons to pretty much any woman who has ever sung in a rock band—some warranted, some way off—Ross admits that the stigma of having a female-fronted band still persists today, with people’s baseless preconceptions and gender-influenced comparisons making it more difficult for the band to be taken at face value.

“We deal with a bit of that kind of stereotyping, but at the end of the day, we’re all just people,” he says. “Someone might come to one of our shows with an idea of how we sound or who we are, but hopefully we’re able to make an impression and relate to them on a human level and leave that sexist stuff behind. By the time they leave they realize we’re just four regular people who love playing music.” V 

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