Joy

Well, I finally got around to putting together a little MySpace page for my old band Joy - you can find it right here, if you're so inclined as to want to check it out. I could blather on about the band and the page, but I'm lazy and it's easier just to quote myself from the Bio section:

"...If you’re an avid fan (and why the hell wouldn’t you be?) you’ll remember that in the Bio for C. Kerns and the Futiles I mentioned that I had been in a little band called Joy in Rockford, IL way back around 1991-’92 or thereabouts. This here page is to remember that swell band. A couple years before then, I helped my friend Bob record a demo for this punk band called Full On Straight – the drummer and bass player for that band were Joel Peterson and Kelly Kliebe, respectively. About a year later Kelly joined my band, The Morning Glories – about a year after that, our drummer decided to bow out and Joel joined – then we changed the name and that’s how come you got Joy.

The first two tunes were recorded at a place in Cherry Valley by a swell guy who helped us record in his badass home studio and didn’t mind our all-around lack of anything resembling a work ethic, or even a basic understanding of what that might be. Another fun thing about that time is that I didn’t always write the lyrics for all our songs – I had a couple notebooks worth of lyrics/poetry that my good friend Billy had given to me – he wrote so damn much that he just gave me a couple notebooks’ worth, and I wrote so damn little when it came to lyrics that, well, it worked out pretty well there for a while. Point being, Billy wrote the lyrics for the first two songs, and I just arranged them to suit the music as I wrote it at the time – so that’s his credit. The third song is something I was in the process of writing in 1993, when we pretty much had to give up due to my being located in a different state (Madison, WI) than they were (Minneapolis, MN). It’s probably one of the first demos I put together by myself – recorded on an old Tascam 4-track, and it’s pretty crappy. Still, it’s something we’d been playing in practices, so it’s really sort of like the last Joy song.

Well, that’s it – that was Joy. I’m biased, of course, but I think we were a pretty good little band."

Whether or not you check it out -- and whether or not you enjoy it -- as always, that's up to you.