The New York City-based Americana duo Joanie and Matt will be releasing an album called Sterling on July 19. The duo first worked together about ten years ago and they wrote a bluegrass album for kids. Over the past decade, both talented singer-songwriters have been working on independent projects and have been highly successful.
“Matt was actually in India living there and I was going through some life changes and I reached out to him about starting a project together and kind of co-writing again,” Joanie recalls. She ended up moving after Matt returned from India and they were only about ten blocks from each other. “We realized from our first meet that the songs were so easy to write and it was a good pairing,” she said.
“I would bring a melody and Joanie would add the lyrics or vice versa,” Matt added. “It was very complimentary and reciprocal.”
The new album has seven tracks, all of which relate to stories in the Bible. “We basically went through the Old Testament and picked out some really interesting and controversial stories,” Joanie said, adding that the duo focused on some stories that may not really have the national attention and may have some backstory behind the story itself. “We really dug into the text. We just went line by line and thought about what the story was about.”
Joanie said she had written music for adults before she started writing for children. During that time, she had written her share of love and heartbreak songs in her 20s. Joanie and Matt wanted to do something different. She said Matt had the background having gone Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and had studied the text thoroughly. While Matt has a lot of knowledge, Joanie said she was not a very religious person. “I was able to learn these stories that I had really no knowledge about,” she said. “As a songwriter, it was challenge to take a topic you really are not familiar with and turn it into a song.”
Matt said they were looking for themes that were really relevant with what was going on today with the political climate, including #metoo, LGBTQ, addiction, and family relationships He said the most amazing thing about the Bible or about source texts for our society is there’s something universal about them, even when the stories are difficult to digest. ” Particularly with some of the stories we focused on with our music in this project, we looked to give voice to the marginalized. That was really important to us,” he said.
Joanie added that they wanted to modernize these stories and tell them through a feminist lens. “I think we hit the nail on the head, or so we’ve been hearing,” she said. Joanie said everyone has been very positive about the music, even in certain communities where they felt like they might be a little risqué. “The progressive communities especially have been embracing it full force,” she added.
The first song that the duo wrote together was “Sterling,” which ended up being the title track of the album and the first single from the project. Matt said he actually sent Joanie a different story, which they also wrote about. Joanie was reading about the story on Wikipedia and found the backstory of another character. Matt said King David had a son named Amnon and a daughter named Tamar. He continued to explain that Amnon, a half-brother of Tamar, raped her and King David didn’t do anything about it.
When Joanie read about that, it really bothered her. “The reason why it bothered me so much is because when you are growing up in Jewish religious school on the weekends, you hear about King David being this incredible figure in history who could do wrong when you are a child at least,” she said, adding that you sing songs about King David. She said learning about him not standing up for Tamar was really disturbing to her. and it was like uncovering this fault of King David.
“I took out a Bible and we read this part of the story together,” Matt explained. ” Tamar is totally silent in the text. She doesn’t speak at all. She has no voice. She’s just spoken about.”It is very vivid what happens to her. wrote the song from her perspective. As songwriters, they started wondering what would be the first thing that Tamar would say when she found out that her father didn’t do anything about this. “Right there, it just blew wide open and we started writing the song together,” Matt said.
The music video for “Sterling” was released last month. Joanie said they made the music video while we were in the studio recording with a full band. She said the videographer would lay low and was a like a fly on the wall. “We really left it up to him as far as what to capture,” Joanie said. “It was a very organic experience and we’re very happy with the way it came out. I think it really captured the song itself.”
Joanie said that maybe they could have recorded a more upbeat song to release as a video, but they felt like “Sterling” is such as strong song. She added that people really respond to the song when they play out live. “Everybody has their #metoo story,” Joanie said.
Matt said they done one full band concert and will do the second this Thursday (July 18) for their album release party. “We do elude to the source a little bit and we will jump into the song,” he said, adding that they went into a little more depth at a recent show. ” It worked really well actually. It didn’t seem too forced or strange I don’t think,” he said.
Joanie said they played a handful of shows and they are working on booking shows for fall, winter and spring. She said they plan on reaching out to music venues across the country including secular listening rooms as well as reaching out to temples that may want to book them.