INTERVIEW: Joyous Wolf find their ‘Place in Time’
Photo: Joyous Wolf consists of Nick Reese, Blake Allard, Greg Braccio and Robert Sodaro. Photo courtesy of the band / Provided by Atom Splitter PR with permission.
Nick Reese, the vocalist for the modern rock band Joyous Wolf, tells it like it is. He doesn’t adorn answers with flowery speech or withhold too much information. If audiences want to know about Joyous Wolf, which has been going strong for five years, he’ll never hold back.
The same can be said of Reese and company’s recording efforts, which include this year’s EP A Place in Time, featuring such as songs as “Had Enough,” “Quiet Heart,” “Said Too Much” and “Feel the Low.”
“We had just signed with Roadrunner a year and a bit ago,” Reese said in a recent phone interview. “OK, here we are. We’re on a major label. Let’s go write our first record for it.”
The band consists of Reese, guitarist Blake Allard, bassist Greg Braccio and drummer Robert Sodaro. They collectively began writing at the end of 2018, and then the recording for Roadrunner came together in early 2019.
“It really all came together in a couple of weeks,” Reese said. “We were done fairly quickly. We finished some time in early February of this year, and we just went straight to it. We wrote most of the songs in two weeks. Only two of them, ‘Undesired’ and ‘Mother Rebel,’ were tracks that we already had in the pocket, and we had been developing for a while. It’s really that simple. As far as the name, when we wrote the song ‘A Place in Time,’ it just seemed appropriate.”
The band had been playing “Undesired” and “Mother Rebel” on the road, trying to test the waters and see if the audience enjoyed the tracks. They did, especially “Mother Rebel,” which was a mainstay of their set list for some time.
“‘Mother Rebel’ is one of our oldest songs actually,” the vocalist said. “It used to be quite different. It was much more of a jam than it is now. We like the song a lot, so we took it. And we’re like, OK, let’s give it a final version. We’re going to really improve on this song, and we did.”
Joyous Wolf have released “Quiet Heart” and the title track as singles, mostly because they sound so different from each other. Reese likes that quality because it showcases the diverse sounds of the band.
“To us, it just felt like it would be the biggest punch in the face because ‘Quiet Heart’ and ‘Place in Time’ are very dynamic,” he said. “They’ve got strong choruses, and we were really proud of them. We were like, OK, if we want to demonstrate a taste of us, what would it be? That’s what it was.”
Decisions for the band are decided on purely democratic terms. Each of the four members has an equal voice, and that seemed nonnegotiable the way Reese described it.
Perhaps that equality is a byproduct of their early days and the interesting story of how Joyous Wolf formed five years ago.
“We were just musicians,” Reese said. “We had all been playing around in Southern California in different ways, and Robert and I go way back. And we always wanted to do something together. I dropped out of college because I just hated it, and I started Joyous Wolf. I called Blake, who had I meant at Guitar Center six months prior for like 15 minutes. I really didn’t know him, but he could play guitar. I wanted it to be spontaneous, and I remember he asked me on the phone, ‘What kind of music is it going to be?’ I’m like, ‘I have no idea. Let’s just see what happens.’ And then Greg joined, and he and Robert went to high school together. And they had been jamming together for a while. It just sort of came to be, and we kept doing it.”
There were some definite goals when the quartet came together. They wanted to make money and get a name for themselves. They wanted to break out of Orange County, California, and start playing in Los Angeles and around the country.
“We kind of have a very strong dislike for the place that we grew up because it’s just not us,” Reese admitted. “We were all very much outsiders, and we felt that. That’s kind of what made us all stick together.”
He added: “It’s not so much that we dislike the place itself. … We all have this weird jadedness about it. We worked really hard at our craft, and we were very competitive. When we went and played a show, it was never personal, but our goal was to look the best and to outshine our competitors. That’s what has made us a thing, and we just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible because we wanted more for ourselves than the local scene in Orange County.”
In many ways, that initial motivation has helped the band with their national presence. They are currently on tour, opening for Deep Purple and heading to such states as Georgia, Tennessee, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Indiana, among other locations.
And A Place in Time appears to be just the start of a successful year of recording for the band. “We’re making another record,” Reese said. “We’re striking an album, a full album, and we’re going to start doing that in the fall.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Joyous Wolf’s new EP is called A Place in Time. Click here for more information.
