Photos by Michael Salisbury at South Facing Windows

Last fall, from the gritty opening guitar chords of his first ever single “Chesapeake,” Joyfriend had instantly captured our attention. Our curiosity grew as his consistency did - singles “Carolina,” “Tokyo Waterfall” & “Champion” each showed us something new we liked from the 23-year-old Park Ridge resident. Eager to hear more, our hopes for a longer listen from him were answered last month in the form of his debut EP, Dog Fight, a 6-song offering that quickly became one of our favorite projects of the year. With not much out there yet on the emerging young talent, we caught up with Joyfriend to get more familiar.

While you’re a regular on The Forecast, this is our first time chatting on the pages of These Days - can you introduce yourself for our readers?

Whats up readers. I'm Tommy Russell, I am twenty three years old, (the youngest of four siblings), & I was born & raised in Park Ridge, IL. I have been making music for more or less ten years & devote almost all of my free time to the practice. When I'm not working on music, I like to stay busy with hands on odd jobs, mostly including construction/ painting gigs. Right now I'm a full time custodian at a local school district & on the weekends I work at the beloved Trader Joes grocery store. Other interests include: reading, the outdoors, going to shows (miss it, but we must stay diligent), filling composition books with bad ideas & spending too much money on my record collection. This all sounds like I'm applying for some dating site or something, haha. But I don't use those, so maybe not.

What was your entry into music like & what were you up to before the Joyfriend project?

Growing up I was constantly surrounded with music. At an early age I remember always listening to music on my family camping/ road trips. Lots of John Denver through the Colorado Rockies, maybe some Fleetwood Mac on our way to Tennessee, stuff like that. It was always a group activity for us, mostly all of my mom's jams in long car rides. Through my adolescence all my siblings always listened to some great music, as they still do, so it was always easy to access pretty like-able, sometimes obscure, stuff. As far as actually starting to pursue music goes I have to give a lot of credit to my older brother Michael. Neither of my parents ever really played instruments or anything, I think my Grandad used to fiddle around on the banjo & accordion singing old Irish songs on the streets of Portlaoise. But Michael knew he wanted to pursue music from the very start, it just came to him, so naturally as the younger brother envying the older brother, I followed suit. He still leads the way for me. My first attempts at music were as predictable as anyone else, just messing around on GarageBand. I was very intrigued with Hip-Hop through middle school & most of high school, so I started making beats & trying to rap, haha. I was never really all that good, but it taught me a lot looking back on it now & set a pretty versatile base for where I'm at now with music. Once I hit about twenty years old I think I started hitting a pretty good stride as far as developing my own sound. Those years as a “rapper”/ producer kind of molded their way into this lo-fi/ electronic, singer-songwriter type stuff. I was pursuing a project under the alias of Mimic for a couple years where I was playing little shows around the DIY Chicago scene. I put out one record under that name that I’m still pretty proud of to this day. That stuff helped shape so much of how I now produce music, recording/ mixing/ mastering etc., it put me in a really comfortable spot in how I would continue to approach music, whatever the kind may be. Then about a year ago, I picked up the guitar & stripped everything down to the basics. I started strictly writing songs on my guitar, filling composition notebooks & naturally, Joyfriend was born.

We were first introduced to you through your single “Chesapeake”, which is unlike anything we’ve heard come from the city before, what are some of the influences / ideologies you’d attribute to the formation of your sound?

Chesapeake was the very first song I wrote after the idea of Joyfriend came to me. I think I was trying to tap into just being as honest as possible in my writing. I never felt that I was ever saying anything with that much truth behind my old projects. Though they came from a very real place, it just always felt like there was something missing. When I started writing Chesapeake I was inspired a lot by those family camping trips that I discussed earlier. I don't know why exactly, but just the scenery & energy of places I've been was something I was trying to evoke through song. Which is why the titles of those first two singles, Chesapeake & Carolina, are literal places on the map, which is hilarious cause I've never been to either of those places, haha. Granted, it helped in a weird way because I kind of had to imagine these thoughts instead of taking any literal approach in the writing. I used the idea of Chesapeake as this sort of vessel in my struggles with my belief in anything, or nothing. Call it religion or call it whatever you'd like. I still don't know what to call it which is kind of the point of the song I guess. To me it's a feeling of wanting to fight something larger than life & the only way to combat that was by using this metaphor of a mountain. I absolutely love mountains, I'd like to live on one someday.

Your new EP, Dog Fight, is a truly great listen - talk to us about how that batch of songs came together

Dog Fight ended up being something that I had no intention of making, which is exciting to me. As I continued to write more songs & after I released a fair amount of singles, I kind of just found myself in this deeper and darker place. At the beginning of shut-down due to the virus, my Mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer, (thankfully she has completely beat it by now & that’s to no surprise considering she is the strongest I know), but literally the day before shut-down was her first treatment of chemotherapy. So, within a week there were two unbelievably heavy things to face in my everyday life. Which sounds kind of selfish & I apologize, because we are all facing this pandemic, & my mom is the one who had to fight that battle, not me. Nonetheless, both those things were altering to my mental health. I was having a tough time with my loved ones & I started losing friends & relationships that I still cherish. I naturally started having lots of thoughts about life & death & all these other uncertainties. I was really scared there for a while & had to do something about it. I'm usually quite an optimist, or so I like to think, so it was kind of a new feeling to me. I started thinking all the way back to the early years of my life at things I've had to face with my family & I also started thinking heavily about my present. Which is actually sort of the timeline of how this project plays out in full. The title track opener is something that I feel was actually written by like my seven year old self as odd as that may sound. & the outro, Champion, Is a song surrounding my twenty third birthday, which is the relation to my present day self. Everything in between is there for the listener to kind of pick at. It's all there on the table. I'm just happy to get it off my chest. There is one specific night that I’d like to devote to, that had a lot to do with where these songs began. It was the night of August 10th & our family's home had lost power for like twelve hours or so & earlier that day was kind of weird & spooky. It was that day where the tornado touched down in the Rogers Park area. Anyways, everything was just kind of eerie & I felt really inspired by it so I ended up finding one of my dad's old tape recorders, lit a couple candles in my room & just started fleshing stuff out. I wrote so much of what came to be the project that night. Some of those actual original tape recordings can be heard here & there throughout the EP. That same night I found the shot I took of my Dogs, the one that ended up being the artwork & pinned it on my bulletin board in this sort of knowing sense that I knew where I was going from there. I'll never forget it. That was a good night.

Which was the hardest song to write on this project?

To be completely honest, all of the songs that made the project were the songs that almost took no thought at all. Everything was fairly easy to get out. It is more so the songs that didn't make the project that were the hardest to write. It feels that way a lot of times in my process of things, as I imagine it may feel for us all, where the stuff that I was working at for hours & just entirely overthinking, were just never good enough! But you have to get through those ideas in order to reach the ones that were just always there in hiding. I always think about it like shedding skin. However, I will say that track number three, “Plath / You Just Killed A Deer”, was the hardest one to put together production wise. In fact, I was going back to re-edit/ mix “Plath” so many times that it is the reason “You Just Killed A Deer” came about. I was driving myself nuts listening back to “Plath” for so long until one moment where I picked up on this feedback that was coming off one of my vocal takes. I ended up dragging out that feedback into a sample that I looped & for some reason it sounded so pretty to me. I was like “Woah I need to put something on top of this!”. In turn, “You Just Killed A Deer” fit over it perfectly, which was a song I had written pretty early on in the process & had no intention of putting out. So, It just kind of works like that in mysterious ways a lot & for that reason, I just love music so much. (Shoutout to Sylvia Plath by the way. She inspired a lot more than just that track in all of this).

Describe the perfect listening environment for Dog Fight

I guess the perfect listening environment would just ideally be wherever you are upon the moment of hearing it. I don’t quite know an answer to this one. It's a really good question. In my experience of listening to any of my favorite records or artists, or what have you, I can say that it kind of just happened at random. Where I was in this very specific space & now I can always relate back to that time or space whenever I hear it. Which I love so much, cause it almost feels like it wasn't supposed to happen, but it did. It's irreversible. Music is so cool man. I guess I hope that when you hear this record you are just exactly where you need to be & that it helps you understand why you're there. That would be perfect to me, just creating your own perfect environment.

What’s been the most fulfilling piece of feedback you’ve gotten on the EP so far?

The most fulfilling piece of feedback has really just been the fact that I have any feedback at all. To anyone & everyone who has been a part of the experience I just want to thank you. Especially to those who make something of it or who can claim this as their own now. What I make is personal to me, but that's merely a sliver of what it is or what it can become to someone else. I was really worried with how these songs would be received considering how much of a leap I took in the sound. So I guess what comforts me the most is just knowing that some people are down to stick around to see where this goes. I just want it to mean something & so far it feels like it does. Thank you.

Surrounding the release of “Tokyo Waterfall” you played me two versions of the track - one a slower acoustic take & another sped up with added instrumentation, which went on to become the official release. Do you find yourself often creating different iterations of a song like this?

Deep cuts! Yes. When I first wrote “Tokyo Waterfall” I felt as though what I was playing in the writing process was exactly how it needed to sound in the recording process, much like that gut feeling I was talking about. (This all stems back pretty nicely into what I was saying earlier about how certain songs are easier/ harder to make, vice versa). Anyways, after I had initially captured the version that would eventually go on to be released “officially”, I felt endless amounts of doubts in the song's structure. I went on to pursue this alternate version that I actually still enjoy very much, but it wasn't until a good word of advice from a friend that I had realized where I was making the wrong moves. He had brought to my attention how some of the smallest most intricate moments in a song could be so big. He had pointed out things I hadn't heard in my original recordings & suggested a couple very subtle changes that characterized the original piece to a certain perfection that I was aiming for. For reference you can find the alternate version of that song at both Soundcloud & Bandcamp. Ultimately, to answer the question, yes, I find myself creating & adapting multitudes of songs almost always. I find it to be both really helpful & extremely frustrating all at once but at the same time it creates so much more space for the songs to breathe or grow into where they find fit. The songs have a mind of their own.

“Champion” - a song you released on the night of your 23rd birthday - juxtaposes a unique blend of confidence alongside some very vulnerable writing. Can you talk to us a bit about that song?

Timing had everything to do with the creation of this song. To give some backstory, I'd like to explain these weird parallels that were present between the day I was born in 1997 & my twenty third birthday in 2020. On the day that I was born it just so happened that all three of my siblings had come down with the chicken pox. This spiraled into my mom & I having to be quarantined from the rest of the family for the first few months of my being here. Fast forward to 2020 & here we are in quarantine once again. To make things more bizarre, I was born on May 27th, 1997, (gemini szn) which was surrounding the notorious & victorious ‘97 bulls on yet another one of their great runs to a championship. Fast forward to 2020, & the world is going crazy about the ‘90s bulls team once again due to this new documentary “The Last Dance”, which was amazing by the way. So to wrap it all together, here I am in 2020 experiencing almost an identical universe to the first days of my existence where Im in quarantine again while the world is going nuts about the bulls & to top it all off I am entering what most of us like to call our “Jordan Year” (turning twenty three). I don't know why, but all those parallels were just very interesting & intense to me & It caused me to just really focus on where I wanted to be in my twenty third year, which in turn, led to the song. It felt like this really big moment for some reason, so I just used that energy in my own way. It's probably one of my favorite songs that I've written. It was very much just a letter to myself that kind of woke me up being like “Hey, check yourself man”. So, saying some of those things was kind of tough but it felt really good to be honest with myself. I wanted that contrast to cut through, as a sort of assurance to myself or whomever else that it's very normal to have these egos & insecurities of sorts. It's all about the balance. & that’s pretty much it, just be a champion. My older brother tied that whole song together perfectly by adding the strings at the end, I love that part.

Any final thoughts you’d like to leave our audience with?

Whatever it is you believe in… keep it alive! Do your part in this life with whatever tools you got. Be kind. Stay loved. Keep learning. With that, I think we can create a safe world for one another. I'm here for it all. Also, thank you so much to you guys for the questions & all that you do for Chicago creatives / musicians alike. Shoutout to everyone who's making it happen. Chicago inspires me so much, thank you !

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