alt-J's Joe Newman on fatherhood, LA, and JJerome87 solo album 'The Canyon' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Alt-J frontman Joe Newman was driving to his favourite East Los Angeles coffee spot on day one of making his debut solo album ‘The Canyon’ when he slammed his brakes. Before him on the deserted suburban street stood two coyotes, fixing him with a cold glare - sizing up the new kid in town.

“Sometimes there is chaos in life, and equally sometimes there is a moment when everything around you settles in a really perfect way; and that was a moment,” he reflects. Those animals now populate the cover of ‘The Canyon’, an album steeped in the music and life of LA, and which documents a transitional stage in Joe’s life.

In the months before the 2022 release of Alt-J’s fourth album ‘The Dream’, he became a first-time dad - a life event that had the unforeseen side effect of accelerating his songwriting energy. The material was more personal, too, and it soon became clear he was writing a solo record.

“When you have a child, you are flooded with so many extreme emotions that you are familiar with but not on the same scale. You feel very vulnerable, agitated and worried for the future. You start to be more reactive to what’s happening in the wider world, politically. You are just in a state of survival. I found the writing was quite medicinal.”

“I knew I wasn’t going to find the centre of what [the record] could be if I was to stay in Brixton.”

The new songs represented a development of his voice, literally as well as figuratively, with an earthy soul influence emerging on tracks like the gritty, galloping ‘Walkaway Music’ and the slick, silvery ‘Juicy’. Joe leant into it, drawn to the City of Angels and its rich cultural legacy.

“There is no better example of the emotional toll of love than within the voice of a soul singer from the ‘60s,” he says. “Soulful is maybe too strong a word [for ‘The Canyon’], because it still sounds a bit like Alt-J and has some roots in folk, but there are soulful elements and gospel, bluesy elements. I knew I wasn’t going to find the centre of what that could be if I was to stay in Brixton.”

He connected with producer Carlos de la Garza (Paramore, The Linda Lindas), and together they assembled their version of the legendary session musician troupe The Wrecking Crew. The band immediately grasped the rootsy Americana that Joe’s demos had been suggesting - a sound perhaps best encapsulated in the yearning beauty of ‘Two Hearts’, a love letter to his daughter that is threaded with voice notes ranging from her earliest days on Earth to the emergence of her own voice.

He took inspiration from Procol Harum’s baroque masterpiece ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’, co-written by Gary Brooker, another Brixton resident reckoning with the might of American soul music. When Joe saw an Instagram post from his then-pregnant partner, the Melbourne-born choreographer Darcy Wallace, captioned “two hearts in one body”, the song virtually completed itself.

Deeming his real name “not satisfying enough” and too “distinctly average” for the album, Joe revived an old email handle: JJerome87. “It’s a signal for something bizarre that you’re about to hear,” he quips.

As for Alt-J, they remain on good terms, with his bandmates having joined Joe as new fathers in recent years. The singer promises that the group will “come back stronger down the line”, but for now, he’s understandably enthused by the foreign terrain that he’s only just begun to tread on his own.

‘The Canyon’ is out 26th June via Mushroom Music / Virgin Music Group.

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