She made a name for herself playing keyboards and singing backup for fellow Brits Joe Jackson and Peter Gabriel, as well as the widely varied Rodney Crowell and Laurie Anderson. But since the release of her debut album Tender City in 1996, Joy Askew has focused on her solo career.
The New York-based artist’s latest album Drunk On You ably extends the re-emphasis on songs begun with its preceding 2008 outing The Pirate Of Eel Pie—which followed her duo Echo, with electronic jazz musician Takuya Nakamura, and its electronic jazz "down-tempo" recordings mixing jazz standards and originals.
“Eel Pie went back to doing songs, and was a return to where I started with Tender City,” says Askew. “This one’s even more so: It’s kind of par with Tender City: Even though they’re 15 years apart, I feel like it’s the same ‘me.’”
The big difference, says Askew, is that the tuneful while atmospheric Drunk On You, which she released last month, has the optimal sound quality that had previously eluded her.
“I was much more careful in the recording process,” she says. “It all comes down to money, basically—which I didn't have. Money and time. But I planned very carefully, so that I went into the studio with my band like a lightning bolt, and only needed three days to record.”
Askew strove for a live feel, “not like a gig, but like we were really playing together,” she continues. “I knew there would be some overdubs, but I wanted a situation where everything would be recorded well enough so that if I could only afford three days in the studio and get 10 songs out of it, they’d be done properly.”
Placing a premium on sound quality, then, she began preparing for what became Drunk On You shortly following the release of Eel Pie.
“What really propelled me was that I’d done quite a few gigs with my band at Rockwood Muisc Hall, and people—former band members and other musicians I’ve worked with across-the-board--said I must record what they just heard,” she says. “But that takes a long time.”
With enough funding via the PledgeMusic fundraising platform, Askew recorded with her band in New York, then after an extensive search, enlisted busy Philadelphia-based mixer Brian McTear, who worked her into two long weekends of mixing sessions.
“The whole process from beginning to record the album and releasing it took a year-and-a-half,” notes Askew, who had actually begun writing songs for Drunk On You back in England.
“I got offered a house sit in Hampstead Heath—a lovely area in London and my former stomping ground after college,” she continues. “It had a Steinway—and the ideas just kept coming! I wrote the first three songs on Drunk On You—the titletrack, 'AOAO' and 'I Broke The Law' all in the space of two weeks, as I was so inspired by the surroundings: The piano was just gorgeous and I was alone in a four-story house, and that kind of space opens you out.”
The three songs stand out for Askew as manifesting a “big change” in her writing.
“They just came so naturally,” she explains. “Often when I write, it can be really agonizing, but these rolled out and sounded great, and people keep saying they’re their favorites.”
While everyone can relate to “Drunk On You” “as a relationship thing,” Askew says that the song, with it’s “very easy-sounding chorus,” was written on a “much deeper personal level.”
“I think back on the past 20 years and go, ‘What was I thinking?’” she relates. “I realize I’ve been driven by my inspiration—which I feel is pure—and the belief in ‘this glittering object’ of getting somewhere in my life with my music, and making decisions based on that rather than staying with inspiration! When you’re drunk you’re not in your right mind, and when you’re sober you gain wisdom and insight.”
The title “AOAO,” Askew says, is an expression like “What the hell?”
“It’s a lament—like sighing,” she says. “The song arose out of musician friends who came to visit in the Hampstead house, whom I’ve known 35 years or more. It was like yesterday when they walked in, and we got into a heavy conversation on how basically 20 people rule the world, and how it’s been getting worse and worse! And the end of the song is like me unleashing my emotion over that."
Here Askew confesses to being a "beautiful earther."
"I think the planet is beautiful," she says, "so why is it such a f**k-up when it’s so beauitfiul?”
As for “I Broke The Law,” it reflects Askew’s staunch animal activist/vegan stance.
“I assisted in humane eduction in schools all over New York,” says Askew, whose song “Poor Man’s Greed” appeared in the animal sanctuary documentary Peaceable Kingdom. “I got very upset at footage of animal testing—especially bunny rabbits—and the owners of the Hampstead house had a very aged bunny rabbit who needed to be looked after every day. Funnily enough he was extremely grumpy, but he was the family pet for 10 years, and that’s a long time. And he was such a character, and my companion for the four weeks I was there writing songs—and suddenly I thought about that animal testing documentary I’d seen.”
She also thought of the activist Animal Liberation Front, and incorporated its philosophy of action into the song. The ALF often skirts the law in seeking to save as many animals as possible from animal abuse (it was named as a terrorist threat by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2005), and while the song doesn’t mention animals directly, it’s become “a popular song within the movement,” Askew says.
The Drunk On You album, meanwhile, is starting to pick up listeners thanks to a radio campaign supporting the tiltetrack first single.
“I’m really trying to bust it out on radio, and gig up and down the East Coast and possibly the West Coast,” says Askew, looking ahead to a full band performance in New York at Rockwood Music Hall on Dec. 29.
Until then, Drunk On You is available at iTunes and through joyaskew.com.
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