Photo credit: Melissa Lee Johnson
In music, the playing field tends to be tilted in favor of highly social musicians, those natural extraverts who gig often and rack up collaborators, inspiration and opportunities in the process. There are some benefits to being anti-social, though, says Lifetime Achievement Award’s Jay Joslyn: Namely, you can get a lot done. It was all that extra time Joslyn gained by staying in that allowed him to commit to his plan to write and record one song a week for an entire year.
Inspired by a similar undertaking from the Chicago emo act Into It. Over It, Joslyn launched his song-a-week project in 2015, while his previous band, Ugly Brothers, took a break after finishing an album. As he saw it, it was a low-risk gambit.
“I think I just went into it with no expectations and just kind of thought, ‘I like a lot of different kinds of music, so I just wanted to experiment,’” Joslyn says. “The main goal was just to exercise that part of my brain. I like dabbling in different things and problem solving, playing around with different genres and vibes.”
The songs were compiled on Lifetime Achievement Award’s Bandcamp release, Today Hard, Tomorrow Hard, and Joslyn admits not all of them were winners. “A lot of the songs I didn’t consider to be finished work, but it was nice for me to have a deadline,” he says. “Whether I was happy with it or not, this is what I produced in that week.” The album is grab bag of indie rock, power-pop, pop-punk, dumb jokes, less dumb jokes, pretty great jokes and restless experimentation. The constant threads are Joslyn’s peppy voice, dry wit and deeply introverted mindset—on song after song he extols the virtues of keeping to himself.
“When I got out I wish I hadn’t,” he sings on “Something To Do With How Often You Do It,” grumbling, “I see a friend across the bar, but they pretend that they didn’t see me.” He sounds happiest when he’s singing about staying at home, where he’s safe from awkward interactions and social faux pas.
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“A lot of the songs are about what I think or feel day to day,” he says. “They are my way of dealing with things that either stress me out or confuse me.”
Joslyn writes in brief, punchy statements—many of the songs on Today Hard, Tomorrow Hard are under two minutes, and nearly all of them are under three—but for those who understandably won’t make the commitment to a 52-song album, Lifetime Achievement Award have reworked and re-recorded 10 songs from that project for their new album, Reprise of the Hard Times .
The record completes the evolution of Lifetime Achievement Award from a sorta-solo project to a full band. With Alex Shah, another veteran of Ugly Brothers, on bass and Grant Postier on drums, the songs are fuller and more driven than the first takes on Today Hard and fleshed out with inventive production details. It’s a purer representation of the band, Joslyn says.
“Now that the songwriting has moved to a full band dynamic, and we’re all writing songs together, we’re coming up with a lot of new ideas,” he says. “I’m pretty happy with the selection of songs from the 52-week project, and those songs are going to continue to be in some of our albums in the future, but we have a lot of songs we’ve been working on together outside of the 52-week project, too.”
Lifetime Achievement Award play an album release show Friday, Sept. 22 at Linneman’s Riverwest Inn with openers Cairns and Live Tetherball Tonight at 9 p.m.
