Photo courtesy of Joe Wong
If you've watched TV shows such as “Master of None,” “Russian Doll,” “Awkwafina is Nora From Queens” or “Midnight Gospel,” you’ve heard the music of Joe Wong, a prominent TV and film composer living in Los Angeles. On September 18, he will release his debut solo album, Nite Creatures.
While he’s lived in LA since 2012 and has lived in various cities around the country in the years prior, Milwaukee—the place he grew up and played his first gigs—still has a strong influence on his music today.
He fondly recalls playing his first Milwaukee shows in the ‘90s when was 14. He performed at a number of DIY style venues, including the now defunct Camelot Inn, The Unicorn and The Globe. In addition to plentiful all age matinee shows, he especially relished going to basement shows.
“I lived at a house on Bremen Street, which was later featured on ‘Hoarders.’ The person that moved in, a tenant or two after us, was the very first guest on ‘Hoarders,’” Wong says. “But when I was in high school, it was the basement show house where I saw lots of bands play and played myself and then me and some friends took it over when we turned 18 and plenty of bands came through and played in the basement. Some of whom, became famous years later. I can remember Modest Mouse for example, as one of the bands that played there. Lots of great bands played in our basement. It was a great place to grow up.”
Going Deeper
Unlike the bigger cities he would later move to where everything was more readily available, in Milwaukee he had to “deeper a little bit to find the kind of music that I was interested in, at the time.” He spent much of his free time going to Atomic Records, Half Price Records and Earwaves. “Meeting the people that worked there and having them recommend music to me, at the time was really a great way of discovering new artists,” he says.
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Milwaukee also had a direct impact on his new album. The Flaming Lips’s drummer Steven Drozd recorded his part for his song “In the Morning” at Howl Street Recordings with Shane Hochstetler. Wong had composed a musical score for the Lips and later became friends with Drozd, who was a fan of his podcast The Trap Set.
Last summer while Wong was visiting family and the Lips were in town for Summerfest, they decided to get together and record. Picking Howl Street was an easy decision as Wong had been a longtime friend and fan of Hochstetler. “He’s one of the heaviest, deepest drummers that I’ve ever heard,” says Wong. “And he was in plenty of bands when I was in high school and we were constantly playing shows together.”
Those experiences have giving a solid foundation to grow from and helped him prepare to make his own personal statement on his debut album.
Q&A with Joe Wong
Why do you like composing for TV and film?
It’s the difference between being a sculptor and an architect in the sense that when you’re writing your own songs, you have to make all the decisions on your own and you have this slab of marble, you can do whatever you want with it. When you’re writing for film and TV, it's more like being an architect, in that you’re writing with the intent of elevating someone else's art. And so, it’s similar to being an architect in that, when you’re an architect, there’s a specific plot of land that you have to build on. There’re specific parameters that you have to follow and certain functions that the structure has to fulfill.
And similarly, when I’m scoring a film or a television show, I’m working around the dialogue and I’m working with the rhythm of the edit of the picture, and I am there to inform or shape the emotional intent of the characters on screen. So, it’s a more collaborative process, which is great. And it’s kind of a good contrast to writing my own stuff. I like doing both, but it requires a different skill set.
Your solo album seems to be a pretty natural extension of your past work, in how cinematic it is.
Yeah. I definitely used lots of the same players that I've used previously. And I was definitely going for a big orchestral sound. I think having a background in film and television music helps inform what I was doing orchestration wise on the album.
But then on the other hand, it’s a much more personal statement than anything I’ve done in film and TV, but it probably was informed by watching other people and helping other people as they were making really personal statements on their films or television shows. I was writing the album around the time that I was scoring a show called ‘Russian Doll,’ which was Natasha Lyonne’s show. And it was very personal to her. And I was kind of watching her as an outsider / collaborator and she was going through that process. And it inspired me to kind of dig deeper when I was writing my own album. I wanted to see if I could make a statement as personal as what she made.
The album’s lyrics were influenced by the death of your father. How was writing about it therapeutic?
I think that that was pretty much a subconscious thing that was weighing heavily on my psyche at the time. And so that theme of loss emerged in the lyrics, subconsciously. I wasn't really sitting down and thinking, what do I want to write about today? I was just really trying to surrender myself to the process and let it out. And that ended up being what it was about, which makes sense because I was constantly thinking about it in my day to day life, at that time.
Does your podcast feel more important during these past few months with COVID-19?
I don’t know if it's become more important per se, but when quarantine started in March, I decided to do daily episodes of the show, as a way of maintaining some sort of social connection to people. And so that was really exciting, and it felt like a return to the feeling I had when I first started doing the show.
Also, I think, we’re coming up on 300 episodes and I’ve spoken of many of my favorite musicians and some of the all-time greats. And I think, just kind of the aggregate knowledge that they’ve imparted, is probably rubbed off in some way. And it's probably helped me in my creative process…I’ve been fortunate enough to speak to so many people that I respect and that have bodies of work, that have changed my life. And I think those conversations are just part of my makeup now and hopefully inform me in a positive way. I can’t see how they wouldn’t.
What are your future plans?
We had a couple of tours scheduled for this year and there’ll be rescheduled for whenever it’s safe to play shows again. The band is Matt Cameron from Pearl Jam and Soundgarden on drums, Mary Timony, who produced the album and who played in Helium and now plays an Ex Hex, on guitar.
Chad Molter, from the bands Faraquet and Medications, on base. Crisanta Baker who plays a Lo Moon, on keyboards. Mary Lattimore on harp and then a 12-piece tampere orchestra. So, it's a pretty logistically complex endeavor We did one performance last year and it was wonderful. So, I was really excited to get out there this year, but it’ll have to wait awhile.
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