INTERVIEW: Jodaki makes time for more "hell yeahs"

[sounds like: fuzzy emo punk // getting high and giving up // no longer giving up //]

The first track of Everything Bothers Me Forever feels like getting high, lying on your un-vacuumed carpet, and ruminating on every shitty feeling you’ve ever had. A disorienting wave of sour synths, drum machine beats, and a screeching guitar rings out as Jodaki sings about lost love, shaken identity, and regrets.

On the album's penultimate track, “Reflection,” he sings about hitting a bowl and crashing, and the music distorts and swells as his depressive episode morphs into the fogginess of the high. The song glitches, then deflates and fizzles out; succumbing to its misery and staying in the static void of the past. “Is there still hope? Or do I just cry?”

But wait! It doesn’t have to be that way! What’s the point in wallowing in our misery all the time? By the final song, his tune has changed. “Time for more hell yeahs! Time for more romance! Time for more silly awkward dances!”

Jodaki is Joon Daniele Kim, a Philadelphia-based artist whose music tends to dwell in that uncomfortable space between “giving up” and “getting back up.” On 2022’s The Mixed Album, he also sang about getting high and giving up, but the conclusion he came to was the same then as it is now - you might feel like shit, but you have to keep going anyways.

And so, Joon finds time to celebrate between the intrusive thoughts and feelings of hopelessness. On “Cinematic Daydream,” he acknowledges his insecurities about a relationship, but pushes them aside to earnestly declare that his love is true. He injects an innocent sweetness even into his more depressing songs, like when he optimistically sings, “I’ll miss you, I’ll be blue, but this is no adieu,” on “Yr Memory.” And it’s hard to get too bogged down by life when you hear a well-placed “woo” or “hell yeah” in a song, you know what I mean?

Joon was nice enough to answer a few questions I had for him about the album.

You’ve been releasing music steadily for years now - how has your approach to music changed? What did teenage Joon think when writing a song vs current Joon?

This might be bad to admit, but I feel like I've only recently matured / grown some amount of self-awareness when it comes to lyrics. I still am too on the nose and put it all out there, but I think with this album (and going into the future) there's at least some effort to obscure things in more interesting ways.

That said, when it comes to production and how things are sonically, I still just go for what I think sounds cool. I'd say my music has become simultaneously more noisy and more polished over time. Noisy as far as like levels of distortion and the sounds I choose to use…but still more polished [than before] because the mix isn't garbage.

Tell me about the collaborators on this album.

There are the two people who helped record/co-produce, Barney Cortez and Matias Van Order Gonzalez (from Glitterspitter and Cart Studios). Both played bass guitar, and Barney (who co-produced most of the album) did a lot of miscellaneous instrumentation. The drums were recorded remotely at Pablo Cabrera (Pablo For Hire)'s home studio, and I've been having him do this since Awk Rock. The parts they're playing are mostly based on demos I recorded at one point or another, occasionally with another collaborator. For example, the bass parts in “Opening Credits,” “Yr Memory,” and “Everything Bothers Me Forever” were done by friends and my partner. All of it was mixed and mastered by Jack Shirley (who has mixed/mastered artists like Jeff Rosenstock, Remo Drive, etc) and the album artwork photos were shot on film by Bob Sweeney.

Is this your first time working with a co-producer throughout the album? Don’t you typically self-produce?

This is the first time I've worked with co-producers. Going into this album, I wanted to do something in a studio, and if I was going to do that, I wanted to do everything "right." For example, Barney did a lot to push me to rerecord to get the best take or giving his input on instrument parts, etc. I normally would have done differently based on my own intuition, but having someone who's done this for like a decade longer than I have and who knows more about recording in a studio and in general, that feedback and advice was extremely helpful and pushed me to be better than I would have, in my opinion.

Can you tell me a little bit about the story behind “Let It Slide”?

I was lowkey afraid you'd ask about this song, haha. All throughout public school I've had a lot of terrible experiences with teachers. From a substitute informing me my full name comprises of girl names, to worse things like teachers spreading rumors I was bipolar after graduating, and also trying to convert me to Christianity while I was still in high school. There's a laundry list of crap and I think about it too much, I felt like maybe one way to clear my head was to write a song about it in the ultimate form of venting. We'll see how well that works, I guess.

Do you have a sort of thesis statement for the album? Like, if you had to sum it up for an elevator pitch?

I think, similar to the bit about teachers, there are things in life that we go back to in our heads constantly. Annoying us, frustrating us, making us wish we did things differently. In short, this album is about all those things that compile in our brains that we can't let go of, whether good or bad. Through my own experiences, I try to touch on these concepts from love to mental health to reflecting on all the songs I have written on the closer. Ultimately, it leads to trying to accept that you can't just flush these feelings away, you just gotta embrace it, learn from it, and keep moving on.

Support Everything Bothers Me Forever over on Bandcamp - it's out November 20th! But you can listen to the first three singles, "Rip Out My Brain," "Cinematic Daydream," and "Yr Memory" today.

Do you make music you think I'd like? Email it to me at jenn@discfive.com! And if you like what I’m trying to do around here, consider dropping me a tip on ko-fi :-)