Photo Credit: Dillon Jordan
Moody Joody is back with another taste of their upcoming debut album. The pop trio released “Average Joe” and its accompanying video on September 16, continuing the run up to Plain Jane, which arrives October 30 via Photo Finish Records.
Following August’s “Fantasyland,” which landed on Spotify’s New Music Friday and All New Pop playlists as well as Amazon’s Breakthrough Pop, “Average Joe” takes a sharper, and often pretty funny, look at modern dating. The song centers on the kind of overly curated guy who seems to have all the right lines, all the right interests, and all the right moves, until the whole performance starts to fall apart.
“Sit in your brickstone apartment/And you sip your manhattan/New York Times morning crosswords/don’t make you more of a man.”
Co-lead vocalist Kaitie Forbes says the song came from her own experiences with unavailable men and the realization that she had sometimes fallen for the idea of someone rather than the person himself. “‘Average Joe’ has become one of my favorite moments on the album,” she explains. “It leans into the toxic cycles I went through in my twenties of falling for unavailable, performative men. Before I learned the signs of love bombing, and when I was more desperate to be loved than I’d like to admit. The last chorus of this song is such a moment and brings up so much emotion. It’s that raw disappointment of realizing you fell in love with potential and not the person standing in front of you. This one’s for anyone who’s ever been personally victimized by an ‘average joe!’”
For co-lead vocalist and synth player Kayla Hall, the song came together after another situationship ended with a familiar “it’s me, not you” conversation. She says the bridge was written the following day, in the middle of the frustration, and eventually became one of the album’s more cathartic moments. “Average Joe” “…feels like one of the most cathartic moments on the album. One of the moments where you could just scream into the void. The idea for ‘Average Joe’ came after yet another situationship where this person did and said all of the right things in the beginning just to turn it around and give one of the old ‘it’s me, not you’ speeches in a car at a park on a random Monday night. Typical. The bridge of the song fell out in a fit of rage the next day. Maybe the universe somehow knew Plain Jane needed one more ‘Average Joe’ lesson in order to take her power back from performative men and see it for what it is. As we’ve gotten to sit with the finished album, this song unexpectedly has become one of my favorites because of its grit and honest emotions. It’s felt like a slow burn – which I’ve come to appreciate in life and in relationships. ‘Average Joe’ leaves you with this powerful energy of lingering feminine rage.”
The track also came together relatively late in the writing process. Multi-instrumentalist and producer Andrew Pacheco says some of Hall’s melodies and lyrics were already in place, but the group needed a few sessions to find the right musical direction. Once they did, the song became an important part of the album’s overall arc. Pacheco describes the track as “interesting because it was one of the last songs we finished writing for the record, but we knew the title would be on the album for a while. Kayla had some of the melodies and words already written, but the challenge became matching them to the right chords and production. It took a couple sessions to really nail down the right direction, but once we found it, it became this really important cinematic moment on the album.”
“Average Joe” follows a string of releases from Moody Joody, including “Suburbia,” “Little Blue House,” “Loretta’s Last Call,” and “OOPS!” The trio has picked up support from SiriusXM’s Alt Nation and playlists across Spotify and Amazon, while their music has earned more than 21 million global streams.
The group has also been busy on the live side, performing at SXSW and Austin City Limits, and touring with The Maine, Smallpools, MisterWives and ARIZONA. After a sold-out show at NYC’s Nightclub 101 earlier this summer, Moody Joody is set to play The Maine’s 8123 Fest in Mesa, AZ, next January, and will support Valley’s “Do You Need To Be Entertained?” Tour for a number of US tour dates in February and March.
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