Words by Harper Mahood
Eight years can mark the entirety of a musician’s career, from conceptualization to reach, legacy to reflection. Take it from The Beatles, MC5 and The Stooges, whose musical careers all fell shy of a decade. Tastes change, audiences lose interest, bandmates grow apart and often, life just simply moves on. But for singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer, Jo Hirabayashi, eight years is not a fizzling out, but rather, a revival.
Now, eight years after the release of Their Prime, Hirabayashi’s Sub Pop debut under the moniker Jo Passed, another album is on the way. Released on January 23, Hirabayashi’s sophomore album, Away, is proof that you can’t rush a good thing. Thoughtfully crafted and deeply personal, the album examines Hirabayashi’s own struggles with mental health and stands as a testament to the payoff that comes from taking one’s time.
Off Shelf: Away is your first album in eight years, following up your debut LP on Sub Pop, Their Time. How did taking nearly a decade of space and time before choosing to release new work influence the album?
Jo Hirabayashi: In the history of rock music that eight years can be the whole stretch of a band’s career. Keeping Jo Passed going and making a second album feels very antithetical to how things work in the music industry. As I was working on the record and more time was added I was reckoning with that in itself; the whole concept of space and time and also the comfort I have around being back in the conversation of music.
Away isn’t something that I worked on for eight years, it was a little bit done here, then put down for a bit, and then a little bit done there. I think it’s interesting to work that way and, although it took a long time, doing a process that way is actually relatively new because recording technology has plateaued enough that the tools that I used eight years ago are not very different from today.
OS: During the creative process you took a year break from listening to the album before coming back to it. What did you discover when you returned to the music?
JH: I think that taking the year off was really interesting as a challenge to the longevity of some of the songs. I think there’s a kind of timelessness around amazing songwriting. The songs that we all love we don’t listen to just for nostalgia purposes. Even if they’re very old, they can take you to the same place they always did and there’s a sort of magic in them. The year off was good because although I had finished a record, I did have uncertainty around certain songs. So after taking time away, I ended up validating my intuitions of what I thought worked and what I thought didn’t work.
OS: During that eight year semi-break, were you still playing music or were you creating in different ways? What was that time like for you?
JH: I played a little bit casually but that year was the full lockdown pandemic. In my mind, at certain points, I had entirely quit music too. I was already questioning whether it was something I enjoyed doing and then with the world shutting down it just felt like this big message of “Okay, maybe it’s time to not do music because it’s not even possible.” Some friends called it “Quit Music Trademark” or “TM,” because the first few months of the pandemic everyone kind of quit music and started baking bread and learning coding. I did a stint into coding and started doing more video work and exploring that creatively and it was really exciting to put a lot of energy into a different creative discipline. That whole year was really a full music detox.
There have been other similar times in my life, like when I quit piano lessons when I was twelve years old. It probably felt like an eternity at that age but it was only four months until I started to play again just out of wanting to. The same thing happened where I realized “this is silly.” There’s no quitting music because, if I just relax, I start to do it again, my brain starts going into that mode.
Through therapy I’ve really unpacked the idea of quitting music and realized that there are lots of things in music that you can quit, and there are lots of things that you can keep doing. I’ve learned to analyze what’s wearing me down and choose not to do those things.
OS: I’m sure debuting on Sub Pop was already a pressure in itself alongside the touring and everything that came with that. What was that process like of finding your way back to music and how did you start to find joy in the process of creating again?
JH: There’s a lot of hopelessness with how to navigate making music. I actually think that now is one of the most amazing times to make music in a very pure way because it’s not as viable as a career. I think that the biggest hurdle right now is that there is so much choice and possibility but there’s also a huge attention economy. For anyone that’s struggling just make sure not to care about the attention economy and try to make things more tangible. It’s okay to not be on social media and just practice music. Understanding the impermanence of the internet and social media platforms in comparison to what you can build with yourself is really important. That’s honestly what happened to me and the benefit of something like a pandemic was that the world really did quiet down for a bit. It made it easier for me to not feel like I had to keep pushing on the gas just because everyone else was.
OS: There are several other musicians who collaborated on this album with you. What was the process like of integrating other people into your work?
JH: Mac Lawrie, who drums on half the record, has been involved in the project since the start. He drummed on the first EP, but he wasn’t on Their Time. He actually had a pretty bad concussion and couldn’t drum for a couple years, right during the time when I was going to record these songs, and it was very sad. But I got my friend Justin Devries to drum and he also did some playing locally. Andromeda Monk is an amazing composer. She’s played woodwinds on and off over the years, and she plays the bass clarinet and saxophone on this record. Téa Mei, who has played bass with the band on and off, lent some lead vocals, and Meredith Bates played violin on one track. With the exception of the drums, I do all the other bed parts, like bass, guitars and keys, but it’s nice to have different collaborators come in and it’s something I’d love to do more of in the future.
OS: Despite being a relatively upbeat, lighthearted album, many of the lyrics tackle heavier topics like ego death and loss. Can you walk me through your songwriting process and the intention behind some of the songs?
JH: It was pretty cathartic all the way through, with the exception of Away which gets a little bit more playful. There’s still pretty esoteric lyrics but I think there’s more concreteness in my songwriting on this record. There’s a lot of stuff that was pulled from therapy sessions or just reflections on identity, which is a major theme in all of my writing. There’s a playfulness and a kind of self reflexivity, involved in the process.
It made sense to me as a rebellion against the heaviness of the topic that the music should be a little bit fun, because a lot of it was analyzing the super ego, the voice that tells you the shoulds and should nots. The voice that moralizes over your own behavior and basically makes things serious and not fun. Away unpacks that and really challenges it.
OS: I hear a lot of Elliott Smith in your vocals, particularly on Alright. Did you have any specific musical influences in mind when recording the album?
JH: I appreciate you saying that, and he’s a huge influence and a fallback artist for me. If I’m fatigued by music and can’t listen to anything else, I’ll still go back to Elliott. In a broader sense, I’m in Toronto now, so I’m very much a fish out of water. I’m such a Pacific Northwest person so Jo Passed being in Toronto is interesting because it shows how far away the Pacific Northwest/Vancouver mindset is from the East Coast mindset. Also, I’m Japanese-Canadian, Japanese-American and a lot of my family history is a settler history within Washington State and the Pacific Northwest. I’ve been thinking about different musical traditionalisms and how there’s a sort of inherent sound that comes out of songwriters from that area, including Elliott Smith, Doug Martsch and Isaac Brock. They’re all white artists, but I’m interested in the kind of desolate and lonely vibe that’s in that music. I think it’s also interesting to think about the other ethnic settler identities that have landed in that very wilderness.
OS: Do you personally have a favorite track from Away, and if so, why?
JH: I think Ico is still my favorite track. It’s the lead single and I think it comes from a very different space than the rest of the songs. Hilariously it was a challenge to write and it definitely sounds wackier off the top. I remember doing a demo of the song and listening back a couple days later thinking “What the hell is this shit?” But halfway through I realized, “Okay, this is actually good.” The demo was also very much not the final product. It had fake drums on it so I told Justin I needed him to do the drums so it was at least a completed track. I think that process of seeing it through turned it into something really beautiful.
OS: What can Jo Passed fans look forward to next?
JH: I have a West Coast tour right when the album comes out, and then I have a Toronto show on February 7. I’m also playing Treefort and there’s a great lineup this year, so I’m really excited to just hang out. The next record will not be another eight years and I actually already have guitar, bass and drums done for a follow up record so I’m really excited about it. This is my sophomore record but in some ways it’s a soft reboot. While I think the pattern of doing a record every eight years would be interesting, I’m definitely excited to have that be a one time thing.
Great interview! All new to me–will be checking the music out!