Fresh off a sleep-deprived night when he and his friends from the local Connecticut music scene were helping guitarist Tim Harewood move to Brooklyn (“They bought us Jamaican food, so it was all good”), guitarist, producer, and singer Izzy Joy mulled over a thought he presented out loud: “The easier it is to survive, the easier it is to create.”
I caught up with Joy in his backyard shed studio in Naugatuck, where he showed me his first ever beat — “it’s cooked,” he said, “so bad” — and told me he had been thinking about maladaptive daydreaming, daydreaming so hard it becomes a form of dissociation. He’s interested in the conditions it would take to bring those dreams into the real world instead.
Ever since he can remember, Izzy has dreamed in images. “I love pictures, bro,” he breathed, gesturing toward the photographs decorating the walls of his studio and filling up his desktop computer screen. Music helped him come up with vivid visuals and scenarios in his head. “My imagination was so strong, I just wanted to be in it.”
In his latest song “Understated,” released two weeks ago, Izzy said he wanted to “show people what I find beautiful.” Complex melodies layer over each other to create a moody atmosphere for Izzy’s smooth voice, cool and in the pocket from beginning to end. Friends Kiana Gurley, Keon Riveur, and Michael Broussard helped him shoot videos and cover art for the single, creating an experience that goes beyond the song itself.
Izzy added the bass line for the chorus early on in the song’s creation and knew it had to stay. “Something about it was really sticky to me.” Then he worked on it every day after his day job as a teller at a credit union, reminiscing on a time when he was able to spend his full brain power on music alone, from morning to night.
In the summer of 2022, Izzy participated in a “lock-in” in an AirBnb outside LA, where a group of musicians gathered to “just make music.” Izzy was working at a Blue State Coffee in New Haven at the time, had never been to California, and knew the others only from a Discord server. He invited his friend Aiden, whom he knew from a Jai Paul subreddit, to come out from Australia and meet up for the first time.
“Don’t get me wrong, ego pierces into everything we do,” Izzy said, but the LA lock-in “felt like an ego-less experience.” For the most part, he didn’t know anyone there, and he didn’t feel a pressure to impress them. They would break out into groups to make music for one or two hours, then — hands up, chefs — export and send out their creations so they could analyze them together. “They liked music how I did,” Izzy said. “It was the first time I really felt seen by people, in my life.” Ever since then, he’s been waiting and hoping to recreate that feeling.
In the meantime, a major part of Izzy’s physical orbit is his studio. He built out his backyard shed as a recording studio among the rabbits, frogs, birds, ladybugs, bumblebees and “so many different types of spiders,” mainly because “my parents made fun of me for singing in the home.” He had been chasing a feeling, he said, and needed to learn how to sing. He started practicing five-minute vocal warmups he found on YouTube. A few years and four panels of drywall later, Izzy now makes music with local artists Nehway, Esmer, Cisco Moon, ammar, Keon Riveur, and more, and, as of last week, has two incredible singles out.
Something that comes up often in Izzy’s music is a “yearning for some experience that I feel will change me.” He wants to travel, to put himself in new situations. “I just want to always question the nature of my reality. I just don’t want the world to feel small.”
Izzy’s efforts to, in his words, “build this world around me” have made him into the kind of person who will lend out his camera, his softbox lights, and his guitar without a second thought. “I’m tired of the daydreaming,” he said. He’s ready to help himself and the musicians around him with the materials to create, so they can get down to creating.
