It’s the ultimate seduction, the idea that romance can ignite your soul. One half of a twin flame in an undimmable, unified blaze. It’s arguably a dream, at least in the way that Hollywood has packaged and sold it to us. But it’s a fantasy that many of us have absorbed on a cellular level. “When you’re in your early 20s that’s what you think relationships are, romance” says the musician, actor, producer and multi-instrumentalist Joey Pollari. “Romance is a necessary function of early love, but we often don’t know when to let romance go in order to engage in the necessary work of love.”
I’ll Be Romance, Pollari’s second album following 2020’s ambient-leaning About Men, burrows into minutiae of a landmark relationship, with songwriting DNA rooted in folkish introspection as well as experimental synth experiments, woven in a confident double helix of sound. Pollari’s authorial voice can dazzle, shifting with a performer’s instinct for characterization, with vocals that move from a grave bellow to a skybourne coo.
With the bulk of the album’s songs written when Pollari was 25, the album makes a shrine of the heart-bursting bliss, torturous confusion, and deep introspection brought on by the kind of love that can arguably only exist in your early 20s, a time when perhaps you’re not so wise to (or cynical of) the dating world. He wrote the album’s lyrics in the midst of a formative relationship with an ex-boyfriend; the couple regularly spent time in the bohemia-steeped surroundings of Laurel Canyon, a short drive from Pollari’s LA home. “I remember feeling I was really falling in love and then being like, I don't know if I can do this,” says Pollari. He sat with the feeling, turning it over in his head. And then came the moment of self-inquiry. “Why do I feel I can’t do this?”
It poured out in songs. I’ll Be Romance’s swaggering lead single “So Close” splits the difference between emotional nuance and stadium-sized heft, zeroing in on a relationship “froze in time” by its principals as a distraction from the work of love. “I never asked you for this, I always wanted you so close,” Pollari implores, part accusation and part lament. It’s “trying to be reflective about, Why isn’t this working?” he says. “That’s something that I’m proud of about this record — that it has admission.”
That sense of openness blooms in future single “Efforts of Love,” a delicate tapestry of psych-folk which seems to crack open like a closed bud in spring; “Aletheia” creates a folk-inspired kaleidoscope of memory, hope, and passion — with a cameo from a talking dog. “Perfume,” meanwhile, is a giddy reverie about love’s first blush, where Pollari’s voice soars as if lifted to new altitudes by lush baroque swells. “I remember being out on the porch, looking at him, and thinking there are no words for this,” says Pollari. “I went inside and wrote “Perfume” in an hour. That was an ecstatic moment for me.”
As a classically trained pianist and self-taught guitarist, I’ll Be Romance unites Pollari’s melophilial instincts with his passion for art, literature, and cinema. (He starred in the groundbreaking gay coming of age drama Love, Simon, the pitch-black crime drama series American Crime, and will appear in the forthcoming reimagined rom-com Things Like This). It’s a joy to listen to Pollari speak about the record, drawing from references as diverse as experimental Vietnamese cinema and cult literary figures. “John Ashbery’s ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ blew my mind at 25 in Laurel Canyon,” he says, referencing the collection of the cult writer that Pollari calls a hero. “It was really about what words can do,” he says, “Ashbery taught me that ‘gaps and sequencing’ reveal language’s failures, its possibilities.”
I’ll Be Romance plunges into this ambiguity, finding fertile creative terrain in the gulf between feeling and expression. “Words turn us loose, but always a remove,” Pollari sings in “So Close,” while “Perfume” thrills in the elasticity of language as he sings, “Every word I choose turns when loving you.” As a writer with a poet laureate’s command of language and imagery, Pollari asked himself. “How can I fit this wordy, lyric-focused [work] into cathedral-like spaces that usually that type of lyricism’s not really invited into?”
He found the answer with veteran producer Theo Karon, who has also worked with Angel Olsen, Julia Holter, and Kamasai Washington. Collaborating with Karon at their cozy, wood panelled LA studio Hotel Earth, Pollari set about building those cavernous spaces for the songs to live in, turning his intimate demos into the majestic, tactile soundscapes of the album. Musicians included drummer Elizabeth Goodfellow (Boygenius, Iron & Wine) and guitarist Steven Van Betten (Fell Runner). “We tried to create all of this around live takes,” Pollari says, adding that the textures of Bill Callahan were a reference. “His vocals sound like you’re in the room with him.”
It was a new way of working for Pollari, who was used to making songs in his bedroom. But creating without a road map spurred these songs into taking on a full-fledged new life. “It was like freefall,” says Pollari of working with his collaborators. “But it was also like falling in love.”
Growing up in St Paul, Minnesota, Pollari grew up in a family of “go getters.” His mom had fought to escape her modest beginnings to rise to the business C-suite, while his father, who passed away in 2017, was “a troubled visionary,” in Pollari’s words. “He struggled to stick with new ideas to see them through.” On new song “A Porch Made of Me,” the artist sings from the perspective of his father at the time of his parents’ divorce. In a soul-baring vocal set amongst baroque folk, Pollari embodies a man wrestling with the demons of the past, the pain of failing to show up in the present, and a hope for the future embodied in a parting gift made of pine. The song is, in Pollari’s words, “the Rosetta Stone for the rest of the record’s tribulations.”
His family marched to the beat of their own drum when it came to music, and radio country mingled with bluesy rock and ‘70s prog on the family stereo. As well as taking piano lessons from a strict Russian-born teacher at his local music store, Pollari dove headfirst into the local theater and opera scene, starring in his first musical at age seven, and took vocal lessons to refine his nimble singing voice.
On the back of some brief dalliances with electronic production and Avalanches-style sound collaging after moving to LA at 17, Pollari’s star began to rise as an actor and, in 2018 publicly came out as gay while promoting Love, Simon. “I was just like, [being closeted] doesn’t make any sense,” he says, citing Derek Jarman and John Grant as examples of how to live unapologetically queer public lives. “All the gay artists I admire are out.”
Pollari is just as dedicated to authenticity in his music, though he knows that there’s more than one way for a song to feel real. “Do I believe songwriting is about honesty?” he ponders. “No; I think songwriting is honesty about lying.” In I’ll Be Romance, he takes a prismatic approach, weaving half-remembered reminiscences with firm declarations, and first-person narratives with those of friends, lovers, strangers. “Being an actor is all about the idea that putting on masks reveals the truth,” he says, going on to reference the Jungian concept of a silver mirror that can reflect subliminal desires. “It’s related to the idea of the album raising unconscious attitudes in order to be sorted through,” he adds. “It may be a little foggy but at least you're trying to put up the mirror.”
Pollari’s instinct for inhabiting personae coalesces in the threadbare acoustic ballad “Johnny Guitar.” “Life on the run, you stride on my lungs,” Pollari sings, blurring boundaries between the self and an object of desire while also nodding to Nicholas Ray’s subversive feminist twist on the Western flick. “I’m Johnny Guitar leaving, and loving anew” he sings at the song’s close, a baruvura twist that turns the track on its head. Meanwhile, the epic title track contains perhaps the album’s most indelible image in ten songs full of them, inspired by a gut-wrenching scene Pollari witnessed outside a Silver Lake coffee shop. “There’s six lanes of traffic there,” the artist remembers. “And an unhoused person was walking straight through the intersection with a box of chocolate eclairs, yelling out ‘Morris, Morris? Where are you?” The moment affected Pollari deeply. “His words struck me with universal feeling,” he says. “Each one of us has been lost, wandering, wanting to reconnect. I saw myself in it.”
With observant details of the world around him as well as scalpel-sharp excavations of his own psyche, Joey Pollari has created an album of depth, power, and joy that marks the flourishing of a captivatingly singular new songwriting voice. Self-directed videos for “So Close” and “Efforts of Love” take the album’s world-building into sensory new heights, while the album art captures Pollari in motion, in a photograph by Jacob Bixenman.
Even at its most introspective, Pollari’s music courses with a vivid sense of momentum. The album closer “Peach Blossom Spring” is a soul-baring paean that “would come to define our breakup,” says Pollari of his ex. The song stings with heartbreak, with a slight ironic detachment between the wiser Pollari of today and his narrator’s persistent hope for a storybook ending. “It’s my first time seeing the strings of peach blossom springs,” Pollari sings. “Maybe it is waiting in another life,” he sings, as reverb cocoons guitars. What’s around the corner may be unknown. But it’s undeniable that, with I’ll Be Romance, Joey Pollari has created an album as easy to fall in love with as romance itself.
Contact:
joeypollari.music@gmail.com
PR:
Chris Cuff — Good Machine PR chris.cuff@goodmachinepr.com
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