'It's a weird place to be': Mt. Joy on the rise even if if feels like their country is 'in decay'
While only a few months old, one of the tracks from Mt. Joy's fourth album, Hope We Have Fun, has become an unlikely fan favourite on the band's recent tour.
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On the softly shuffling God Loves Weirdos, the narrator shifts from optimism to acknowledging a darker reality.
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On the hushed choruses, vocalist Matt Quinn sings about love, joy and intimate connection with a partner, offering the tender scene of a couple laughing at a gas station at 4 a.m. about a 'God Loves Weirdos' T-shirt. 'Damn, I'm still in love with you,' he sings. But elsewhere, he accepts that 'the world looks insane as it circles the drain.'
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The Philadelphia-born, Los Angeles-based band did not write overtly political tunes for this album, nor are they always directly autobiographical. But the song can be seen as a metaphor for a band on the rise during troubled times in its country. In the past couple of years, the act has graduated to stadiums as its fanbase continues to grow. They have received attention from Rolling Stone and the New York Times. They have earned one billion streams around the world and sold out iconic venues such as Madison Square Garden, Red Rocks and The Greek Theatre. They played Bonaroo in June and the Newport Folk Festival last week.
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'All this great stuff is happening for us, but the backdrop we are in as citizens feels like it's in decay,' says Quinn, in a phone interview with Postmedia. 'It's a weird place to be, obviously, as people first, but also as artists. We're always trying to bring people joy. Our purpose feels grounded in people having a good time and a respite from their difficult lives: Come and have fun at a Mt. Joy show. We're always aware of what is going on in the world, but where does Mt. Joy fit into that? Is that becoming something that we need to address? It's something we've thought about a lot. I don't know the right answer to that. I wish I did.'
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It's not as if the band, which will play Calgary's Saddledome on Aug. 9, hasn't been more politically overt in the past. They still play the 2018 song Sheep, a soulful folk tune that Quinn says is about 'Americans becoming sheep and blindly following the ideology of Donald Trump.' Mt. Joy was even more on the nose with 2020's New President, a pre-election song that proposed America was in desperate need of fresh leadership after Trump's first term and has Quinn singing the less-than-subtle battle cry 'we're gonna march down right now. We're gonna tear down these fascist clowns' against a deceptively soft groove.
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'Things have changed here,' says Quinn. 'Somebody asked me in an interview if I thought that I would be allowed to make statements like that. I guess I hadn't fully thought about that, but it's a fair question. I don't know what the rules are. They seem to be changing very quickly. It's scary times. As a band, Mt. Joy, we're still trying to figure out how best to lend our voice to that.'
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