As a member of Australian music collective 30/70, Allysha Joy’s warm, husky vocals have been at the forefront of the outfit’s soulful sound and freewheeling musical identity. Simultaneously, the singer and keyboardist has been carving out a distinctive solo career in the contemporary jazz and soul scene, releasing personal projects that showcase her signature style, a revindicative and passionate confession of emotions.
First announcing herself to the world with her 2018 debut album Arcadie: Raw (Gondwana Records), which won ‘Best Soul Album’ at Australia’s Music Victoria Awards, she followed that project with Torn: Tonic, her 2022 sophomore album on the U.K.’s First Word Records. Now she’s returned with The Making of Silk, a completely self-produced album, also with First Word. A brave testimony of vulnerability and introspection, the album is an ode to love in all its various expressions: platonic love, romantic love, and self-love. Joy accompanies her intimate songwriting and vocals on the eleven-track set with her own playing on the Fender Rhodes, and contributions from more than a dozen musicians and instrumentalists.
Ahead of her upcoming appearance at this month’s BRIC JazzFest in Brooklyn (she performs October 19th on a bill with Reggie Workman, Lakecia Benjamin, The Jungle, Joaquin Pozo, and a combo consisting of Amir ElSaffar with Lorenzo Bianchi-Hoesch), I caught up with Joy on a call from Berlin, where she’s just wrapped the European leg of her latest tour. Fresh off the September release of The Making of Silk, she offers a window into her current day-to-day trajectory of travels, live performances, press, studio time, and reflection, while weighing in on her beginnings in music, her numerous challenges and various motivations.
How did you get your start? I've heard you’re self taught, but I’m not sure to what extent.
Allysha Joy: I started out singing in church, so I guess I was taught by listening to the people around me and just engaging in the worship that was going on at the church. My mum is a singer, my sister is a singer, my grandmother, my dad…Everyone in the family sang.
Then, I decided to leave the church when I was seventeen or eighteen, and started to feel at a loss. I was missing a really core part of my being, of my joy, of my expression. So I taught myself how to play piano, and I met people back home [in Naarm/Melbourne] that I finally felt aligned with. The only access that I had to music up till that point was through church. Finding jazz musicians and soul musicians that were doing what I wanted to do felt like [being] reborn. I could finally access this part of my spirit that I was missing. Everything sort of made sense after that point.
What’s the meaning behind your album The Making of Silk?
Allysha Joy: The album is all about love. It's about redefining this word “love.” It's about my own understanding, and uncovering past experiences of both platonic love, romantic love, even within my family—those experiences of what was called “love,” but was anything but loving—and now coming to understand [them] through lots of therapy, through lots of art, through lots of reading. Bell Hooks was a huge inspiration in this album. Just the way that she speaks to redefining love, and understanding love as a place of safety, was so profound to me. It's so simple and so profound simultaneously.
Finding relationships where I felt safe allowed me to look back on my past experiences, and I just wrote deeply about that. Another big inspiration on this album was that a lot of my previous work has been about social change and thinking about collective movements for social justice and equity, and a lot of that space can sometimes feel like you're engaging in something that is loving, but often it's not…often there are inbuilt hierarchies or problems with ego, or disparity and power, even in spaces that are trying to create positive change. And so I think now more about how I can move with an ethic of love in my personal relationships, but also in how I think about social change and policy change and abolitionism, or, you know, just how I engage in the world more broadly. And I thought about some of my music previously that has been really staunch and aggressive—like, “This needs to change,”—and, more and more, I think about having those same conversations, but from a different viewpoint.
This feels like a rather personal project, however, one that many can relate to in their own ways. What’s the process behind this, and how do you hope for listeners to connect with your music?
Allysha Joy: I don't really think about the listener until a lot later on in the process. For me, it's about articulating my feelings, because that is therapeutic. I find metaphors for myself in my day to day life, this helps me make sense of the world, and that's all I'm wanting to do at the moment of writing. I'm just wanting to feel and articulate. I find so much joy and relief in articulating my feelings. And then I’m asking myself constantly, “What does the music want to become from here?” And, “How do I create a body of work that is meaningful?” I do think about wanting to create art that is healing for other people, but I'm not really thinking about that in the moment of its creation. That is an intention [for later]. I hope that [my music is] helpful for just one other person. That is [something] I always sort of keep in mind.
For a lot of my previous work, I really didn’t want to speak too much about the themes or the meaning, because I think it's cool when people take whatever meaning away from it that they need. But, with this album, I really felt like it was important to talk about it, because there's deep and challenging themes, and I am really done with society in the way that it manufactures love as this commercial commodity that’s completely void of hair [laughs]. That is not what we’re talking about here, talk about that over there.
You’ve self-produced The Making of Silk, and worked alongside musicians on the instrumentals but only have two vocal features as voice notes. How did the collaborations get to be a part of the final album, as opposed to just being you on the songs?
Allysha Joy: The sort of last step was getting two really dear friends of mine to send voice notes. Douniah is a friend of mine that lives here in Berlin, and Annalisa Fernandez is a friend that lives back home in Melbourne, in Naarm. I asked both of them to speak on what love is for them, but I told them about, you know, not this commercial idea of love, but this idea of love that is based in spiritual growth and wanting their best for one another. And that was sort of the last piece of the record. It really helped to tie things together for me. And it’s a beautiful way to have my friends speak on the record. I also feel really blessed to have Oscar Jerome feature on guitar on this as well, and then so many friends from back home.
You released the album on the 13th of September, and immediately started your tour on the 18th September. How has it been touring with a band, and performing at iconic venues like Jazz Cafe in London?
Allysha Joy: For this album, I want[ed] to create the same level of vulnerability, trust and power that I think is in the idea of love. I like the method and the process to meet the intention in the music. The music is about vulnerability, I want it to feel vulnerable while we're playing. So a lot of it is improvised in moments. And then there's really clear arrangement stuff that we're just trusting each other with. I've been leading up to these shows all year, arranging the music and working with people that understand how dynamic the music is. Because I come from Australia, there's a different way to think about music back home. We play really open, we think about time in a different way than in big cities. I'm sure it's similar in other small cities, where people aren’t in a rush. That has a feeling in the music. I like to play, sensitively. So it's taken me a long time to find the right people to play the music, and I've found a band that I absolutely love and I'm so happy with. They're all London-based musicians, so that's been really special. When we played in London, there were six backing singers and four of us in the band, so it was like a really big crew of people. That was amazing.
Now that you've wrapped your European leg of the tour, you have your upcoming American performances. You will also be performing at BRIC JazzFest. This is an acclaimed festival that’s seen the likes of Esperanza Spalding. How does it feel to be part of this?
Allysha Joy: It feels pretty surreal. Sometimes I feel some sort of imposter syndrome. I think the most challenging thing for me now, to be completely honest, is that I want to do the best I possibly can and share the music to the greatest capacity that I can while on a budget. I'm trying to piece together the best band that I can, to do the show correctly. And I feel so powerful in my own voice and in the music and in the songwriting. I want to do it justice, because I feel so grateful to be placed on a stage with Brandee Younger.
How are you preparing for your set at BRIC JazzFest?
Allysha Joy: For me, prepping for shows [is] the same as prepping for life. I am constantly trying to meditate, trying to remind myself of how I want to move through the world, because the audience feels your intention, maybe even more than they hear your music. I think the audience feels energy, and the energy that I'm wanting to create requires a lot of internal power. I'm really thinking about communicating that with the people around me, trying to find the right people that will articulate what it is that I'm trying to say. And so much of it is just about creating this moment of joy, reverence, and spontaneity, responding to what is in the moment. I don't know what it's going to be like, so I'm going to prepare to be as flexible and as fluid as I possibly can, and to feel good about whatever it is that happens, and offer all of myself. So much of it is psychological preparation more than musical. Other than that, I'm excited, though I just heard that I could do visuals as well. So it will be a more immersive show than I thought it was going to be able to be.
I know you’ve just dropped an album, and you’re in the middle of touring, but are there any future plans you can tell us about?
Allysha Joy: Yeah! There's so much! There's a couple of live videos that I filmed while I was in the U.K. with the strings and the whole crew, which will be amazing. I'll put those out soon, and then in May, I actually recorded the next album at Abbey Road Studios. I'm gonna get a couple of people, actually, some of my favorite musicians from New York, to play on it when I'm there, and then finish it off and go back home. I go back home in December. I just love music.
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