Track By Tracks: Joviac - Here And Now (2020)

1. Intro:

I wanted to start the album off with a bang! To have a lot of emotion and contrast within one track. If I remember correctly, this song was one of the first tracks that I started writing for the album and you can really hear the excitement of starting a new chapter in the music. I'm big on beginnings and I was definitely firing on all cylinders with this one. I was racking my brain to come up with a name for the track, something deeper than "Intro", but as has been the case with a few songs before, the working title just stuck and I thought "if it ain't broke don't fix it"! I think it's a very fitting introduction to the album.

2. Straws:

Straws has a special place in my heart. It's a real tightrope walk between progressive and poppy elements. I'm very proud with how it turned out since that balance (at least for me) is not always easy to find. The song is about a panic attack and your mind scrambling to come to terms with what's happening. I learned a lot while writing this song, especially about trimming "the fat" out of a song. I recommend listening to the album version since you get a little bit more compared to the single version. The single edit version does come with a music video though! Check it here: https://youtu.be/74szjFyLMmw

3. Black Mirror:

Black Mirror came about slightly differently compared to the rest of the album. I usually write the songs and we do some arrangement together as a band, but with Black Mirror I intentionally left it as the last track to write because I wanted to tackle it together with Antti Varjanne, our bass player. It was a really fruitful cowrite and it was an interesting experience letting go of the reins for a little bit. It was a real 50/50 effort! Also I have to thank my friend Joonas Parkkonen for the amazing guitar solo, that dude can shred!

4. Here And Now:

This song is the album's title track for a reason. It encapsulates all the major musical directions present on the album within one song. It's dramatic and has a lot of peaks and valleys, just like life in general. The song is about taking grasp of the present, our take on the whole "Carpe Diem" thing, I suppose. It's also our longest song and the closest thing that we have to a "prog epic". We also had a guest on this song, Matias Kupiainen from Stratovarius. His solo is really the icing on the cake so I'm immensely grateful for it! We haven't been able to hit the live stages in a while because of the Corona Virus, but we did do a studio live take of this song, so check it out if you want to see how we are live! You can find it here: https://youtu.be/SaapKDDCCaQ

5. Decay:

This is the album's "quirky song", the outlier of the bunch. That's also exactly why we decided to make it a single for the album. It showcases us at our grooviest and it's a super fun song to play. You can check out the music video here: https://youtu.be/1Z1o5sz7pnk The album has two distinct lyrical themes, personal struggles with mental illness such as anxiety, and critical commentary on the polarised nature of the times that we are living in. Decay is definitely an example of the latter.

I remember writing this song back in 2018 with so many of the people I look up to dying in a window of a couple years and the figurative storm swirling on social media. It just felt to me like everyone was at each other's throats, and it still kind of does, so that song is very relevant to me even now in 2020. I hope we can find some common ground, maybe this global virus pandemic will bring us closer together!

6. Crossfire:

Crossfire is an intensely personal song for me. It's one of the songs on the album that deals with anxiety and depression. I remember coming up with the starting line "I've been walking around like I'm the devil himself, like the worst guy in town you shouldn't lift a finger to help" after I walked out of a therapy session a few years back. It was a euphoric feeling and I remember humming the line to myself the whole way home on my bike so I wouldn't forget it. I'll let the listener interpret the rest of the lyrics.

7.Fade Into The Light:

This song started out with the working title "Outro" so it was always supposed to close the album. The song is about letting go of the past and looking forward with a kind of wistful melancholy, but it's hopeful all the same. It definitely starts out as the most mellow song on the album but it takes the listener on a trip and by the end you notice you've ended up in a very different place from where you started, just like life.