My Heart to Joy is a band that everyone should have on his or her radar.  Playing a melodic and hook-laden blend of post-punk and indie rock, My Heart to Joy have released a number of EPs and the LP Seasons in Verse (Topshelf Records, 2009), which garnered critical praise around the blogosphere and earned comparisons to Hot Water Music and ’90s era Dischord Records’ groups like Hoover.

Their Reasons to Be EP will be out later this fall, and the band are hard at work on an as-yet-unnamed second full-length effort.  Verbicide was happy to catch up with the band over lunch and talk about their history, their influences, and their direction as a band on their new recorded efforts

First, introduce yourselves and mention what you play in the band.
Greg: My name is Greg and I play guitar.
Ryan: My name is Ryan, I play guitar and sing.
Chris: My name is Chris and I play bass.

How did My Heart to Joy first come about?
Ryan: My Heart to Joy started a couple years ago with our ex-drummer Allan and myself.  We started as a two-piece, as sort of like a side project, something for fun over the summer, and it sort of evolved into what it is now and got a lot more serious.

A side project for what?
Ryan: We had like a… [laughter] In retrospect, a non-serious high school band — but at the time that was our serious pursuit, and [we] have since changed focus.
Greg: Honestly, I have the demos for the high school band and it’s pretty good.
Ryan: [laughter]
Greg: Uh, it’s alright.
Chris: Wasn’t I supposed to play live guitar or something?
Greg: Chris Teti was also in the band before any of us and then was quickly dismissed — and [now] here he is now back in the band, which is awesome.
Chris: Full circle. [laughter]
Greg: Full circle.  Everyone in our town in the early days of My Heart to Joy was in [the band] for at least five minutes.  It went from being a two-piece to quickly peaking at a five-piece, to going back down to a three-piece, to going to a four-piece, to — here we are — playing live as a five-piece again.  So, about every six months something changes one way or another.

What are your influences musically and lyrically?
Ryan:  I think our influences have changed a lot over our discography, and, I mean, it’s pretty noticeable.  In the beginning — at least for Allan and [me] — we were just trying to recreate screamo bands that we liked, and we weren’t trying to necessarily be very original or anything. We just wanted to be in a band that we liked the way it sounded.  It evolved from that into being more about…we went through a melodic punk stage, and then we went into [what we are] now — we’re more into, like, an indie sort of thing, where we’re about The Smiths and bands like that.  It’s just been an evolution from “We want to sound like a screamo band.”  Ever since then we’ve been kind of distancing ourselves from that, only because we want to try different things, and we’ve gone for a different sound every time we’ve sat down to write.
Chris: Yeah, you grow and you develop, and vocal harmonies sound awesome.
Greg: I’d say, more or less, it went from wanting to be Orchid to then maybe starting to hear more kinds of ’90s style bands — Promise Ring or Braid — and now we’re all just listening to like Guided by Voices and, as we said, The Smiths and just way poppier stuff.
Ryan: We’re no longer interested in trying to recreate even the ’90s — we’ve already moved past that.  So much time passes between when a record actually is written and when it is released, that by the time it’s released I’ve listened to 100 new bands and I’m not interested in what I was listening to before, and we are on to the next thing.

When I saw you guys live, I kind of got a little bit of a Hot Water Music kind of feel.  Would you say that’s an appropriate comparison?
Ryan: I would say that’s a very interesting comparison, because we get that fairly frequently — or, at least, we did more when we were just doing Seasons in Verse. I think that when we come out with the new EP people won’t really compare us to them so much.  The funny thing about that is not one of the members of the band has ever listened to Hot Water Music, or spent any real amount of time…I’ve heard them a little bit, and they’re a fine band, but we certainly did not mean to replicate their sound in any way, shape, or form.

How do your musical influences manifest themselves in the songs that you write?
Ryan: When I sit down to actually write a song, I usually do try to have some sort of sound in mind, and that can come from influences from the past or something I’m currently listening to.  But it’s pretty spontaneous; it just kind of happens.  I have an idea of what I want it to sound like, but I don’t think about it that much, otherwise I think I’d end up worrying too much.

You’ve already touched on it a bit, so I want to ask, what is your writing process like?
Ryan: Usually, I will come up with something on guitar — and maybe bass — and I will loop it and layer it and [formulate] the idea. Then I’ll bring it to everybody else, and they’ll say if they think it’s worth pursuing to the next level.  Greg will change his guitar lines to fit him, and Chris will change his bass lines to fit him, and then, obviously, I don’t do much of the drum writing, but the drummer will do what he does, and then it all goes from there.  Vocals are usually put on top towards the end.
Greg: That’s usually the most “team effort” part of it.
Ryan: Yeah, I’ll usually write lyrics, or sometimes Al would write lyrics, but as far as the melody and things like that, we all decide what it’s going to be and try it out — a lot of trial and error.
Greg: The last time we were sitting down with an acoustic guitar [saying] “that’s good,” [or] “that sucks,” and also we’re getting really stoked on the use of harmonies on this one, and we’re thinking about that a lot more.
Chris: Particularly that side of melody, and trying to be interesting because that’s where we’re at and that’s what we’re interested in now.
Ryan: We did a decent amount of demoing on the EP, and that helped us figure out, hey, this doesn’t work and this works better, so when we went into the studio we had a better sense of everything.

So was that different from the process of doing the Seasons in Verse LP?
Greg: Oh my god.
Ryan: Seasons in Verse was probably the least thought-out album of all time.  We wrote all the songs, which took a little bit of time, but when we actually went into the studio we hadn’t [yet] demoed it — we hadn’t done much of anything like that.  All the music was actually recorded in a 12-hour span all at once in a very live setting, and all the vocals were done over two days in two five-hour periods, and that was it.  We didn’t really retouch anything, or overdub anything, or go back and try to make it better or anything — it was very spontaneous.  And that was sort of our intent, but listening back to it now I think we’d all like to go back and change this, and change that. But [at the time] it was really a spontaneous effort.

If you were to go back, what is something you would change?
Ryan: Probably not anything too major, not anything too drastic, but thinking about it maybe a little bit more, and maybe adding things, or playing it correctly, things like that.
Greg: Because you don’t notice that anything’s wrong, but to us — oh my god, it’s just the worst thing to listen to.  I’m happy with how it sounds, at least sonically, but performance-wise on our parts, we were all really happy with it for like the first two months and then…oh man, this is bad.
Ryan: But if people like it though, that’s fine, I’m not gonna argue with that — it’s just [our own] criticisms we’ve had [of the album] from listening to it a lot.

What’s the future of My Heart to Joy for the rest of the year and beyond?
Greg: Well, right now we have a lot of shows coming up in October.  The idea I think is to play regionally, like New England and Pennsylvania, maybe — hopefully — get down to the Baltimore area. And we’re about to put out a new EP.  The seven-inch is titled Reasons to Be, and it’s just three new songs.

When is that looking to drop?
Greg: We still don’t have a release date, but hopefully late fall.  Fingers crossed.
Ryan: We’ve played a few festivals — CMJ, The Fest — hopefully we’ll be playing South by Southwest, just trying to do some of that type of thing and get out there in that way.  The EP is sort of to tide people over and produce interest, because we’re trying to write the full length right now, and hopefully that will come out in maybe a year, or as soon as it can.

Is there already a label looking at that?
Ryan: We’re trying to talk to people now, but the whole point of the EP, I guess, is to drum up as much interest as possible, so then maybe, I don’t know what could happen, but we’ll talk to other people then.
Greg: As soon as the EP comes out, that’s probably when we’ll start getting a lot more active. But for right now, we might as well just stick around and try to play as much in the Northeast as we can.
Chris: And the EP is different from Seasons in Verse.
Ryan: It’s going to be a decent change of pace for our previous listeners; it’s going to take a little bit of getting used to but hopefully more people will get into it after.