Joy Askew - Everything Is Different (2022)

Everything is Different
Was recorded during Covid’s first two years, with songs from the innocence of before the pandemic and the change, that had set in fast and deep during.

Looking back, looking forward and with a feeling that nothing would be (quite) the same, Joy Askew, singer, songwriter and musician, was working in her studio alone, pulling in separately recorded pieces of music from all the musicians collaborating with her on the project.
Like ribbons of connecting sounds they came, from Tokyo, Connecticut, Nyack, Long Island, Nashville, London and even just a block away in Brooklyn.
Some were recorded in living rooms, on pots and pans, on smart phones or in gorgeous sounding studios. Some with accompanying video footage shot sometimes in a garden, sometimes in the dark.

Piece by piece by piece.

After many months, when things were beginning to open up in Brooklyn and with only two more songs to go, Joy tripped on the sidewalk, (possibly from her own enthusiasm), and broke both arms and a wrist and the trauma to the rest of her body put her hopelessly out of sorts.
PAUSE!…………for a month.
With the last two songs to record, everything was different. Askew was unable to play the keyboards. “Aliens”, a song written in 2019, oddly enough, refers to the changing political landscape using the metaphor of a virus covering the surface of the Earth. “Silent” talks of how unaware we are of all the species that inhabit and intertwine on the planet and how much more there is to know and embrace! Both tracks were based on keyboard riffs.
Like rummaging through The Salvation Army Bins, Joy found and adapted previously recorded keyboards… and the record was finished.

Joy Askew has had an embellished past playing alongside more than a few music influencers and icons. Now, as a re-invented musical poet, this collection of new songs have been described as powerful, moving and magic.
Everything Is Different will be her 10th release.