“JW Francis has mastered the art of lo-fidelity with album one. You can’t ask for much more than that.”
– **** DIY
“sure to brighten your end-of-summer blues” – WONDERLAND
New York’s next lo-fi legend JW Francis today releases his debut full-length album ‘We Share a Similar Joy’ on Sunday Best Recordings, alongside a video for new single ‘All There’. The single follows ‘Good Time’ and ‘New York’, which was A-Listed at BBC 6 Music, added to Radio X’s X-Posure playlist and saw support from DIY, NME, The Line of Best Fit and Wonderland, to name a few. The album will be released on a limited-edition yellow vinyl, which you can order here.
‘We Share A Similar Joy’ is a sun-drenched, care-worn collection of modern classics about love and life in and around The Big Apple. Its lo-fi, intimate sound provides a genuine comfort in these uncertain times and firmly secures Francis’s credibility as a future stalwart of his genre. Describing his debut as ‘a warm blanket’ JW’s intention was very much to make a body of work to escape to, as he elaborates;
“It is a place to run away to, but also a place to celebrate life’s small moments of joy from a quiet moment of pre-dawn solitude to an all out delirious, cathartic party. The album is about the shared feelings of nostalgia, childhood, anxiety, longing, and most of all, joy.”
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, JW landed in New York City at 19 to study Economics at Columbia University, but not before making stops, stays and stints in Chelsea, Vermont, aged 12 and Paris, France, aged 13. Whilst at Columbia, the troubadour started music blog Rare Candy and founded student-run recording studio CU Records. Musically, JW takes his lead from the greats of the downtown scene – Patti Smith, The Velvet Underground, Television, Talking Heads, Strokes & Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ – whose inspiration can be easily heard across the album.
Proving his NYC credentials, JW qualified as a licensed New York tour-guide. In between recording his album of gentle but playful odes and laments to the city’s iconic skylines and characters, Francis also finds time to work a day-job as a research assistant for a Nobel-Prize-winner, runs a murder-mystery business. As if that wasn’t enough, he also maintains separate backing bands in LA, San Francisco, Paris and Glasgow to name but a few of the dozens of cities (19 states and five countries, for precision’s sake) he has played in.
Tracklist:
