On the Rise
JW Francis

Reaching through the familiar, time-worn crackle of tape spools, travelling through decades in an instant, a small voice says: “I love my brother, I love my daddy, I love my sister, I love my momma, and…”, then, the little boy’s wandering voice suddenly comes sharply into focus, as he declares, with the gift of absolute conviction we know only in childhood: “… I love myself.”

That child, unafraid to love, and unafraid to say so, was singer-songwriter JW Francis at four-years old. And in a way, nothing has changed. That snippet of himself, found last Christmas after watching back his family’s home movies, might seem perfectly mundane – what’s so unusual about a kid saying he loves his mum and dad? – was, in its own way, quite radical. “I love myself”, his four-year-old self insists, planting his flag firmly in the soil of a world that, as he grows, will tell him not to. This statement of intent is the first thing you hear on his debut album, We Share A Similar Joy.

Joy is a friend of JW Francis. Despite the weather in New York City turning to winter, reflective of a bitter climate of another kind throughout the states, he laughs generously, with extra helpings of warmth and a certain kind of freedom. His hope, for this record, is that it will be a “warm blanket” – something to nestle with when the static of the outside world is all too deafening. His particular brand of lo-fi indie unwinds itself like a daydream, crackling with familiarity, and yet from somewhere far beyond.

“Everyone I’ve worked with in the past wanted me to sound very polished – and I wanted to sound bad,” – that laugh, again. It was his friend, producer Sahil Ansari, who had brought that particular vision to fruition. It was just one link of a chain of appreciation that formed the foundation upon which We Share A Similar Joy was built. “I was just in a state of gratitude,” he explains. “I was living with my best friend in what I considered to be the best city in the world; I had a great group of friends - and I called my grandma every day.” It’s the simplicity we often lose sight of that JW Francis is trying to distil in us, to step back, for just a moment, and count our extraordinary, ordinary blessings.

While he has anchored himself in New York, up until this point, Francis was something of a nomad. The “four pillars” of his life: Oklahoma, Vermont, Paris and New York, have all imbued his life, and therefore his music, with a concoction of qualities that make We Share A Similar Joy a unique declaration of self. Oklahoma are where he planted his roots: “That’s where I get my sense of awe with the world,” he says. “When we moved to Paris, I remember the thing that blew my mind was that you were in walking-distance of a store. I still haven’t gotten over that. Oklahoma gave me my sense of wonder.”

It would be in isolated forestry of Vermont that Francis would pick up the guitar – not so much due to freedom of choice, but from a lack of options. “There was six feet of snow outside,” he recalls, “so I couldn’t go outside for like, eight months,” so the guitar came into his life as something transportive, at first only in his daydreams – and now, on a trans-Atlantic level. “Vermont taught me the importance of isolation and solitude,” he believes.

But it was Paris where he would, for the first time, try on rose-tinted glasses. “Paris is a city that loves you – and you love it,” he shares. “It’s romantic. You can walk the streets alone at night and there’s a soft orange glow that gives you a hug, and you feel like the city cares for you in a way that New York doesn’t. It doesn’t care about you at all. You have to prove yourself to it.”

His ode to New York on the record is a bittersweet one: the blessings are mixed; the sword is double-edged. It’s a frenetic storm in a teacup, a three-minute whirlwind of the city’s relentless motion: “I sleep when dead, I go, I go, I go, I go…”, he sings, half in awe of its pace, half struggling to not be left behind in the dust. “Yeah, New York… it’s a complicated relationship,” he says. “I mean, the city is cruel. It doesn’t care about art; it doesn’t care if you’re inspired or not. The fact you have to prove your worth is what makes it so energising, and yet so draining, at the same time. There’s this energy here that I have not found anywhere else – it’s an energy of doing your absolute best, whatever that means.”

Francis has made a living from his intimacy with the city. As a tour guide, he knows the grid of New York like an anatomist, with each vein pumping the city’s lifeblood. Sifting through the gems, he tells me of Cobble Hill, and Irish immigrant neighbourhood in Brooklyn, which has remained more or less untouched since the 1880s. It’s right next to a power plant, he says; the dichotomy of this relic and the hum of electricity, of modernity, living side-by-side, had captured his imagination. “You know when you walk through a space and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m probably going to dream of this later’?”, he asks me, “I just felt something strange here. It’s a place I’ve only been to twice in real life, but dozens of times in my dreams.”

In lyricism, there can be a tendency to sugar-coat; in these times, particularly, escapism is favoured over the gunmetal grey of reality. Francis’ song-writing, however, captures honest-to-god truths in a new light. His album is strewn with life’s paradoxes which strike a chord in our own lives: “I feel a need to make myself yours / I feel a need to make myself mine”, he sings in “I’m Down, Whatever”, which captures the tug-of-war between wanting to wanting to share yourself with another, and yet, out of self-preservation, wanting to keep yourself whole.

Reaching that sweet spot was a destination that took JW Francis hundreds of songs to finally arrive at. “You start of writing very sincerely, and it comes off so cringey,” he explains, “so then you use tricks to write very cryptically, and suddenly, you think you’re Bob Dylan, you know, ‘stand in the rain with your pain and the weatherman’, whatever – you’re just trying to throw people off the treadmill. And then you realise you’re not really saying anything of value, or anything people can relate to. So then you come full circle, back to sincerity, but this time, with more caution, side-stepping those clichés.”

Francis doesn’t have a particular problem with clichés: “They’re just universal truths,” he says. Where clichés let you down, he believes, is their lack of specificity. “You have to get more specific on what your truth is,” he says. “’I’m Down, Whatever’ is a rumination on the fact that a lot of people our age are plagued with the idea that they need to be the best version of themselves – and that can kill you, because you’re never going to get there. It’s always the carrot in front of your face. ‘Trying to be the best version of yourself’… what does that even mean when most people don’t even know what they want?” His song-writing speaks to that symptom of society we all know so well, and gives us a tonic for it through his own unique perspective.

Writing songs is a constant in JW Francis’ life. He has a back catalogue in the hundreds – there is a reason, he tells me, why only a handful made the cut for this record. One day, he decided to channel his creativity to a certain subject, just to see what he could do. So, naturally, he decided he would begin writing odes to his favourite fruits. He amassed enough songs that could easily make four albums. “It was so silly and fun,” he says, laughing at the absurdity of it. “It was one of the first times I unlocked my brain, when I realised that by giving myself less choice, I would be way more creative. Writing about fruit opened a floodgate.”

It was through this careless creative freedom that he cut his teeth in the New York open mic scene. “But one day, when someone came up to me and started singing “Banana”, calling me ‘The Fruit Guy’, I thanked him, walked away, and then decided, ‘That is dead. I cannot be the fruit guy. I do not want to be singing “Banana” at some kid’s birthday when I’m forty-five years old.” He tells me, in particular, “Tomato”, which has a chorus which goes, “Fuck you / You’re not a fruit” – a real crowd pleaser, he assures.

For someone who can reel off songs about fruit like a reflex, it’s surprising to hear that when it came to being a musician, it was not love at first sight. In fact, for much of his life, he had neatly skirted around it. “I’m a listener first and a creator second,” he insists. He founded and ran his college recording studio CU Records, as well as the music publication Rare Candy and hosted a radio show. “I was always obsessed,” he admits, “I get obsessed with artists. I’m the kind of guy who looks up every interview they’ve ever done, which is why it’s so exciting doing interviews now, because I wonder what kind of breadcrumbs I’m leaving on the internet for my stalkers,” he laughs.

Though he had always had an almost religious devotion to music, it didn’t occur to him that it had been his dream to be a musician until after he had graduated college. “It’s funny, because I had friends who were really trying as musicians, and that whole time I was interviewing them, booking shows, putting in support – anything except playing with them. When I realised, it was like, ‘Oh, duh!’ – the thing that I’ve always done is what I want to be doing with the rest of my life.”

JW Francis is the final form of a long lineage of musical aliases. It came, in part, from an ambition to be a fantasy writer, which he had nurtured at the age of ten. It made sense, according to his idols C.S Lewis and J.K Rowling, that “all you need are two letters, and a fancy last name. I was going to be JW Francis, the fiction writer.” When he reached the discovery that to write a book, you must spend a lot of time alone, he let that dream go – but the name stayed. “I feel like I couldn’t be more me,” he confesses. “There’s that saying that goes like, ‘the person wearing the mask is the most truthful’, or whatever. There’s some kind of sentiment of that in JW Francis.”

Playing live is something he savours in particular – he’s animated at the best of times – but when he talks about the stage, he lights up. We talk about “Good Times”, and the way, just before the chorus, he pauses: “I’ll just relish in the tension. I just love when a band stops mid-song, and the singer just kind of looks around the room… it’s palpable, you know? The live show is all about the vibe and the energy, rather than recreating the album. Onstage, I think that’s kind of boring, actually. I’m very impressed when people can do it well. But what you walk away with are the vibes. I love performing live, and I make no secret of it. When I’m onstage, I think people can tell.”

As JW Francis, he has played no less than 72 shows – that’s 19 different states, and 5 different countries. “I have a spreadsheet, not a freakish memory!” he insists. One of his little idiosyncrasies as an artist is that in every city, he forms a different band. In the beginning, it arose from practicalities, more than anything. When he was invited to play shows, venues often didn’t have the money to fly over his entire New York-based band, so together, they would form another for one night only. His love for performing means, he says, “it can only be good – even if they’re not playing particularly well. The crazy thing is, it’s never gone wrong. I think, at first, they think that as a singer-songwriter I’ll be a die-hard perfectionist, and are so afraid of incurring my wrath, or something - which doesn’t even exist, I don’t even have a wrath – but as soon as we start rehearsing, they realise that whatever they do, I’m going to be happy with it. Every show is a different sound. Some are more heavy rock, and some are more like smooth jazz – it entirely depends on who the band is.”

He has no lofty ideals of quantifiable success. External validation is something that has never held any sway over his music. Instead, he believes, “Success is about wanting to do it again.” While being able to make an honest living from music has its lustre – not to mention being able to afford a plane ticket for his entire band in New York, next time – much like We Share a Similar Joy, success is rooted in gratitude, for this very moment, being unafraid to indulge in that child-like awe that brought him this far in the first place. As the tape winds to an end, the little boy says: “Mom’s here, Dylan’s here, Chloe’s here, Daddy’s here … and I’m here!”