Joyous Wolf Says OC ‘s Classic Rock Scene Needs to Be a Collective, Not a Competition

If there’s one thing the band Joyous Wolf has realized on their journey as a neo classic rock band, it’s that there’s power in riffs and power in numbers.

This brought them to the idea to form their own collective with some of the friends they’ve made so far: fellow psychedelic-era throwback heavy rock’n’roll bands, Of Limbo, Them Evils, Slow Season and Thundergut to name a few.

“It’s a sort of brothers in arms type of thing,” singer Nick Reese says. “We all want the same things: to make good rock music and to show that the genre has still so much room to grow. We also know that if we work together we make a much larger noise than we would on our own. You can make a much bigger and more noticeable impact when you get the best artists to work together to forge the future of the genre with each group’s twist on the past.”

Starting just over a year ago, the band has been quick to gain the attention of their contemporaries in Orange County/Los Angeles, including Badflower who brought the fresh-faced rockers into their studio (dubbed The Hideout) to film a music video for their song “Sleep Weep Stomp,” which has since garnered thousands of views on Youtube.

They then released their first EP, Daisy in September of 2015 and in February had their first radio airplay on KLOS thanks in part to more promotion from LA band The Veronicas. Their new single, “Mountain Man” will debut on the Heidi and Frank show during an on air interview on April 8th.

The rapid-fire succession of helping hands from their fellow SoCal rock bands has made the young band (all of whom are barely 21) realize that the most important thing in this business is making friends with the right people have forming lasting symbiotic relationships.

Of course they wouldn’t be anywhere if their talent wasn’t as impressive as their tenacity. Reese’s vocals are the perfect counterpart to Joyous Wolfs trudging, heavy hitting riffs, with a distinctive crooning howl, tonally sandwiched somewhere in between Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder. Reese, along with, Drummer Robert Sodaro, and Bassist Greg Braccio have been friends and dabbled with music with each other for years, but the missing component came when Reese met guitarist Blake Allard in the acoustic guitar room at a guitar center.

“I was in there just fooling around and he walked into the room,” Reese says. “He was trying to tune a resonator guitar. I had my tuner on me so I tossed it to him. We jammed on Born On The Bayou by CCR and just clicked. I asked for his information. Six months later when we were starting Joyous Wolf, I called him to join the band.”

Reese laughs about the band name, saying that it means absolutely nothing. “We spent weeks thinking of a name. We hit the point where it was getting ridiculous. We were just throwing ideas out there that weren’t taken and it was just the first name where we all looked at each other and said, ‘Alright.’”

Joyous Wolf and the “collective” are hoping to create a platform where the bands in Southern California that are willing to put in the work have the capacity to flourish.

“It’s all about establishing the common goal. Working together, playing together, realizing that it’s a huge waste of time trying to make it a big ego competition. We’re all just trying to share our music with everyone,” Reese says. “Why taint that with rivalries? We live in the same place. We create different sounds that exist inside the same genre. To make that genre strong again, we have to be strong together.”

Joyous Wolf will be playing a free show at Slidebar in Fullerton with The Gambit, Crown City Krooks and fellow “collective” members Of Limbo and Thundergut on April 1st.