Joy Kills Sorrow was a Boston-based
indie pop
Indie pop (also typeset as indie-pop or indiepop) is a music genre and subculture that combines guitar pop with DIY ethic in opposition to the style and tone of mainstream pop music. It originated from British post-punk in the late 1970s and su ...
, American roots stringband formed in 2005. The band at its last concert in May 2014 consisted of founding member and award-winning flatpicking guitarist Matthew Arcara, vocalist Emma Beaton, Wes Corbett on banjo, Jacob Jolliff on mandolin and Zoe Guigueno on bass.
The band's name is a play on the call letters of WJKS, the Indiana radio station that broadcast the
Monroe Brothers in the 1930s.
History
In 2007, the group won first prize in the Podunk Bluegrass Festival Band Contest.
In September 2012, it was announced that bassist
Bridget Kearney
Bridget Kearney (kə́ːnɪj, car'-nee) is an American musician and songwriter. She is a founding member of the band Lake Street Dive and winner of the 2005 John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the Jazz category.
Kearney's solo recording work beg ...
would be departing the group to concentrate on working with her own group,
Lake Street Dive
Lake Street Dive is a multi-genre band that was formed in 2004 at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. The band's founding members are Rachael Price, Mike "McDuck" Olson, Bridget Kearney, and Mike Calabrese. Keyboardist Akie Bermiss ...
.
In February 2013, Zoe Guigueno joined the group as its new bassist.
In February 2014, Joy Kills Sorrow announced via its
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
page that its members would soon go their separate ways after playing one last show on May 1, 2014 at Cambridge's Lizard Lounge.
Band member backgrounds
Emma Beaton joined the band after just turning 18, right in the last couple months of high school. She went on to study cello at Berklee College of Music and was awarded “Young Performer of the Year” at the Canadian Folk Music Awards in 2008.
Matthew Arcara took first place in the National Flat Pick Guitar contest at the Walnut Valley Festival in 2006.
Jacob Jolliff, who was Berklee's first full-scholarship mandolin student, won first place in the National Mandolin Championship in 2012 at the Walnut Valley Festival.
Wes Corbett teaches banjo at
Berklee College of Music.
Zoe Guigueno is a British Columbia native, graduated with the President's Award for the Creative and Performing Arts from Canada's prestigious Humber College in Toronto, where she studied jazz bass. She recorded and toured for years throughout Canada and Europe with acclaimed Canadian bands Fish & Bird, Crooked Brothers and Bull Kelp before joining Joy Kills Sorrow.
Influences
Joy Kills Sorrow draws influence from jazz, pop and rock.
Releases
* ''Joy Kills Sorrow'' (2006)
* ''Darkness Sure Becomes This City'' (2010)
* ''This Unknown Science'' (2011)
* ''Wide Awake (EP)'' (2013)
References
External links
*
{{Authority control
Indie pop groups from Massachusetts
Signature Sounds artists