On November 8, indie pop group Moody Joody will release their debut EP Dream Girl, via Photo Finish Records. Through their glittering compositions and cathartic lyrics, Moody Joody remind listeners that embracing your darkness is just as healing as embracing your light.
Moody Joody are currently on tour supporting MisterWives on their Just For One Night fall tour. Moody Joody will support MisterWives on tour on select dates until November 1, and will then play their official EP release show at Nashville’s Row 1 on November 8.
The group released three singles ahead of their EP, including “Velvet Connection,” “Ground Control” and most recently “Cuts Deep.” Described as a situationship anthem, “Cuts Deep” was written with frequent collaborator Scott Harris (Shawn Mendes, Dua Lipa) and perfectly encapsulates what Moody Joody is all about through its sharp lyricism and soft, upbeat charm.
Composed of Kayla Hall (lead vocals, guitar), Kaitie Forbes (lead vocals, guitar) and Andrew Pacheco (producer), Moody Joody is a Nashville-based pop outfit that shimmers and shines in their sonic radiance. Within their artistry, the group effortlessly yet intentionally captures that particular era in one’s life where they are learning to accept every part of themselves: the beautiful and the ugly, the dark and the light, the soft and the rigid.
On their debut record, Moody Joody explores these concepts as well as how one learns to understand their own femininity and womanhood. Ahead of Dream Girl‘s release, there’s no doubt that Moody Joody’s debut record will be a defining, glittering and fearless musical effort from the indie pop trio.
I’m very excited to chat about all the stuff you guys have coming up. Obviously you’re on tour with MisterWives right now. How has the tour been for you guys so far?
Kaitie: Everything’s been so great. We feel so honored to be out with MisterWives, and this is only our second tour as a band, so we’re still learning [laughter], but the shows have been really great and we’re excited because we’ve gotten to play some new songs and a lot of new cities for us.
How does this tour compare to your first one?
Kaitie: The drives have been a lot crazier this tour, not going to lie [laughter]. We started in Portland, so we drove from Nashville to Portland. So the first week of traveling we didn’t even play a show, we just were traveling. But now that we’re in the groove, I feel like we all just know better what we’re doing and we’re more in the flow. Less nerves.
Kayla: I feel like, especially after the first tour, it was just a good gauge of where we were at. After that tour we were like, what new gear do we need? Things like that. I think we have a better flow within our own band too, and just having different parts. Like we’re doing choreography for the first time this tour. Things like that where we were really excited to bring new things into the live show just to elevate it, versus the last tour where we kind of just starting from zero.
Your last show of the tour is November 1, and then you have an album release show as well on November 8. What can fans expect to see from these shows coming up?
Andrew: We’ve got a good mix of a bunch of the singles that we put out in the past and we’re playing a new song that’s not released yet. So it’s been fun to see the crowd reaction and engagement with that. Just high energy. We’re having a lot of fun and a lot of laughs and smiles on stage. A lot of bumping into each other by accident [laughter].
Kaitie: I almost ripped Andrew’s chord out of his guitar on accident. But other than that we’re thriving. This is our first Halloween show too, so. Costumes.
Kayla: Yeah, we are going to be wearing costumes for the next two shows. May or may not have to ship some stuff to the venue as backup options [laughter].
Without giving anything away, what are the costumes? Are we all matching or is everyone doing their own thing?
Kaitie: It’s related to our song “Ground Control.” We’ll just say that.
I love that. Of course, I know we’re talking about new singles and unreleased stuff from your debut EP Dream Girl which is coming out, congratulations on that. With your first ever album, what’s on your guys’ mind as release day is approaching?
Kayla: We’re just so excited. It’s our first body of work, so just to have something more intentional and all strung together is really exciting and we can conceptualize a little bit more. And we have a music video coming out that we are so excited about.
From the unreleased songs, do you guys have any tracks that you’re most excited for people to finally listen to?
Kaitie: We are playing a song called “El Camino High,” it’s the upcoming music video and it’s also the one we’re doing live on this tour and we also have some choreography to it. So it’s just kind of this perfect storm of all these new experiences for us. The music video is probably my favorite video that we’ve done for this EP. I’ve even said it might be my favorite Moody Joody song ever.
What about it makes it your favorite Moody Joody song? I feel like that’s such a huge title.
Kaitie: I know [laughter].
Andrew: It feels like us, but it’s a little different.
Kayla: Some of the songs on the EP we wrote years and years ago. It’s the last song we wrote for the EP and I think when you work on a body of work for as long as we’ve worked on this EP, when you have something that feels a little more mature and like a different part of our own musicianship and then where we’re at as a band too, it just feels exciting to feel like we have some old songs, but then also something that just feels like we want to enter into the next chapter. We’re going to start working on an album next year, but this song just felt like, okay, here we are.
Kaitie: And we are able to do so much with this song with choreography and the live show, and the vision for the music video just came together really nicely. I feel like this song is a package deal, which feels exciting.
Do you feel like your sound really changed during the process of making the EP?
Andrew: I think that there are elements of our sounds that have been there since day one and are a core part of Moody Joody. And then over time we’ve kind of expanded on that and inserted other influences into the picture. I think that when making the EP, it was important for us to represent a lot of different sides of the band within it since it’s our first body of work. I’d say that there’s definitely some fresh energy for us on this. It’s definitely expanded for sure, and I feel like I could see the evolution in that, but it’s been very natural.
The latest single off the record was “Cuts Deep,” what’s the story behind the song and what was the songwriting process like?
Kaitie: We wrote it when we were on our last tour in April. We had a few days off in Brooklyn so we met up with Scott Harris, who we wrote “Ground Control” and “Velvet Connection” with, and we wrote “Cuts Deep” that day.
Kayla: We had a few lines we were sitting on for a while that we intended to be the chorus originally, and they actually ended up being the first few lines of the song in the first verse. I feel like that’s always what’s so fun about working with Scott specifically is that we’ll come in with an idea and we always just end up with something so great and it’s just really natural. But the song content is about one of those moments when you’re having the “define the relationship” conversation when you’re in a situationship and you’re like, how is this going to go? [Laughter.]
Going off of that, I really did want to ask about how you discuss relationships, feminism and womanhood in your music as well. You’ve said this upcoming EP explores both the ups and downs of womanhood. When you were making this album, how did your views on yourself as a woman, how you take up space or how you perceive yourself change?
Kayla: I don’t want to speak for both of us, but as I get older – I turned 30 this year – I think a lot of it is self-acceptance and releasing shame. There’s so many things about being a woman that are so hard to unlearn, and I think I’ve learned about just having radical self-acceptance for the moments where I feel down, or I’ve had depression in the past and I’ve taken SSRIs or things like that. But also celebrating my sexuality and lightheartedness and fully just leaning into whatever we were feeling at the time of writing. Some of that is more lighthearted and some of it is really deep and emotional. Like, it gets dark at 4:00 PM in Nashville in the winter and we have a song called “Pass The Time” that I feel like leans a lot into seasonal depression and what it feels like for us in Nashville. So there’s just all these different elements of owning our humanness throughout.
Kaitie: I think a lot of it for me was just really the idea of perfectionism. I came from a very religious background and was raised on believing that I did need to be this dream girl, so to speak, and be on this pedestal and not have too many emotions, like I can’t have darkness or anxiety or depression. And I think this EP is a really good practice for me to just own up to all the parts of me and not be afraid to write about it and just be authentic about it.
Making this album was very healing for all of you. I know music obviously can be a source of catharsis for those who listen to it, but when you guys actually made the album, how did that offer a space of healing for all of you?
Kaitie: I think for me, self -acceptance is a large part of it, and just not being afraid of judgment or disappointing people. It just felt like a good practice for me to accept myself and step into who I am.
Kayla: Yeah, and we wrote so many songs for the EP at different points and chapters in our lives. So for me, whenever we get in a session, it’s almost like a celebration of all these different chapters. Because we really have been working on this EP for years. It’s like you can listen and pinpoint different things we were going through because all of the songs are really authentic to us. If Kaitie and I happen to write separate verses, we like to lean into our personal stories and come together with our shared experience on the choruses. So that has always been a foundation. It’s just being really authentic. And we obviously hope that other people, when they listen to it, can really feel seen or supported. It’s always cool when you can have that connection as well with other people and hope that it resonates.
Do you ever feel hesitant to put out something that might be a bit personal or a bit vulnerable? Or is it just natural?
Kaitie: I definitely do get nervous, because my parents are still religious. Even with “Ground Control” there’s a line about getting high, and I was so scared. And “Cuts Deep” says “fuck” and I was so scared about that (laughs). They’ve been amazing about it though and very accepting, but I think I’m just so conditioned to hide those parts of myself or not lean into my sexuality, and a lot of these songs have notes of just being sexual. So yeah, I definitely always have a little bit of fear, but this EP has been such great practice for me and I feel like I’ve overcome a lot of that fear.
We’ve talked about this a little bit, but your music as a whole kind of balances both light-hearted and darkness, and it balances dreamy and with edginess. How do you bring these two alternatives together to make your own unique sound?
Andrew: Obviously the experiences and the stories are the girls’, but for me they come in with lyrics or an idea and in most cases what the song ends up sounding like is my emotional interpretation of what they’re saying in a way. I try to always scope the production and the sonic element of things around the story and the lyrics. So I think that’s probably how we end up with some songs being more of the ethereal, moody kind of thing. It’s always about how the story feels to me, musically. And like I said, being our first body of work, I think when we were coming up with what songs to include in the track list it was very important for us to display all those sides of us to give a summarization of Moody Joody at this current point in time.
With the first album being a summarization for the band, was there a certain pressure to include very specific songs or stick to one particular sound? How difficult was that for you all?
Andrew: Well, it’s interesting because we don’t write that many songs outside of what we put out. I know the girls both are obviously very intentional with what they want to say all the time. So we didn’t have a bunch of extra songs to choose from necessarily. There were some older songs, like “Pass The Time” was an older song that we thought needed to be on it to complete the message of the EP in a way. And sonically speaking it was different and we wanted to introduce that. But in terms of the actual songs, I don’t think so.
Kaitie: Yeah, it’s always really organic with us.
Kayla: I wouldn’t say there was too much pressure. What’s really awesome too about Photo Finish Records and our team we’re working with is we do feel like we have creative freedom to explore and decide what feels right to us when it comes to the music.
Obviously your debut EP hasn’t been released yet, but in terms of your sound is there anything that the band wants to experiment with in the future that you haven’t explored yet?
Andrew: It’s been really interesting to see how the live show has influenced the production on the studio versions because I don’t even think it was something that I realized when we were making them. But when I listen back to our older songs I can hear that it’s become a bit more of a band feeling in a way. Even the poppier songs. But at the same time I can totally contradict that, because I also feel like we’ve gotten more experimental with sounds in the studio and weird stuff. With “Cuts Deep” there’s a lot of different random influences in there. So it’s like, our sound is definitely changing while still under the same umbrella.
Kayla: I feel like too, since we have been working on this one for so long, once we do have this out and we go into the point where we’re ready to start working on a full-length album, we’ll be able to lean more into that where we can be more present in the studio and actually make a whole body of work together. Because we really didn’t write this EP with necessarily 100% the EP in mind. But with the album, it’ll be the first time I feel like we’re every song that we’re doing, track listing, everything will be very intentional and flowing. So I feel like it’ll be exciting to explore our sound in a different way with the intention of writing a full-length album as well.
In regards to Dream Girl, what do you ultimately hope that listeners will get from the album?
Kayla: That’s a really good question. I think the really awesome part about music is that every single person is going to have a completely different experience with it. So one person might lean more into it’s helping them heal something, like Kaitie said with religious trauma or with their own views of their sexuality or embracing that side or confidence. I think it’s cool that each person can have their own experience with it and just overall connection.
Kaitie: Yeah. And maybe just the message that one feeling or one season of life doesn’t define you. This EP is very much about duality, and you can own your darkness and you can also own your fun, flirtatious, sensual side as well. You can be both and both are okay.
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