How Lagwagon's Joey Cape Channeled One Of His Worst Years Into A Beautiful Record

One of the most challenging periods of Joey Cape’s life began in Australia last year. As the world began to shut down due to the pandemic in March 2020, Cape and his Lagwagon bandmates were touring the country.

As they neared the tail-end of the run, they were forced to cancel shows in Adelaide and Perth and scramble back to the US, where things went from bad to worse for the beloved punk rocker.

Over the months that followed, he separated from his wife of 20 years, was forced to move back in with his parents as a result of losing his livelihood, his father passed away AND he contracted COVID.

Despite all that, when asked how he’s doing, Cape notes he’s “good… really good, actually”.

“Mentally, I’m in really good shape,” he says. “I’m a little sad that things are still kind of blooming in a bad way with the virus, but I’m back working again, which is nice, after over a year with just my dog – that was crazy.”

It was during all the chaos that 2020 delivered that he penned his latest solo album, A Good Year To Forget, which helped him process those turbulent times.

“It’s like any other traumatic experience in your life… you learn from it and grow from it and there’s relief when it’s not happening,” Cape says.

“The whole time I thought, ‘I need a purpose.’ I tried a bunch of things: I took lessons online and I joined a book club and I did a bunch of nerdy things - I tried to build a birdhouse and I failed – and I just did a lot of really dumb, funny things in sheer boredom.

“But once I started making the record, it was good, I had a reason.”

Cape said that he found 2020 “was inspiring, definitely easy to write about”, and given it was written and produced during periods of isolation, he also played all the instruments on the record, “which was really a pleasure and a lot of fun.”

“But, you know, it was lonely,” he adds, “and there was definitely a lot of times during that record that it was strange not being able to share the experience. I’ve always shared the experience with others and doing it alone was a little odd.

“And I made a commitment early on that I would finish it before anyone heard it, and that’s hard to do. I wanted to just go, ‘This is what I did in 2020.’

“Every time you made a record you think, ‘Man, I’m really doing something here,’ and then years later it falls into the heap of records that you’ve made and they’re all just fine,” he laughs. “But it’s a special experience that I hope not to repeat.”

It was indeed an inspiring year for Cape, who penned around 40 songs during that time.

“There was one point where I was like, ‘You know what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna write like five records and then I’m just not going to have to make records for a while. That’s what’s gonna happen here,’” he jokes.

“I don’t really like long records, so there was 12 kind of essential songs for the feeling of it; I don’t even know if they’re the best songs because I never played them for anybody and I certainly shouldn’t be the judge of that.

“There are so many songs that Lagwagon have recorded that, if you had asked me when we were making the record and I was writing the song, I would say, ‘Yeah, and then there’s this filler tune called Violins.’ And then we get it out in front of people and everybody loves that song and I’m going to play it for the rest of my life. It’s a good thing to be sentenced to.”

A song that almost didn’t make the cut was album single Saturday Night Fever.

“I had a [COVID] bubble and my bubble involved this friend of mine and his partner, and I would go over there once a week and we’d get pissed and listen to music,” Cape explains.

“One night I decided to play him the songs because I was turning the record into the label and [Saturday Night Fever] came on and he goes, ‘Oh man, Saturday Night Fever, that’s the one.’ And I was like, ‘I was gonna cut that from the record.’ Because I played him like 14 or 16 songs. There you go – what do I know.

“I mean, I wrote the song to my dog, who I sat next to for a year-and-a-half.”

Joey Cape's A Good Year To Forget is out now, check it out below.
 

Ahead of Lagwagon’s 2020 Australian tour, Cape joined That Sucks! podcast to discuss meeting your idols (and why you should never do it).

Listen to the full episode below on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts.