“We’re lucky, but we also work hard for it.”
Josh Kennedy is the vocalist and guitarist for The Black Moods, a trio that is rounded out by bassist Jordan Hoffman and drummer Chico Diaz. Their musical momentum going into the coronavirus pandemic (and even throughout it) was fierce, but it came with some challenges and frustration. More on that later, but right now as we share this interview with Kennedy, we want to shine a light on how they’ve come out of that funk, so to speak, with so much more to their name, an even grander future, and even more modern rock ground to explore.
We ease into a conversation with the frontman for this interview, who tells us about Arizona, the current home base for The Black Moods that is far from our home turf, but shapes where they are at this point in their career. “It’s cool because if you go where Phoenix is, then go like four hours north, you’re in The Pines and it’s Flagstaff and there’s snow. Then you head out to Sedona and there is all the Red Rock. It’s just like two-and-a-half hours from there. And then we play in Mexico this weekend, which is just another four hour drive south, so you’re on the beach and you’re close to everything. It’s nice, I love it.” That being said, he holds a lot of love for the Big Apple, too – a city of which he and his bandmates are still cutting their teeth in.
“We love [New York] City, but as a band in our position right now where we’re still a baby band pretty much, we still take the train to our show and our tour manager/front of house guy takes our equipment in a U-Haul we rent. We don’t just get dropped off from the bus at the venue. We still have to worry about parking and all that kind of stuff. We love it all, though, and we have a blast. We always try to have, like, buffer days to where we just have a day or two in the city to hang out, see local friends, take it all in.”
As we talk about this, we are reminded about how the rise of a band, the come-up of an artist, is what builds character. The Black Moods, much like The Beatles and Nirvana and all the bands before them, are no exception. “It makes you appreciate when you do have those successful moments, because you earned it, you know? Nowadays there are people and bands that we have ran across that are way bigger than us that have never even played a show, which blows my mind. It’s ’cause the internet and TikTok and all that kind of stuff allows these people to get really big, which is cool, but it’s just a different mindset where we’re a band that is good because we work hard and we rehearse. Every live show is worth like 10 rehearsals. We work hard and we play and we’ve definitely earned our tightness and the abilities we have as a band on stage and off, sleeping in a van, changing tires, and all that.”
The trio of rockers with their true DIY energy have worked hard – there is no doubt about that. It’s not only how they operate on the road, though. Throughout their days writing and recording, the band is implementing a refreshed effort and thoughtfulness to their groovier styles of today. Getting into that space and that process is just as diligent and demanding, but it has shaped the soundscapes of a variety of great songs – most recently their singles “HEAVEN,” “Sugar,” and (appropriately) “Passion.”
“We recorded them in LA,” Kennedy shares about these revolutionary and evolutionary single releases. “We’re a three piece, so we write with each other a lot. Our manager at the time was working with this other artist that wrote for Bruno Mars around the time he had his first hits and stuff. He introduced me to this cat and he’s just like, ‘You guys hit it off and I think you should write some songs together.’ So, I went out to LA.”
Like New York, which we spoke candidly about earlier, there is a lot of diversity and a lot of culture in Los Angeles, which can make or break a band. “I’m not a big fan of it,” he admits, “but LA’s vibe. I appreciate it for what it is, and I’ve been out there since I was a kid going back and forth and recording and playing and all that stuff.”
Although, as Kennedy shares, “It could be a bit pretentious. You don’t sell merch in LA or New York – that’s one thing we’ve found out, so we don’t carry our merch in town unless we get dropped off from the bus.”
He continues diving into the songs at hand, though, that came about in the City of Angels and a bit outside of the three-piece structure that The Black Moods were rooted in. “I went out there and ‘HEAVEN’ was the first song I wrote. I made it with the writer for Bruno Mars. I sent it to my drummer who was back in Phoenix. Him and our bass player were coming out a couple days later, but I just wasn’t sure about it, so I sent it to them in advance and the guys freaked out. They’re like, ‘Oh, this is great.’ We just kind of built on that. ‘HEAVEN’ and ‘Sugar’ were really the first two that we wrote with Seth and Nico, who was the writing team we were with. We just pushed those songs out first, but I think we have like 10 songs that we wrote with those guys. We also have about two records worth of songs that we were just sitting on, too. When ‘Passion’ came about, we weren’t sure what to put out. We’d recorded it a few months before all this – before we even put ‘HEAVEN’ out. We had it, and we had got a few more, so we were like, ‘Let’s just put it out,’ especially since we integrated a lot more production with ‘Sugar’ and ‘HEAVEN,’ and that was the direction we were going in, since we are just a three piece rock band.”
“We attacked these songs with more of a use of the whole studio element, instead of how we did the other records, which were basically just rock records, us and instruments. We are pushing a little more into the alternative side with ‘Sugar’ and ‘HEAVEN.’ Then ‘Passion’ is just kind of a two minute punk rock song that we made for us. We’re big Queens of the Stone Age fans, so we were heavily influenced by that. Our bass player wrote most of the music and brought it to me. Then the lyrics and the melody just came right out. It was pretty effortless. So, after everything, after the first two songs being so much on the alternative tip, we were just like, ‘Let’s put out a two minute punk rock song, be a little broader,’ and that kind of thing.”
The Arizona group is doing that well, though, with that thoughtful approach to their honest, anthemic, occasionally sensual, often percussion-driven sound.
Kennedy says he is excited to see where this goes and what sound and project it leads into. “We’re in the midst of figuring out how we’re going to put together – if we’re gonna put out a full record or if we’re going to be getting an EP. It’s just so crazy with the way the music business is right now. People have said that for years; it’s like when it went from vinyls to eight tracks to cassettes, and then CDs to streaming. It’s always gonna change. You gotta just kind of go with it. It’s the same thing with film; I’m a big rock doc fan. I watch every documentary I can get my hands on. I watched one recently and people were talking about when MTV came about and how you couldn’t just make records and tour anymore as a musician – you had to be an actor in a video now too, you know? A lot of the artists are about that, but others had to acclimate to it. It’s kind of the same thing that we’ve been about, too, because between all the platforms like YouTube and TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and all this stuff, you have to be a master at all that now. Here we are focusing on the hard work of writing songs, recording songs, and then you have to be a social media savvy creator on top of all that. It’s a lot to keep up with, especially when you’re just a guitar player and a songwriter,” he concludes with a laugh.
Although he mentioned streaming a bit offhand, it was important to note that The Black Moods’ top cities who listen to them were Phoenix, of course, Chicago, Toronto, Seattle, and Brazil. Yes, it’s true – one of those cities is not quite like the other. It changed our perspective a bit about streaming services and having to wear all these hats and how you release music, because you just don’t know what hands (or, ears) music can get to these days. “If it wasn’t for streaming platforms, we never would’ve known that Brazil liked us so much.”
We tell him that we believe the must be exciting – having your music be heard everywhere from your hometown to across the globe. He agrees with a laugh, telling us that it is pretty crazy, even if the band has shared stages with legendary acts like the Gin Blossoms, Shinedown, and Godsmack.
“It’s funny you say that,” he adds. “When we first went to radio, we had signed our deal to put out ‘Bella Donna,’ and it was our first single with that. It broke the Billboard Top 40! A friend of ours went to Italy on vacation around that time, and she said when she got into her hotel room that Virgin TV was on, and our video for ‘Bella Donna’ was playing… in Italy! We’re like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ So we did some research and found out that they were digging it over there. Then we put out a single called ‘What You Got’ and we signed with an Italian label over there to distribute it, get it out there. During the pandemic, we found out it was No. 5 on the charts in Italy! [We] couldn’t tour on it, though, of course, and we got beat up pretty bad, because then our second highest charting song was out – ‘Sunshine’ –it broke the Top 20, but we couldn’t go tour on it. That kind of set us back, but it allowed us to make the movie: 500 Days of Silence.”
The film at hand is a rockumentary that is a period piece, as well. It takes musicians, fans ,and the world backstage and behind the curtain, but also beyond the screens and behind the masks that held us back in 2020 and 2021. It’s inspiring, on-the-nose, and a true working man’s reflection of being an artist, finding footing, feeling the rug ripped out from under you, and moving forward with grace. “It turned out really well,” the singer/guitarist says. “Sammy Hagar, Jim Atkins, Robin Wilson with Gin Blossoms, Rick Springfield, and more, are in it, which is crazy. Not being able to tour led us to that, so at least something good for us came out of the pandemic.”
Kennedy explains how it was important for this film to show the “dichotomy,” as he puts it, between bands on the rise during the pandemic, versus bands who were already very established. The way each subset of artists viewed that tough time and how they came out of it is vastly different – and all depicted in the film.
“Sammy Hagar and Van Halen and Corey Taylor and Slipknot and Stone Sour and all those guys – how they were dealing with [the shutdowns] versus a band like us that not everybody knows… the reality of that difference is what this is about. If we were at that status of Slipknot and Hagar, if we were at that level, I think we would’ve lost that truth and reality a little bit. If we were a household name, you know? At least in the way that the movie was made, it was kind of meant to show the guys like us that were still changing tires on the side of the road and need to go out on a tour. It’s about not making money during the pandemic, not even selling millions of records during the pandemic could keep us alive. We were struggling; that’s why we chose to put that out there, in the hopes that after people watch it, they’ll become fans of the band and it will push us to that status eventually, to where we’re that big and can play Madison Square Garden and not question if we’ll survive as a band. […] We worked with the director, Jeremy, who sort of had carte blanche with the movie, but we put everything in there. It’s completely honest from our perspective of the situation.”
YOU CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT 500 DAYS OF SILENCE, THE NEW DOCUMENTARY FROM THE BLACK MOODS & THEIR FRIENDS, COLLABORATORS, PEERS, & IDOLS, CLICK HERE.
FOR MORE ON THE BLACK MOODS, VISIT THEIR WEBSITE!
