Loverboy was excited to sit-down with Joey Pollari, the enigmatic songwriter, musician, actor and director. Today sees the release of his second album, I’ll Be Romance, and has been preceded by the sensually hypnotic singles ‘So Close’ and ‘Efforts of Love’ and their self-directed videos. The album exemplifies Pollari’s unique assemblage of personal experiences, theatrical expertise, avant-garde 20th century film influences and crafted sense of drama. 

Our conversation was philosophical and varied as we discussed the gay intimacy in Joey’s videos, Joan Crawford’s transgressive role in Johnny Guitar and the homosexual subtext in the works of Chaucer.

Joey, on your site, I’ll Be Romance includes the epigraph: ‘For our time in the Canyon, never cursed.’ Laurel Canyon was informative to this album and there is a long history of musicians including Joni Mitchell living there. How was that a source of inspiration for you?
My ex-boyfriend’s place was in Laurel Canyon. It was so far away from where I lived that it was only tenable to travel there for days at a time. I wrote a good amount of the record there so the relationship is traced by the record’s songs. It is influenced by the rock/alternative folk tradition of people who were in Laurel Canyon, but it’s not a Mamas and the Papas record. Joni Mitchell is a hero of mine but It’s not trying to sound like Joni Mitchell. This is not going to be that. The location imbued it, but it’s not referential that way.

Was there much time between the writing and recording?
It was almost immediate. I wrote the songs, decided I had enough to go on and recorded it during my relationship. In fact, my relationship suffered for making the record. I was maybe too far in making it to see that I was a little bit distant from the relationship.

It must be a little surreal to be in a relationship, but also be writing about it at the same time.
Yeah and the difficulty of making the record was apparent. I was not sure how it was going and therefore thinking about it a lot. I was really wondering if I was going to pull off what I had in my mind or whether I’d have to abandon all hope and let it be its own tower. I think that I got it reflected to me by that boyfriend who said, ‘I don’t know where you are and what’s going on.’

I’ll Be Romance was recorded in a studio with collaborators whereas your debut was more DIY…
Yes. This was the producer suggesting, ‘Why don’t you come in with this piano and guitar, or in your voice? We can build it up around that.’ I think on some level, every bit of the art process is you having a certain goal to reach the sun and then realizing you’ve only got human wings. Maybe the wind is blowing southeast, and you want it to go west, but hopefully you learn to enjoy it. It just really ended up different than I thought. Therefore, I have some good distance from it. Even at the time I heard mixes, I was happy to be surprised.

Did you go into the process of making this album with an idea or of what you wanted it to sound like?
Yeah. I had a playlist of everything from ‘Where Would I Go Without You?’ by Nina Simone to Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and Gillian Welch’s Whiskey Girl. I don’t hear those on the record. And I think it’s best that it’s not like that. I think it was something else that I was writing, some other tradition or some other thing.

I can see your music relating in terms of being reflective and ‘world building.’
Exactly. That’s what got carried over. But I’m not so hip as you are to have had that insight. I was going, ‘Why doesn’t it sound like Fleetwood Mac?’ I don’t think it’s a diaristic record. The lyrics are not diaristic, but it was sort of a process of realizing that the influences of the canyon had more of an impact on the record than I had imagined.

The videos for ‘Efforts of Love’ and ‘So Close’ seem to show ‘secret worlds’. Like a strip club or sort of gay underground space where you’re experiencing these imagined embraces.
Yeah. That is of great importance to me. I think that kind of reflects Laurel Canyon writing in that way, this home, despite the world or a world excluded from it and very much having to do with all the elements from it. You can’t push the world out that much. I’m very psychologically interested in what’s going on in the unconscious, not the literal underground with the metaphoric underground; what happens in private between two people. That’s why I picked those locations you’re smart to pick up on that. Other future videos [from the album] are out in public, but I guess I‘m at a point in my life where I am interested in privacy and intimacy is a way to get to that.

I think about these private places in the US where there’s geographical isolation, like Laurel Canyon, Provincetown, New Orleans; they have their own rules and culture.
Yeah, Gay history has thrived from private spaces of course. Safe spaces. I think relationships in general rely on private space as it’s in privacy that we are revealed. So, I like the idea of setting up directorially places where we see the fantasy enacted. Of course, many people are out in the world enacting their fantasies or presenting a certain idea of themselves all the time. But the real secretive ones, they come out in private, not to sound spooky or mysterious, just they do.

As the director you could have shown a sexy nightclub or the fantasy of a strip club, but that’s not what we see in ‘So Close’ or ‘Efforts of Love.’
No, I’m not interested in that. We have enough unmitigated fantasy images in the media and I would like to see more of an awareness of what’s going on. Not in a metaphysical or postmodern way, just how does ‘Efforts of Love’, how does The New Jalisco Bar in DTLA, how does that transform via Onyx’s dancing? How does she move reality out and invite fantasy in? How does she close its container, invite more memory, and how does memory well up into melancholy or pain or anguish? That was my interest at the time.

It must be hard to direct your own videos. I’ve never wanted to because I’m too busy worrying about what I look like to be thinking about anything else.
Yeah. I guess I wasn’t worried about it because ‘So Close’, for example, started with me directing others and the setups were relatively simple. I was in the director spot already and there was so much to think about and be part of that by the time it was my turn to be under those same lights and perform, you just have no time to think. So that’s a gift for sure. I would check myself in the mirror maybe, but I just remember, I’ve learned about myself. I’m best when it’s go time, not in the lead up.

Is it because you’ve been acting in movies and TV since you were 15?
I’ve been acting since I was four years old. I wanted to perform, sing, act, dance. That’s it. That’s all I wanted to do as a kid. I was the classic homosexual child looking at Judy Garland saying, ‘Wow, Wizard of Oz’, she was the archetype; someone I wanted to be.

Speaking of movies, there’s a haunting western tinged song on this album titled, ‘Johnny Guitar’. Was that inspired by the Joan Crawford movie?
Of course. That’s one of my favorite movies ever made. I wrote it as being, I’m both Joan Crawford and Johnny Guitar…and the Dancing Kid. Then sort of unintentionally sort of weird, then maybe the Dancing Kid and Johnny Guitar are having a relationship. That movie is very queer as you know. Emma secretly lusting after Vinnea, Joan Crawford’s character. I mean, the whole movie’s great, but the first 30 minutes, it’s like watching dominoes already falling and you’re trying to keep up.

Joan Crawford did a whole series of movies when she was in her late- 40s and early 50s that were I think her best.
Yes, after a great run of movies and working within the studio system, I mean, she got Johnny Guitar off the ground and the studio thought it was a failure. But here we are all how many years later going, ‘No, [Joan] you had it more than right. This is future thinking. This is progressive and transgressive.’

Do you feel like your work is, in some ways self-motivated? Like is it about this kind of doing the things yourself in that way?
Certainly. But what gay person isn’t? I think that’s a gay trend, isn’t it? I’m only speaking generally as it’s more fun that way, but not because it’s true. Yeah, I wanted to put on the clothes that I chose, not that it was ever a problem before being given clothes. That’s a great gift as an actor, you have ideas and you pick things out, but it’s collaboration in the middle. With music, I can dress up in anything I choose. Only if I can pull it off, of course. I think that is the identification with Joan Crawford type or that archetype. I think that is on some level, if I can again speak generally and therefore less true, why gay men like these women, especially from the ‘40s-‘60s, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe, despite the odds they outsmarted the studio system. I’m not saying that’s my own character. I just think that somewhere that’s been imbued. If you wanna do it, you gotta do it.

Even as they got older those Golden Age stars created their own sexuality, their own persona. They kind of demanded us to look at them from a perspective of power.
Oh, I think you hit the nail on the head. Yes. They not only refused, they marked themselves. Even Johnny Guitar is such a great example where Joan Crawford is so still in the movie yet refusing at every angle to be misconstrued. And she’s not defensive. She just marks her territory. When I look forward to the music career I have ahead, projects I have planned, I don’t feel vengeful. I just keep thinking about what else can I try on?

What future music projects are you scheming?
One idea is to make a record that’s based off a psychedelic folk record that’s inspired by Canterbury Tales and then a hypertext punk record. It’s not punk music, but very hyper-textual. I was forced to read Canterbury Tales in school but now as I get older, I think it is an interesting song cycle. And each character gets a voice The Wife of Bath, etc. So that’s kind of gay to me, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s an interesting bricolage. I love the competition element of Canterbury Tales. I remember when I was in Canterbury Tales as the Franklin we were competitive with the other tales, like trying to get people to vote for your tale and not the other one.
Wow. Well, that feels like a good metaphor for psychology. All of our parts are in competition to be heard, aren’t they? Our anger, our guilt, our shame, our joy, our love, our lust, our sexuality, our drive they are all me and they want to be invited to the table. Metaphorically, who else is in me? It is like a competition. Canterbury Tales is like an apt metaphor.

I want to write about RuPaul’s Drag Race being a modern Canterbury Tales.
Actually, like that is a great article. It is not only RuPaul’s Drag Race, but all modern reality competition shows are indebted to Chaucer. But God, you should do it for Drag Race. That’d be brilliant. Write that for Loverboy, I will repost.

I think what you do as a musician skews the template of what gay artists should present in music, You’re presenting something refreshing that’s uniquely in your own language.
Oh, wow. That really means a lot. Again, I feel like, not like defensive or criticizing that but yeah, just gay. I guess I’m interested in what gay language could mean in the way that it was expanded by poets and authors and maybe for songwriting or singer/songwriting has or at least modern day has gotten. Maybe I’m a little bit like, ‘Oh, how can we invite Rumpelstiltskin into the conversation?

Rumpelstiltskin via the gay experience! Speaking of the gay experience, Loverboy Magazine was named after the hit Mariah Carey single, ‘Loverboy’. Do you have a song or moment of Mariah Carey’s career that you enjoy?
Wow. What a gift. I have to reveal myself as a sap. I remember hearing ‘Hero’ as a child, and I think my Mom and I would listen to that. I did listen to her entire audio book for a gay book club in the pandemic. Speaking of more women that mark their territory and say, ‘This is who I am, and don’t you forget it!’

I’ll Be Romance is out now.

Interview by George Alley