Joy Denalane – WILLPOWER

One death and two goodbyes: Joy Denalane‘s latest and sixth album “WILLPOWER” (Release Date: November 10th, 2023) is about letting go, about grief, but also about a new found freedom – and about self-empowerment. Featuring contributions from Ghostface Killah, Sékou Neblett, Max Herre and Roberto Di Gioia among others, the album represents a leap into the unknown with fiercely oscillating happy/sad Soul of unbridled intensity.

Soul has always been the music of liberation, and “WILLPOWER” contains Joy’s very personal liberation anthems. The central emotional poles of this album are death, birth, endings and new beginnings. Ultimately, this music is about the fact that willpower alone is sometimes not enough in life. While working on this album, Joy Denalane had to say goodbye to her beloved father, whom she had accompanied during the last three years of his life, which were overshadowed by illness. This farewell, the funeral, and shortly afterwards – at least in terms of space – sending her grown-up sons out into the world, and finally the feeling that a completely different, completely new phase of life is now beginning: all this and much more is contained in these eleven new songs.

So when Joy Denalane sings about willpower, she is also referring to acceptance: the ability to take things as they are, to live with them, to find one’s place in the raging sea of life.

“The death of my father had such a serious impact on me ….. The grief doesn’t go away, it lingers. My mother passed away 20 years ago. Now it feels strange to be all alone in the world, even at my age”.

For Joy, the formative events on the road to “WILLPOWER” are interconnected:

They say you don’t really grow up until your parents die. Joy Denalane knows what they mean:

“I think it really is like that,”

she says.

“I really struggled with my father’s death, and I still do, and I’ve moved through the world differently since then, it’s like a switch has been flipped. I’m not even sure it’s a process. It feels more like a permanent state.”

A state of mind that eventually led to some of the songs on ‘Willpower’. Especially the second single “Happy”:

“I wanted to dedicate a song to my father, but it was important to me that it didn’t sound like a traditional mourning song, but that it transported the many happy memories of him. I had a wonderful life with my father.

says Joy

“Happy begins with a shuffle beat, a wobbling organ in the background and a slowly building verse:

“Don’t know how this life works without you / But it all depends on the story imma choose,”

Joy sings with gravitas as the song steadily builds into a powerful soul anthem, eventually reaching another climax with a surprising and fantastic collaboration with legendary Wu-Tang Clan rapper Gostface Killah, before the chorus ends with an initially jarring line: “I’m happy for the loss”.

“It’s a contradiction, of course, it’s about my tremendous appreciation of the last period we had together, when he was not feeling very well. That’s when our already special relationship really intensified. They say I should sit around and grieve / But I am happy,”

Joy explains,

Joy sings at the end of the song – about the fact that this man existed, that he had such an impact on her life and music, and that he was her father. Overall, the reflective moments on WILLPOWER are perfectly matched by the powerful, joyful ones. The album opens with an adaptation of Johnny Hammond‘s “Can’t We Smile”, and the way Joy sings this song gives the answer to the question posed in the title: Because sometimes life just doesn’t work out, and in times like these it takes a lot of willpower to keep going. The free-swinging jazz of the original still resonates well, but Joy takes the song to another level, making it her own by adding two verses that are not in the original. The following “Fly By” also glides along, shimmering, with a dignity and elegance that is rarely found. The future is uncertain, you already have some cuts and bruises, but you also know a lot better than before. This is even more true of Joy Denalane‘s voice. There are basically two categories of soul and R&B singers: Those who show off their technical skills and those who take a more classical approach. For them it’s all about the song. The lyrics, the emotion, the soul. Joy, of course, belongs to the second category.

Although she could probably sing absolutely anything, her singing is never really for its own sake. Instead, she speaks through her songs, getting better, more truthful and more intoxicating as the years go by. In the wonderful, sustained ballad “Revolutions” or the jazz-inspired “Far Cry”, for example, Joy’s voice drapes itself over our troubled souls like a gently cooling blanket. Everything about the “WILLPOWER” predecessor “Let Yourself Be Loved” was right – except the timing: With her Motown debut, the queen of African soul had recorded a clear statement of soul. “Let Yourself Be Loved” entered the German album charts from zero to five, was an artistic and commercial triumph, but was released in the middle of the pandemic and could therefore never be properly toured.

So now, with “WILLPOWER”, Joy Denalane is celebrating, if nothing else, her regained freedom as a musician:

“I felt like I wasn’t getting enough exercise. You’re ready for anything, but you can’t run because of external circumstances. Out of that energy I went straight back into the studio. I just wanted to keep going. In this respect, it’s no coincidence that “WILLPOWER” is in some ways a musical continuation of “Let Yourself Be Loved”.

says Joy

Once again, Joy has drawn inspiration from the history of American soul, but whereas on her last album she explicitly traced the Motown and Stax sound of the late sixties and early seventies, on “Willpower” she makes music that sounds like it could have been sampled by artists like Mary J. Blige or the New York R&B trio SWV in the nineties. Sounds confusing? It’s not at all: On WILLPOWER, Joy Denalane opens up enormous high-fidelity spaces. The spirit of the aforementioned resonates here as well as that of Teddy Pendergrass, Michael Jackson of the Quincy Jones era or Marvin Gaye. “But WILLPOWER is music for the here and now – and it is Joy Denalane‘s music.

Once again Joy has produced the album with “Let Yourself Be Loved” producer Roberto Di Gioia – as well as with Max Herre. As with her previous albums, Joy has once again produced an album with the man she shares her life with.

“We don’t talk about music all the time. It was great to be able to share that so intensively again, we have a reliable mix of agreement and disagreement. I trust Max and I think it’s almost a shame how little his role as producer is in the public eye, because he’s also Max Herre, the pop star. But he is an insanely good producer, very organised and to the point. But of course I had the final say.

she says about working with her partner of many years

Making classic soul- and R&B-inspired music sound and play like this is now almost a secret science that only a few have mastered.

“The search for the right sound was sacred to us, we practised it like a religion,”.

says Joy of the pieces mostly composed by Di Gioia

Roberto Di Gioia, on the other hand, is not only known to have an excellent feel for classical styles, but also to be extremely well connected. The meticulous and passionate approach of the Denalane team and Di Gioia’s address book resulted in a real scoop: On some selected tracks on “WILLPOWER”, the bass is played by none other than US jazz musician Tim Lefebvre, who most recently led the band that recorded David Bowie’s last album, “Blackstar”.

“It was great because Timmy intuitively understands this sound from the inside out, he has studied it,”.

says Joy

“WILLPOWER” was recorded in Munich and Bremen, the vocals were mainly produced with Max Herre at Circle Studios in Berlin, Jan Krause was again responsible for the mix. Along the way, Joy Denalane worked with old friends such as Sway Clarke, Sékou Neblett and Matteo Scrimali. The fundamental harmony between Herre and Denalane during the work on WILLPOWER is reflected in the song “Hideaway”: “Waking up with the birds / Cause boy we deserve to finally be free / Like we’re the last two on earth,” sings Joy. These are the nicest words a couple can find for each other after such a long time. When the kids are out of the house and you know that now, more than ever, you want to enjoy your newfound freedom with the person you raised those kids with, “finally we live in a hideaway,” as the song says.

“We remain parents, of course, and we continue to accompany the children, but I became a mother at the very beginning of my career. For as long as I can remember, family has been the defining core feeling for me. Of course I’ve developed as an artist and done my thing during that time, but it’s still very different now.

says Joy

Having seen the children off on their own and now standing on the threshold of a new phase of life opens up space for new thoughts, but sometimes it’s the old ones that have been with you all your life. This is most evident in the final song on the album, the very personal ‘Soweto’. Again, this song has a jazz touch to it, so it starts with jazz and ends with jazz, in an almost Sun-Ra-esque way. A meditation, “Soweto’s / Crawling on my skin”, Joy sings, “Some beauty they can’t comprehend”.

It’s about identity, of course:

“I’m not from Soweto, but everything always comes back to the colour of my skin, whether I want it to or not. Soweto is a code for that,” she says of the song, which she struggled with a bit because the music initially resisted any melody, which Joy helped herself to with a little The Mamas and The Papas inspiration. As the daughter of a South African father and a German-passing mother, Berlin-based Joy Denalane has experienced racism since childhood and has therefore fought the battle for identity and self-positioning from an early age, also and especially in her art. Willpower and self-assertion have always played a role in her life.

With “Let Yourself Be Loved” Joy asked herself: where do I come from, what defines me, if I take away everything else, what’s left?

WILLPOWER is about the things that are yet to come, the path that lies ahead. The flickering and the gravitational, seemingly opposite poles, from which the center of power emerges, which this woman has built up in eleven weightless songs, gliding towards infinity. With willpower, resilience, but also and above all acceptance. And so, with “WILLPOWER”, Joy Denalane dances towards the sunrise. But she is not alone.