“One Saturday I woke up and wrote four songs in one day. There was nothing special about that day. It was just when the songs arrived.”

Ideas for Sunny, I Was Wrong arrived quickly, sometimes full songs and sometimes snippets that Joe pieced together over weeks and months. He overloaded his phone with voice memos of stray strums and hummed melodies. He kept guitars all over his home so he always had one in reach whenever lightning struck.

Gradually, an album came into focus—or at least an idea of an album. “I knew I wanted to make a studio record, and I knew I wanted to make a record. I didn’t want just a hodgepodge of tunes. I didn’t want to make a concept record, but I wanted something that needs to be heard from start to finish. I wanted it to be a destination. An event.” Joe opened up his process with Jim Creeggan (The Barenaked Ladies), Mike Evin, Mike McKenzie (Lowest of the Low), and Mike Belitsky (The Sadies) in the studio. After years of recording piecemeal—one track in this studio, one part in someone’s living room—it was a thrill to record live, which lends an intimacy to these songs, akin to hearing a small jazz combo jamming in a basement club. Songs have a fresh spontaneity, as though the band is writing the arrangements in real time.

Joe recruited some of his most admired musicians to bring added nuance and story. Aimee Mann, Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub), Rodney Crowell, and Jimmy Webb make their indelible marks throughout the album.