Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. This week, Harry sat down with VRSTY vocalist Joey Varela over Zoom to discuss the band’s new album, their creative process, what he’s been listening to, and what’s next for the band. You can purchase VRSTY‘s new album, Welcome Home, here.
Harry: What got you into making music?
Joey: So, okay, I am originally a pop singer. I grew up listening to Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Usher, and everything in the ‘90s, stuff like that, and then when I got to high school I started playing guitar. And I found that I didn’t like playing pop music on guitar. One of my friends introduced me to metal, and that was it. I just never turned back after that.
Harry: Yeah, when I saw “King of Pop” and obviously your vocals, I figured there was plenty of influence. What are your favourite bands?
Joey: God, there’s so many right now. Favourite bands of all time would be like From First to Last when Sonny [Moore] was in it, Killswitch Engage, absolutely love them, Underoath, like I am a super huge Underoath fan. Right now I’m really liking Spiritbox, Bad Omens, Sleep Token. I’m a huge Loathe fan.
Harry: I bet you loved that the Sleep Token and Loathe collaboration.
Joey: Oh, I love that so much. I have been listening to that non-stop.
Harry: If you could open for any band, who would it be?
Joey: If I could open for any band… that’s a hard one. I’d love to open for Underoath. I would love to open for Spiritbox, Sleep Token, While She Sleeps. Actually, here’s a weird one: I would love to open for Whitechapel. I’m a huge Whitechapel fan.
Harry: I would not have guessed that. Do you listen to a lot of deathcore, or is Whitechapel kind of the exception?
Joey: No, no. I listen to deathcore here and there. It’s funny because I started off listening to metalcore and then transitioned over to deathcore, and at one point I swear all I was listening to was Job For A Cowboy and Chelsea Grin and things like that, but then over time I just, you know, started listening to more like post-hardcore and stuff. I still listen to it here and there, but not like as much as I listen to Whitechapel.
Harry: I get that. The new Whitechapel record [Kin] was so good. Do you guys have a particular approach to writing, like an amalgamation of everyone’s ideas, or…?
Joey: No, so I write and record all of the music myself, pretty much. I do it at home. I write all the guitars, the bass, the drums, and everything else first, and then I go back after the song is done and I add the vocals. For the most part, there’s no plan. I just wake up and I’m like ‘ooh, I like that guitar riff’ and I start playing it, and then that turns into a song and then I go back and sing on it. But there’s never a plan for any of the shit that I do.
I write and record all of the music myself, pretty much. I do it at home.
I write all the guitars, the bass, the drums, and everything else first, and then
I go back after the song is done and I add the vocals,
… and then that turns into a song.
Harry: That’s quite interesting, because obviously you have both soft songs, heavy songs. I kind of assumed that was everyone’s ideas together.
Joey: Nah dude, I just wake up in random moods some days. One day I want to play a soft song and the next a heavy song, and I’m like ‘all right, whatever I want.’
Harry: So the diversity on the record, was that not intended at all, or was that just all the songs you’d written just thrown together?
Joey: I think it was more the record came out that way because I was just having fun. I’ve worked with a couple of different producers, talked to a couple of different labels and things like that. It always seemed like it was very business-y. But with Spinefarm [Records], they pretty much just told me, ‘hey, listen, we love what you’re doing. Just go into the studio and do that. We don’t care, just make good songs.’ And then my producer, Andrew [Baylis] (Prod. Sleeping With Sirens, Outline in Color), also just already loved what I was doing, and you know, his idea from the beginning was, ‘oh, I don’t want to change anything. I just want to make what you do better.’ Just the whole process was so much fun that we decided that we wanted to write literally anything. We’re like ‘nothing’s off-limits. Let’s just write whatever the hell we want.’ And that’s what ended coming out.
Harry: Oh yeah, I think the production on this album is much better than your older stuff. You wrote “Never Again” with Cody [Quistad] from Wage War…
Joey: Yeah! Well, so, I actually didn’t ‘write “Never Again” with Cody from Wage War’. The story is he wrote it and I sat there. Technically we wrote it together, but that guy is such a good guitarist. We sat down to write this song together and he asked me for an idea of what I wanted to do, and so I was like ‘yeah, I kinda wanna do this one thing.’ And he just picked up the guitar and the whole song came out in like an hour.’ I just sat there like ‘okay, this is incredible! I don’t want to change anything.’ How is someone that talented? It’s not fair.
We sat down to write this song together and he asked me for an idea of what
I wanted to do, and so I was like ‘yeah, I kinda wanna do this one thing.’
And he just picked up the guitar and the whole song came out in like an hour.’
I just sat there like ‘okay, this is incredible! I don’t want to change anything.’
Harry: You’ve been a band for quite some time now. but what new difficulties came with writing your first full-length?
Joey: Honestly, I think this one was more lyrical than anything. With my older songs, I always tried to be really personal, but with this I was having so much fun that I wanted to be extra personal with the songs that deserve it, but I also want people to have fun songs. And that was a huge problem with me because I never have any fun, and so I don’t know how to sing fun, happy songs. But I hope some of them came out fun and happy.
Harry: I mean, I love the pre-breakdown callout in “Sick”. That gets me going. It’s so fun.
Joey: Funny thing, “Sick” actually wasn’t supposed to be on the record.
Harry: Yeah, it was the last song you wrote, wasn’t it?
Joey: “Sick” was written after the record was done. You know, we showed it to the label, and actually “Sick” and “Welcome Home”, the title track, after the record was done. I showed it to the label, and they’re like ‘yeah, what the hell. These are so good, we’re throwing these on here.’
Harry: I was quite surprised when I saw the tracklist was fourteen songs, to be fair, for a debut album. That’s chunky.
Joey: We had a lot of time and I just wanted to keep writing. If we would have had a couple more weeks this record would’ve probably been twenty songs.
Harry: Have we got anything coming down the line?
Joey: Let’s see, we have… God, we have a bunch of stuff. We have tours, I’m going back into the studio after this tour to do some renditions of some of the songs on the record in Spanish, because I really wanna do that, and then I already started writing our next record, because things are kinda moving a little quickly for us, which I didn’t expect.
I’m going back into the studio after this tour to do some renditions
of some of the songs on the record in Spanish, because I really wanna do that,
and then I already started writing our next record.
Harry: Yeah, you’ve really picked up steam.
Joey: It’s kind of crazy to thing about it sometimes, because I think we’re such a tiny band, but then I start hearing things from my management and other people, and I’m like ‘wait, is that really happening?’
Harry: Even a couple people I know that don’t listen to metal are aware of you.
Joey: Damn, that’s insane. I actually… Yesterday, I heard our song playing in the gym for the first time ever. We were in Planet Fitness, and, uh, I was literally just sitting down and I heard “Closer” come over the Planet Fitness radio thing, and I literally was like ‘what the hell is going on?’
Harry: I was going to say, it had to be “Closer” or “Sick”.
Joey: Yeah, it was “Closer”. Those songs are like… God, I’m so glad those songs are doing well.
Harry: What does the title ‘Welcome Home’ mean to you? Was that always the title?
Joey: Yeah, so, it was always the title of the record. ‘Welcome Home’ is pretty much like saying ‘welcome back. This is your life and you can’t escape it, so welcome home.’ That was pretty much the basis for the entire record.
Harry: What song are you most proud of writing?
Joey: I have two songs that I am most proud of on this record. One is called “We Always”. That song I wrote about a relationship that I was in that I have a daughter from that relationship, and it was really like piss-poor and abusive and everything else, and I don’t really like talking about things like that because I feel like there are so many people out there with stories that me just adding to it doesn’t really help anyone, you know, but it kinda felt like I had to get that off my chest. That song came out the video it did, and I love it. And “Soul”. “Soul” was another one of those songs where I… It was the first song I wrote for the record, but I was afraid to show anybody, because I like country and old school rock music, but I wasn’t sure if anyone was gonna like that song, or be like ‘yeah, that could totally work’, so… but they ended up loving it.
Harry: Because you have such a wide range of songs, do you ever look at a song [set to be published] and really worry about how people will react to it?
Joey: Uh, yeah, “11am”.
Harry: Oh, really? That’s arguably my favourite.
Joey: Really? Yeah, dude, that surprises me. I keep hearing that, and I… That was the song that took me the longest to do on the record, and the one where, after we did it, I tried really hard to get it deleted from the record. I tried so hard. I told my label, I told management, I told my producer, I’m like ‘I don’t think that song belongs on this record.’ Everyone said it did, I trusted them, and now people like it.
I tried really hard to get it [“11am“] deleted from the record.
I tried so hard. I told my label, I told management, I told my producer,
I’m like ‘I don’t think that song belongs on this record.’
Everyone said it did, I trusted them, and now people like it.
Harry: I’m a sucker for piano and those female harmonies at the end.
Joey: I love piano music, and I love things like that, but I guess I didn’t expect myself to do a song like that so early on.
Harry: After “Wilt” on Cloud City, I kind of expected a softer closer, but I didn’t expect it to be that soft, and it really worked.
Joey: Yeah, we just took away all the instruments on that one.
Harry: To align with the physical copies of the album you had to push it back. How much of a struggle was that?
Joey: So hard. Our distributor kinda messed up on our CD orders, and we sold more than we had, which is insane. And then I remember the record was supposed to come out, ship in November or something like that. It got pushed back because we didn’t want… I wanted to make sure that everyone that purchased our CDs and stuff like that got it when the record was out. I don’t like when people buy things from us and don’t get it. It just makes me feel like crap. I guessed it kind of worked in our favour a little bit because it gave me time to work on other things, but also I was kinda… It kinda sucked, because I really wanted to put it out.
Harry: I had it anyway, because we were reviewing it. I kept telling people it was going to be really good, and then suddenly it’s not Friday but three months’ time. But everybody loved it, so it doesn’t matter.
Joey: It was also cool, because it got pushed back but it ended up coming out the day that we left on ShipRocked. That was super helpful to us. It gave us more time to prepare, and people on ShipRocked loved it. It was so crazy.
Harry: Did you play any of the songs on the album that weren’t singles on that first day, or not?
Joey: We played the entire record. Our set on ShipRocked… We played two sets, and they were both about an hour, maybe a little bit over an hour. So we decided for day one we were going to play the entire record back to front, and for day two we were going to play a bunch of throwbacks. So we played two completely different sets.
Harry: That’s incredible, actually. I guess I need to be there next time.
Joey: Yeah, you gotta come out to ShipRocked next time.
Harry: If you could cover any one song, what would it be?
Joey: Ooh, okay, I really really really want to cover “Dirty Diana” by Michael Jackson, but I haven’t figured out how to do it well yet, so I haven’t touched it. One day it’ll happen, though.
Harry: It’s one of those, you can’t just do a straight pop cover of it, ’cause you’re never going to top it. I think vocally you’d nail it, but if you’re not going to change it up, what’s the point?
Joey: That’s what I’m saying. The thing with covers is that you kind of have to change some things. They’ll probably never be better than the original, but they have to at least be able to stand with it. I haven’t figured that out at all.
Harry: Do you listen to any of the Pop Goes Punk records?
Joey: I used to, yeah. I used to a lot. I wanna say the first three or four were like my favourite, but then they kinda…
Harry: Got stale?
Joey: Yeah. I think a lot of people who were doing them kinda just didn’t care anymore, were just doing covers just to do them.
Harry: That’s fair. I’ll just sometimes be listening to your stuff and it reminds me of the style certain bands would take in their interpretations—obviously you are merging those two genres. How is it playing live again now?
Joey: I love it. I didn’t realise… I knew I missed it, but I didn’t realise how much until we started doing it again. We’re on tour for the next about three months straight, and I’m already thinking about going home at the end of those three months, and I don’t want to go back already.
We’re on tour for the next about three months straight,
and I’m already thinking about going home at the end
of those three months, and I don’t want to go back already.
Harry: You get people that hate touring and people that love it, and you strike me as a performer.
Joey: I think when I first started touring I wasn’t really good at it, ’cause you know, you’re never good at this kind of thing, and I was always just weirded out by it. But now that I’ve got the hang of it and everything else I’m more myself now than I was before. It’s so much fun.
Harry: What does a typical day on tour look like?
Joey: All right, so I wake up, we go to the gym—I try to go the gym as much as possible, ’cause eating healthy on tour is not a thing, so I at least try to make sure my body feels healthy, at least a little bit—and then we’ll probably go get something to eat, then I’ll hang around until the show starts. Just hang out with people. I’m not the type of artist that hangs out in a green room or anything like that. I’m literally sitting at the bar all night drinking with everyone and trying to talk to everyone. Then I go to sleep and repeat the same cycle the next day.
Harry: Well, if you ever come to the UK I’ll buy you a drink.
Joey: We actually have plans to go the UK but they keep getting cancelled on us, and I’m so mad about it. We’ve had so many tours offered to us already and they keep falling apart. I would love to go over there and play with Holding Absence or something like that.
Many thanks to Joey Varela for sitting down for a chat with us, and make sure to check out our full review of Welcome Home! For all things VRSTY, core, and music in general, keep it locked on Boolin Tunes.