Originally from New Brunswick, Joe Grass is a multi-instrumentalist producer and songwriter now based in Montreal.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with Joe on a handful of projects, including a few pieces of theatre and, now, a couple of albums.
I release music as Clever Hopes and Joe has played electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and the pedal steel on both of my albums - he even sang a little in french on Artefact. Chances are if you’ve heard any of the tunes and thought, oh man, who’s playing that sick lick, it’s Joe.
Joe makes everything he touches better.
Joe is incredible player, producer and, perhaps most importantly, collaborator. He has instincts that are second to none that he’s cultivated through years of working with the likes of Patrick Watson, The Barr Brothers, Elisapie and the late Lhasa de Sela.
In our chat, we talk about his musical beginnings, what album of his he can’t listen to anymore without cringing (and who he was trying emulate when he recorded it), about the catharsis of burning his old diaries as a young man (and how he wishes now he still had them), and, well, of course, fatherhood.
