“I JUST WANNA CAPTURE IT AND PUT IT OUT BEFORE I WILL BE ONTO SOMETHING ELSE.”

Made up of Joe and three-to-four other friends that include XIXA’s Gabriel Sullivan and Geoffrey Hidalgo, former Tucson-based musician and presently Philadelphia-bound, Andrew Collberg, and the most-recent addition, Isaiah Briggs, whom you can see around town with Lando Chill. The band performs whenever all entities coincide in the desert. It’s like a collage of artists, talents and sounds. They’ve also been recording an album on-and-off— again, because The Cloud Walls isn’t about rushing. It’s about a mostly organic encounter between friends.

“It is not a priority. I just wanna capture it and put it out before I will be onto something else…I want to document it, before I do totally different music,” Joe says as his black cat—Cassidy Bagoose—climbs jumps, meows, and checks out Joe’s friend’s voluptuous hair.

Two days later, a late Friday night in February to be exact, The Cloud Walls had a show at Saint Charles Tavern in the colorful city of South Tucson. It was an impromptus event that was set in stone after Joe, Gabriel and Geoffrey had some Bloody Marys at the recently-opened neighborhood joint. Joe says they wanted to do one last show in Tucson before everyone splits again. It all worked out just right during a day of “bikes, bloodies and buds,” and chatting with Saint Charles’ owners Churchill Brauninger and Elizabeth Menke.

Photo by Joe Novelli

Being rooted in a single thing can make the creative mind a little duller.

It could be said that Joe has journeyed and experienced enough for a couple of humans. He’s gotten to truly absorb the beauties and downfalls of places like Greenland, Lithuania, northwest Canada, central and southern México—but the more he gets to see, the more he seems grounded to planet Earth. He cherishes the opportunities.

Still, he’s been back in Tucson since a few days before the jolly holidays, and nothing could be better. He was away for a few days in January to perform in North Carolina with Greenlandic musician Nive Nielsen.

Toward the end of 2015, Joe was away for more than two months. He first toured with Nive and The Deer Children, and later with mambo kings of the Old Pueblo, Orkesta Mendoza. Really, the only two bands Joe still tours with long-distance these days.

Joe and Nive, a singer and songwriter from Nuuk, Greenland, go way back. 

“I really like to collaborate…I listen to different kinds of music, [and] it is hard to be satisfied doing one,” he says of his diverse artistic colleagues. “[With] Nive’s music, [you can] be really delicate, be really loud…dynamic. [It’s] beautiful…Greenlandic, cinematic…I don’t know what to call it.” 

The two crossed paths more than six years ago at the Sundance Film Festival. Joe had just jumped into a musical partnership with an artist from Philadelphia, who was part of the soundtrack of a Greenlandic movie screened at Sundance that year, Nuummioq. Nive was involved in the production, too, and a tight friendship with Joe birthed from there.

His work with Nive is a nice mental challenge, as he goes back-and-forth performing mambo and other genres of the Latin American persuasion with Orkesta Mendoza. “It stretches you,” he says. And that’s good. Being rooted in a single thing can make the creative mind a little duller.

Photo by Joe Novelli

Photo by Joe Novelli

JOE’S MULTI-FACETED LIFE

During his last stay in Greenland last year, it wasn’t all about music.

Joe and Nive visited an orphanage in the northern area of the country, and hung out with some of the girls who live there. Joe is actually writing about Nive and that visit for his side-job. He writes academic content for an organization that helps put together school curriculums, from elementary to college level. He’s a smart one.

Joe comes from a family of writers and musicians. He’s living up to that tradition to a tee.

As he sits on a picnic table in his front yard, sipping a cold brew he just brought out from his kitchen, Joe looks back at some of his greatest memories. He lived in the south-eastern Mexican state of Veracruz for a few months during his last year in high school. Joe remembers meeting a good friend from Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz, who learned English thanks to his devotion to Madonna’s music.

While in Mexico, Joe says he became “obsessed” with the legendary French-born, Spanish, multilingual artist Manu Chao. He was also quiet fond of 1990s Shakira—that voice and that long black hair.

Joe just truly enjoyed (and enjoys) Latin American music. Still, he looks at himself today, and landing in a mambo band is one of many details in his life he didn’t expect. But that’s not bad.

Photo by Joe Novelli

Photo by Joe Novelli

During the last tour, the Orkesta embarked to the Old Continent a couple of days after the Islamic State attacks in Paris. Their first show was actually in France. Another one in Belgium almost didn’t happen, because the Belgian border temporarily closed down, remember? For a guy like Joe who travels to Europe very often, there was a melancholic, but still festive air during the first few sets. As he puts it, destroying culture is at the forefront of terrorist groups like ISIS. What better way to fight against that than continuing the joys of life—going to a concert or grabbing one or three drinks at your favorite bar.

Orkesta returned to the desert merely a few days before Christmas to a packed welcome-back show at Club Congress, and another at the Crescent Ballroom in Phoenix—two of Joe’s most beloved venues.

This spring, Joe is back at it in Europe with Nive. This dude is just nonstop.