THE DEALS
Power pop with a punk flare.
Photos by Vanessa Valadez
“We love making music with each other, and we love playing it for whoever wants to listen.”
Chicago’s up and coming electric power-pop group The Deals fuses a 90’s punk sound with up-tempo melodies that are simultaneously dark and danceable. Consisting of college friends Benji, Bin, Emmy, Margot, Ronnie, and Joey Deal, The Deals pack a punch with upright bass, keyboards, acoustic and electric guitar, and gang vocals. With their debut record Clear and Severe, out now, The Deals made a powerful and exciting entrance to the diverse music scene that is Chicago. Read on to get the inside scoop on influences and songwriting from guitarist and vocalist Joey Deal.
Basement: How did this project get started?
Joey: We all met while studying music at Oberlin Conservatory in rural Ohio, but the band didn't really start in earnest until we had all been living and playing in Chicago for a while. We sort of transitioned from being a country bar band to being The Deals. All of us are involved in many different projects, across many styles, and are extremely close friends. I never really had that one true home for my own songs, and one day I just sent out a text like, "do u guys wanna be a for real band and make a record?" That's pretty much how it went down.
Basement: What influences your sound?
Joey: Well, since a big part of our ethos is being "eclectic", our influences are sort of all over the place. We want to be able to go from sounding like Taylor Swift to sounding like Nirvana on a dime, in the same song if at all possible. Basically, we try to be in tune with that inner voice that hears something and says "damn, I wish I had written that". Some of our most operative influences, at least at the time of recording Clear And Severe, were The Beatles, Elliot Smith, The Muffs, The Ramones, Lucinda Williams, Joni Mitchell, and Tony Molina.
Joey: I hadn't really set out for us to be a "Power Pop" band (in fact, I don't really think I was super familiar with that term even two years ago), but after enough people insisted that that's what we were (and struggling to describe ourselves in bio after bio) I realized that they were right! The whole "wide stylistic variety" thing works perfectly in this realm, since it's kind of a catch all term that stretches from The Beach Boys through The Cars through Weezer through Fountains Of Wayne and beyond - lots of different aesthetics but all in pursuit of that perfect "hooky happy/sad guitar pop".
Basement: What does your songwriting process look like?
Joey: Oh, I wish I had an answer to this question! Sometimes songs fall out of me, sometimes I molecularly engineer them in a scientific laboratory, sometimes I take one of the nonsense improvised songs that I sing to annoy my girlfriend and cats to an (il)logical conclusion, and sometimes I go on long walks, researching different types of sailing knots. The one constant is that I try to make sure I know what I'm actually writing about (sounds simple, but bears repeating!) I like metaphors.
Basement: Your debut record Clear and Severe dropped earlier this month- can you tell me a little bit about the new material?
Joey: The songs on C&S were written primarily in the winter of 2018-2019 - I took on the (ill-advised) journey of going off my antidepressants cold turkey, without consulting anybody - horrible idea, do not recommend. I made it about 5 months, and sort of lost my mind in the process; a lot of these songs were born then. A few of them are from college though, I just felt like they fit.
Cover art by Tim Curley
“My goal in a lot of these songs is to probe the human experience by looking inward and forming what I find into some universally relatable renderings of different things - love, loss, happiness, sadness, dread, joy, etc. That's the goal at least, who's to say if I accomplish any of that.”
Basement: Why is Chicago a special place to be a musician?
Joey: It's enough of a city that you can realistically work and thrive here, but midwest enough that non-coastal types like myself can exist without peeling all of our skin off from over stimulation. And ultimately, it's pretty much like everywhere else - a place with people doing all sorts of this and that. It's good for my constitution to be around all sorts of this and that, I think.
Basement: What’s next for The Deals?
Joey: World domination, household name status, your mom texts you one of our songs. We might get really into something weird like hot dog eating contests. Start a joint investment portfolio. Watch Star Wars.
