Opening Up sees us talk to musicians about the opening track from each of their studio albums. Our next guest is Barry Johnson of California punks Joyce Manor, currently on tour with The Wonder Years down under.
There’s no mistaking their frenetic, earnest brand of noise—one that universalises frontman Barry Johnson’s experiences and pulls you into his nostalgia for them, even if you weren’t there. It’s this quality that’s earned Joyce Manor a cult following, despite remaining criminally underrated. “I kind of thought that we would be one of those bands with one record that people like,” Johnson reflects. “Like, the first record’s good and then they just went downhill.” Now six studio albums in and preparing for a seventh, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Fans across the globe, decked out in Joyce Manor merch, sing their hearts out to songs from every era.
As he looks back, Johnson acknowledges: “First tracks are really important. Especially if you’re making an album that you think of with an arc – a beginning, middle and end – and not just, ‘We wrote this many songs and put the best ones first.’”
“Orange Julius” – Joyce Manor (2011)
With a tone that even Johnson describes as menacing, Joyce Manor come at us hard on ‘Orange Julius’, with what he adds are “dissonant, bashing chords, kind of out of nowhere”. Clocking in at just over a minute, it’s an introduction to the mania quintessential to Joyce Manor.
“The song’s kind of about a revenge fantasy,” Johnson details. “Like a murder revenge fantasy. In my head, the character is a shy girl that’s bullied, but in love with her bully. So it’s kind of this weird unhealthy fixation or obsession. It just seemed like an exciting first song – no chorus, nothing. It’s just one long verse that ends with some whoa’s. It’s a nice introduction – this is gonna be quick, and this is gonna be weird.”
The title doesn’t come from the frontman’s personal love of the American fruit drink – which he has never actually tried – but it does evoke the generational high school experience of making the mall your second home. At least that’s the story to an extent, and the other side of it is what Johnson attributes to not realising that he may have once heard it in a Modest Mouse song. “I heard that song maybe a year or two years later, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah. Orange Julius.’…Honestly, the truth is I just didn’t have a title, and I had to think of something. And I think I subconsciously stole it from Modest Mouse.”
“These Kind of Ice Skates” – Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired (2012)
“Some bands have this, like ethereal – maybe not ethereal – but like, epic, swelling guitars that are easing you into the album…Maybe there’s some spoken word over post-rock guitars. Do you know what I mean? And it sets this epic tone. I think I’m going for the exact opposite effect, where it feels like it’s the middle of the song,” Johnson asserts. ‘These Kind of Ice Skates’ off their delightfully discordant sophomore outing Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired certainly throws you into the deep end of an album that, though only 13 minutes long, packs so much in its punch you’ll feel the aftershock for hours after your first listen.
“There’s something I like about the first track feeling like it drops you right in, like cold water,” Johnson adds. “I also thought it was a cool first line: ‘You can’t make a mistake on these kind of ice skates.’ It’s like, what the hell does that mean? But I thought it was cool.” He slyly mentions that there is material floating around that didn’t make the album, despite the fact that it wasn’t remastered like its predecessor. He caveats that he personally understands why they didn’t end up using what was left off, but as to whether it will ever see the light of our streaming services, he answers: “Maybe one day.”
“Christmas Card” – Never Hungover Again (2014)
“This is the only record I did not sequence,” Johnson admits. “I did a sequence, and I had ‘In The Army Now’ as the first song, which was totally wrong. The guy at our label was like, ‘Can I try a sequence?’ He sent me back the record with ‘Christmas Card’ as the first song as opposed to the last song…For some reason, I had it in my head that that was the epic closer. I don’t know why.” It turned out to be the right decision, with Never Hungover Again exultantly celebrated with anniversary shows (even featuring a cameo from Mark Hoppus) last year in tribute to its decade of success, although that didn’t feel like the case at the time.
When it came out, Johnson was skeptical that it would ever land. “I’m old now, that’s what I was thinking. I’m old, I’m washed up and nobody really likes what I’m doing.” Now critically acclaimed as a classic not just for the band but for the genre, no room lights up like one full of Joyce Manor fans when the band play almost anything off the full-length.
Johnson discloses that Never Hungover Again actually starts with a mistake. “Something happened with the tape machine,” he notes. “It opens up with this really jarring, gross tape machine mistake sound. I think that’s pretty ear-turning, again, it sounds like you’re in the middle of the song. Again, that thing that I like where it’s the opposite of epic.”
“Fake I.D.” – Cody (2016)
“I think Epitaph had bigger hopes for Never Hungover Again and then, like I said, it didn’t sell terribly well. It didn’t really blow up in any way. It’s been a slow burn for that record, but now people really like it, and that’s fantastic. With Cody, I was like, ‘Alright. If this one doesn’t connect, then it might be over for us.’ I think I was really trying to write hooks. I wanted it to be really catchy and infectious. I thought that was one of the catchiest songs on the record, so it was a cool opener.”
Not just catchy but containing multitudes, he adds that it was bold to put ‘Fake I.D.’ first simply because “the lyrics are insane.” He continues: “It sounds like they’re written by someone who’s having a manic episode, which probably wasn’t too far off from the reality. I liked leading with that. It felt confident to be like, ‘This is probably the poppiest thing we’ve ever done, but it’s super unhinged.’ It felt like a big move.”
Musing on a comparison between Kanye West and John Steinbeck might have felt a little safer in 2016 (although always intended to be a tongue-in-check criticism of the mindless small talk that follows the afterglow), and Johnson laughs at the suggestion that the line has actually aged well. “That line gets weirder and weirder as time goes on,” he agrees. “And maybe it’s not even done getting weird. Maybe he’ll have some crazy redemption arc, you know? But maybe not. Probably not.”
If you listen closely (especially to fourth track ‘Do You Really Want to Not Get Better?’) you might hear the dulcet tones of Phoebe Bridgers, who Johnson and the gang met as a fan who had disclosed her love of Elliott Smith. Johnson invited her to come by the studio to meet Smith’s producer Rob Schnapf, who coincidentally was also producing Cody. “It’s not my style to try to ride someone else’s coattails or hitch myself to their star,” he comments. “But it’s been amazing to see what a career she’s had, and continues to have. She didn’t even have an album out when she sang on the song…It’s cool to meet somebody who’s that young and then to see them go on to do great stuff. It’s the same with Julien Baker…She’s like crowd surfing at our show, singing along to ‘Leather Jacket’, finger-pointing along. Now it’s like, that’s Julien Baker. It’s cool.”
“Fighting Kangaroo” – Million Dollars to Kill Me (2018)
The album title for Million Dollars to Kill Me was inspired by blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, who recounted when he offered a friend a million dollars to kill him following his plane crash in 2008. Holistically, it balances the maturity of Cody with a dive into the fractious energy that makes Joyce Manor special. Its opener, ‘Fighting Kangaroo’, was intended to land as a definitive Joyce Manor anthem, although to frontman Barry Johnson, that wasn’t quite how it shook out.
“Maybe it was sort of trying to get back in touch with what we were doing on the first record, because the first record was not a studio thing. Those songs were road-tested, we were playing shows and playing those songs a lot, and you would see which ones got people stoked. I think I was writing with that in mind, I wanted something to be fun to play at a crazy house show.” At the same time, he wanted it to be something that would “make people who aren’t in this little subculture” aware of them. “Like, this is our mission statement. This is what we’re saying.
“It is anthemic, but it’s not one of our most popular songs. It didn’t end up turning into the anthem I hoped it would, but that’s okay. Try your best.”
“Souvenir” – 40 oz. to Fresno (2022)
“Opening with a cover is fully insane, so I like that. That’s why that got picked as the opener,” Johnson declares, referring to the band’s cover of OMD’s 1981 classic ‘Souvenir’. The cover came together on a 7-inch that the band did with Blake Schwarzenbach of Jawbreaker for a postapocalyptic coming-of-age comic book by Tyler Boss and Matthew Rosenburg. “There’s some kind of Armageddon type thing where there’s a couple of people who have survived, and they’re living in an old record store. It had to be set at a certain time, like pre-1990 or something like that, and I thought we could Weezer up this OMD song.
“It was kind of like getting to do a split with Jawbreaker,” Johnson exclaims, “but not really because he wasn’t like, ‘I wanna do a split with Joyce Manor’. A guy who writes comic books set us up on a blind date…but I’ll take it.”
Johnson does have some regrets over having the cover as the opener, but only due to the swirling black holes of distraction we call our attention spans in 2025. “I think there are stronger songs on that record that it would have been cool to have earlier because they maybe would have been heard more. When you look at streaming, as you get to the end of the album, the songs have considerably less streams.”
He closes: “We put some bangers later in the record that I wish we gave a little more light…I want to make an album that has an arc and a narrative, but I also want people to hear our best stuff. So it’s a little conflicting.”
Catch Joyce Manor wrapping up their tour with The Wonder Years in Australia this week.
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