“Born in the City,” from JOATA, a.k.a. José Oyola, used to start with a guitar. Now it starts with a drone and sliding synths. Oyola jumps onto the melody. “When I was young / my mother used to say,” Oyola sings.
Those who heard Oyola sing “Struve” when he lived in New Haven a few years ago might expect the next line: “José / don’t stray away.” But it’s different now. It slips into Spanish, in the voice of his mother: José, cuidado por allí. And the changes keep coming, culminating in different chords, a more triumphant sound in the chorus. Oyola makes this eight-year-old song new again.
And he’s about to release it again, too, alongside the song “Cambio,” to create a new EP, Como Se Dice. That comes out on Aug. 30. JOATA will celebrate the release of Como Se Dice with a series of shows, including a gig at Pacific Standard Tavern on Crown Street on Aug. 31.
When he lived in New Haven, Oyola quickly made a name for himself as the leader of José Oyola and the Astronauts, not only as a performer, but as a host of other shows, whether it was from his Taco Hut series or his 2015 blowout at College Street Music Hall to fete the release of that year’s Hologram. He also organized the weekend-long Astrophests featuring local and regional bands.
Then Oyola moved to Brooklyn, two and a half years ago. “It was crazy because it was kind of spur of the moment,” Oyola said. He was talking about it at a bar with a friend, and “a week later he said, ‘hey I found you an apartment.” The spot was in Bushwick. “I was talking about it and then eight weeks later I was in Brooklyn. No job lined up, no nothing.”
“It was like jumping in the pool,” Oyola said.
He lined up a job at Sprint, where he had worked when he lived in New Haven, and started thinking about how to get into the music scene there as well. One day he sold a cell phone to a young woman. “I found her attractive, but she was with a guy, and I was at work, so I didn’t think anything of it,” Oyola said. Not long afterward, though, he saw her on Tinder and swiped right. It connected.
“She messaged me,” Oyola said. “‘This is interesting,’ she said. ‘I know!’ I said.”
It turned out she was a colorist, and started dyeing Oyola’s hair. “She gave me my blond streak,” Oyola said. She was also friends with a woman who was dating a music producer named Pablo Fan Martín. The two women decided Oyola and Martín should meet.
Oyola visited Martín in his studio, and Martín played him some of the music he was working on. He loved the sounds Martín was getting, but wasn’t sure how to proceed. “We looked at each other and said, ‘why are we meeting?’” Oyola said with a laugh.
But they worked it out. “We just hung out and then three months later we were working on songs,” Oyola said. He brought in a few of the songs he had recorded on previous albums. “I think I can make them bigger, and we can take this artistic road together and bring out the best in each other,” Oyola recalled telling Martín. About the songs, he said, “I wanted to see how much I could push them out of the box they were in.”
And push they did. In some cases they changed the chords underlying the melodies. “One song is in a different key and it’s a darker sound now,” Oyola said. They dropped the song down a half-step down so Oyola could better hit a high note in the melody, but Oyola found that it changed the character of the song. “It sounds so spooky now. The vocals are still so happy, so there’s a tension in it that I like.”
But most of all, the songs have changed up their instrumentation, leaned harder into electronics and samples, creating a sound that feels that much more ready for the radio, or for the club. “It’s a reworking,” Oyola said. “Bigger,” for “a different audience.” By that he meant literally the live audience in New York, who hadn’t heard Oyola’s music before he arrived there. “I live in a new place, and to me it was an experiment,” Oyola said. “It gave me a little more freedom.”
Why rework older songs in addition to writing new ones? Oyola relished the chance to revisit some of his older material. “I thought that they were the strongest songs I had,” he said, looking back over his past albums. And he thought his performances of those songs maybe didn’t get all he could out of them. “At 20, you don’t have the tools” sometimes, Oyola said. “I sometimes listen to my old stuff and think, ‘man, my friends really love me,’” he added with a self-deprecating laugh. But also, “I’m a different person, too. The person in the songs has matured.”
Oyola may live in Brooklyn now, but he still feels a sense of place here. “My mom’s in Hartford and I have friends in New Haven. I’ll always have a connection to Connecticut,” he said. “It’s funny explaining New Haven to people from Brooklyn…. I’m like, ‘you know what? Where I’m from, we have pizza.”
The sense Oyola has of relating where he lives now to where he’s from appears even in the lineup for his New Haven show. “I always like eclectic shows and I want to bring shows that New Haven isn’t used to,” Oyola said. “It’s cool to see that people want to keep coming back.”
First up will be Drop.Kick.Pop., a guitar-driven electronica act Oyola connected with last year when they were both part of the Warped Tour. Next will be garage rockers Deaf Poets; Oyola met the group at an all-Latin show at Cafe Nine. Then “I went to Art Basel in Miami,” and saw them again, “and then the third time I saw them was in New York.” R&B singer Siobhan rounds out the bill.
“It’s cool to bring New York acts up to New Haven, because it’s worth a stop,” Oyola said. “It’s like, ‘hey, I’m coming home — do you want to play a hometown show? All you have to do is take a train.’”
Como Se Dice comes out on Panapén Records on Aug. 30. JOATA’s New Haven release show happens Aug. 31 at Pacific Standard Tavern, 212 Crown St., at 9 p.m. Visit the show’s Facebook event page for more information.
