Songwriting Tips, Cancel Culture & More

Over the course of 47 years and 22 studio albums — including Hope and Fury, out Friday (April 10) — we’ve heard Joe Jackson navigate a variety of musical styles, from rock to rhumba, swing and jazz to jump blues, even bossa nova and classical. The design of all that is a mystery, however — even to Jackson himself.

“I never go into an album with a plan or a concept,” he tells Billboard via phone from New York, where the classically educated Jackson splits his time with another residence in his native Portsmouth, England. “I’m always trying to tell people this whole thing is very intuitive, and everyone seems to think it’s all planned and there’s a concept and an ideological reason why I do things in a certain way. It’s hard to convince people otherwise. There’s connections between them all — it would be weird if there wasn’t, I think. It’s the same guy. There’s some line going through it all.”

That diversity, of course, has meant that audiences come and go over the course of Jackson’s career. He’s had occasional commercial successes, including his 1979 debut album Look Sharp! and its enduring hit “Is She Really Going Out With Him?,” as well as his 1982 Night and Day album that spawned the Billboard Hot 100 top 10 “Steppin’ Out.” Other endeavors, such as orchestrated works like Will Power, Night Music, Heaven & Hell and Symphony No. 1, cemented his reputation as an artist with a capital A — or artiste, if you prefer.

The result is a similar diversity of opinion about fans’ favorite Jackson album.

“Well, of course that depends on how much they know my work,” he acknowledges. “A lot of the time it’s Night and Day or my first album, but you never know. We did a show in Seattle and Eddie Vedder came backstage and told me (1986’s Big World) was his favorite album of mine. I was taking to someone the other day whose favorite album of mine is (2008’s) Rain, which was very flattering because I think that’s a very good album. So you never know…and what am I going to say to anyone? I’m not gonna say, ‘You’re wrong.’”

On the nine-track Hope and Fury, Jackson pulls together a variety of the idioms he’s explored before, including Latin rhythmic flavors, adding familiarity to its freshness. “Again, it’s very intuitive,” Jackson explains. “It’s a bit like being a chef and trying to create something; it’s ‘Let’s try this, let’s try that,’ just throw in different ingredients from all over the place rather than following a recipe, and hopefully get to a point where, ‘Ooh, that tastes really good.’ It doesn’t matter where the ingredients came from, as long as it’s tasty.”

Hope and Fury follows 2023’s conceptual What a Racket!, on which Jackson composed music hall-styled songs in the guise of the fictional Max Champion. He and his core band — longtime bassist Graham Maby, guitarist Teddy Kumpel and drummer Doug Yowell, along with percussionist Paulo Stagnaro — began working on it at Fuzz Factory in Berlin, ostensibly making demos but actually giving the album its true start.

“The demos turned out so well I was able to use a lot of them on the album,” says Jackson, who finished work on Hope and Fury with co-producer Patrick Dillett at Reservoir in New York City. “The advantage of the technology we have now is if I like something I did on the demo, it can be emailed to New York and become part of the album. That was the case even with lead vocals; I thought I was going to have to do them all over again, but as I listened back to them I kept thinking, ‘I don’t know how to do this any better. I don’t think I can.’ I think half of the lead vocals are actually demo vocals. I like that…because you can really get sucked into a sort of endless tunnel in the studio, sometimes, where you think nothing’s good enough and you end up never finishing up anything. If you have a demo mindset — I like that, that’ll do, let’s move on — it can be beneficial.”

Hope and Fury listeners will find some familiarity on “Fabulous People,” one of the album’s several semi-autobiographical tracks, when Jackson lights into the same kind of keyboard tone he employed on Night and Day and particularly “Steppin’ Out” — again, not by design. “I think when I’m working on anything, if it starts to sound like something I’ve done before, generally I will scrap it or twist it in some way so it’s unrecognizable,” he says. “But once in a while I might think, ‘Well, it’s actually OK to have a reference to something I did before.’

“In this case, the song was more or less finished, but I felt like there was something missing. It needed something like an intro or an interlude or some instrumental thing. That’s when this thing came together that sounds a bit like ‘Steppin’ Out.’ It seemed appropriate for some reason — I’m not sure why, to be honest.”

While Jackson notes that one of his few rules for songwriting is to “avoid cliches whenever possible,” one of Hope and Fury‘s tracks — “After All This Time” — is in fact built around cliches to illustrate the rigors of a troubled relationship. “It’s a string of cliches all about relationships gone wrong, actually: it’s a crying shame, it’s a sad affair, a can of worms, a sack of woe,” he says. But he refutes another cliche when, after laying all that out, the couple in the song concludes that, “After all this time, maybe we should stick together…break the law and start forever now.”

“It wasn’t what I expected when I started writing it,” Jackson says. “It started out as two people doing terrible things to each other, and ‘Why are we doing this?’ It started to depress me, and I thought about the end of an affair song in itself being a cliche, and maybe we can rise above that, too. It’s like using cliches and then turning them all on their heads, which is interesting and I’ve done a few times…’It’s Different For Girls’ is an early example of that. It makes it a more interesting song.”

Then there’s “I’m Not Sorry,” which feels like a quintessential Joe Jackson song, attitudinally, with its jabs of piano and declaration that “Hello cruel world, I’m not going away/So I might as well have my say” as he refuses to apologize “for all the damns that I never gave…every little fad I didn’t chase…every flag I didn’t choose to fly” and more.

“It’s kind of my answer to cancel culture,” Jackson says. “I think the key line to it is at the end, this idea that there’s no point in apologizing to someone when that’s want they want. They want to make you their bitch.”

Jackson and his band are preparing to tour extensively after Hope and Fury‘s release, starting May 11 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. and playing in the U.S. into mid-July, then hitting Europe starting in the fall. Australia may be on the docket as well, according to Jackson.

“I’m excited about this tour,” he says. “To go out and play it live, that’s my kind of thing. “We don’t always play the same set every night, but even when you do it’s not the same ’cause you have to create it every night. Things come out different. The sound is different. It doesn’t get boring even if you do play the same songs every night.”

Jackson isn’t hazarding a guess about his next endeavor, however, other than to say that, “I’m always working on ideas. You’re always simmering…and every now and again things come together.” He predicts that he’ll want some kind of break after touring, however, though he’s confident a next project will reveal itself in due course.

“I just keep putting one foot in front of the other,” Jackson says. “What happens over time is things that I finish influence the things that I work on next, and it gradually takes some sort of shape or seems to find its own structure and what it wants to be. There’s a natural rhythm to it.”