It’s been a long and wild ride for Joshua Novak, the young singer-songwriter from Denver who releases his first full-length album Saturday at the Hi-Dive.
A CD is daunting for any artist, but while some prolific writers can push out an album a year, Novak has taken his time, dealt with the blows and worked his way through loss for the five years that have gone into “Dead Letters.”
That’s a long time, and Novak knows it. It’s a lot of band turnover and broken hearts. It’s health issues and trips abroad and important conversations and quirky epiphanies.
You know, the stuff that makes for quality pop music.
And “Dead Letters” is a solid collection of songs. Novak’s casual storytelling reigns in “Make Up,” and his theatrical vocals are soulful in “La Muerte Del Amore.” “Tidal Wave” is his winning, if bitter, indie- pop hit — a live favorite and one of his strongest compositions.
The release of “Dead Letters” will be a potent closer to 2010 for Novak, who has lost most of his longtime band and found new love in the past 10 months. For now he’s playing with his friend and consistent bandmate Tiffany Meese on backup vocals and keyboards — and her husband, Patrick Meese, on drums.
“This is the band for the show, and for a few after,” Novak said of the group, which also includes Churchill’s Tyler Rima on bass and Nate Marcy on guitars. “I’m going to see how that goes and play with whoever will play with me down the road. I want to start touring in the spring. And many of these guys have other bands and other lives and can’t tour with me.”
To better understand the creative process behind “Dead Letters,” we asked Novak to walk us through the past five years of his life in his Capitol Hill apartment and the Baker bars he haunts, especially in how they relate to the CD. It took a while to awaken his memory, but eventually he remembered . . .
January 2005: “I’d had a stand-in band when I did my EP release in 2004, but Kit Peltzel — a local drummer — had seen me doing karaoke somewhere and said, ‘Hey, if you ever need a drummer, I’d be happy to do it.’ It was the beginning of a nice and long creative relationship.”
March 2005: “I visited a friend in Paris early that year. I was going through a creative slump, so I took what little money I had and wandered the city by myself and was inspired by Paris. It was cool to be in Europe and listening to stuff in my headphones and walking the beautiful streets.”
April 2006: “We thought we knew what the CD’s lineup looked like at this point, but in April we had ditched two of the songs and then added a couple of different songs. It was all because I hung out with a transvestite on one random night and had this intense, serious conversation. . . . And a few days later I wrote ‘Make Up,’ and I had to put that on the CD.”
December 2006: “Later that year, I was in the hospital for a little heart issue. I was living hard in those days, and I think I wore myself out a little bit. I remember talking to this person who was in the hospital bed next to me, and that inspired ‘Heart Hits the Wall.’ That was a real wake-up call for me.”
June 2007: “My friend Shannon and I went to a post office to mail her mother something, and we heard the guy in front of us ask the clerk, ‘What happens when a letter gets sent back but doesn’t have a return address?’ And she told him, ‘It goes to dead letters.’ We both thought that there’s a romantic idea of these potential love letters and birthday cards sitting in these giant bins in these rooms. You want to go through all of that stuff and see what’s there, and I thought that connected with the album, for sure.”
February 2008: “I broke up with my boyfriend, and I wrote ‘Tidal Wave,’ and that’s been one of my most-responded-to songs that I’ve ever had. It has the most hits on my MySpace page, and it’s one of the few songs that people actually request at my shows. It sounds like a cliche, but the lyrics in the opening — ‘You’ve got a heart like a tidal wave/Rushes in and pulls back to the sea’ — I felt like I was constantly chasing after this thing that would always return to a bigger thing, and I never was able to hold onto it because it would always run away.”
September 2008: “I played the Monolith Festival that fall. We had our new bass player rehearsed and ready for that show. I was playing with Nate Meese at the time, and some interesting things were coming on musically for us. And, of course, it was inspiring to play Red Rocks.”
July 2009: “I was jazzed to be in the Top 20 in The Denver Post’s Underground Music Poll. I’m happy to be a part of it no matter what, but I remember I was on a road trip — Ian Cooke was with me, and we were going to Vegas for my birthday. He knew all along that he was No. 1 in The Post’s poll that year, but he couldn’t say anything about it until the paper came out. And when we got back into town, we picked up a paper, and it felt great to have all that support. I felt like I was in a good place with the band at that time, too.
January 2010: “Unconsciously — and people in creative positions do this without realizing it — you get comfortable — and I got comfortable in playing with Kit and working on the record for such a long time. And then Kit told me that, because things were starting to take off with his other band, Snake Rattle Rattle Snake, that he had to stop playing with me. And once Kit left, I was shaken out of my comfort zone.
“I was going through a tough spot — an awakening and realizing all the things I wasn’t really doing because I was comfortable. It symbolized a new start since we played together for four or five years. And Kit’s one of the nicest people I know. I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t take it personally, because I really liked working with him. It was kinda like a breakup. But I’m happy for him. But Kit left, and the guitarist followed, and then the bass player left after that. So once Kit left, my band fell apart, and I took it personally, and I was down.
“I picked myself and kept doing this. When I was down, I wondered, ‘What will be the next thing? What will I do?’ The only thing that came back to my mind was finishing this record.”
January 2010: “That same month, I met the love of my life. He graduated from DU, and he’s multilingual — he speaks French and Spanish. He’s going to graduate school probably for architecture. He’s stylish and young but mature and he has great taste. He’s very open. And he also created the album design for ‘Dead Letters.’ I was upset about the whole Kit thing, but I was equally excited having met Will.”
October 2010: Joshua Novak releases his debut full-length “Dead Letters” at the Hi-Dive on Saturday. Kissing Party and Candy Claws fill out the bill. Tickets, $6, are available at .
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com;
