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As a young man in the small town of Wellington, Ohio, JT Daly lived in search of signals, and, despite the relative quiet, they often came through in abundance. He had Stephen King novels, Radiohead, a love of vampires, a Bible-haunted community, and a beloved but mysterious uncle, John Terrence Kelly, who designed geodesic domes and dated Andy Warhol. This was and is his mix, a legacy of righteous weirdness to live up to repeatedly in sound and color, story and song. JT desires desperately to be the art he wants to see in the world & he means to conjure it up together with others. He sums this ethic up in a couple of guiding aphorisms. One can feel like a bit of a downer: “Art is hard.” The other throws down a gauntlet: “Evolve or die.”

This is the creative vision which brought him to Nashville in search of a tribe and he finds his people everywhere. Much of this century, he’s had a beautiful thing going under the group moniker, Paper Route, whose work (including three full-length records: Absence, The Peace of Wild Things, & Real Emotion) managed to penetrate the popular bandwidth with songs featured in (500) Days of Summer and FIFA 17 and a network performance on Late Night With Seth Meyers. All these little fires have been pursued alongside art exhibitions, design work for Paramore, Sufjan Stevens, and Mutemath, composing and producing the soundtrack for ESPN’s 30 for 30 film “Chuck & Tito”, and producing, co-writing, and touring as a bandleader for K.Flay with whom he received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Rock Song and Best Engineered Album (“Blood in the Cut” & Every Where Is Some Where). In a quick follow-up, he produced and co-wrote “Hallucinations” with PVRIS, which was recently crowned the best alt-rock song of 2019 by Billboard Magazine.

But each of these efforts arise out of JT’s determination to huddle up with other strange people to launch signal flares that might reach others the way he was once reached himself, a pay it forward kind of thing. Continuing down a path begun with a solo project entitled, Memory, he now means to take on his own inertia (and the inertia of others) within a communal collective called Mad Wave (f.k.a. The Voodoo Children) with an aptly named debut: Instant Nostalgia.

“No matter how hard we try and avoid it, we always compare moments in our life to things that happened in our youth. As a musician this can be your edge or your curse. I wanted to employ that curse and turn it into an album. Instant Nostalgia is an album about places that we ache to revisit.”

This is clear from the get-go. “I heard a song today” is the first line of the opening missive, “1969” which goes from the achingly private to the outrageously choral and communal within seconds (“We don’t need a thing...I’ll be yours and you’ll be mine”). We’re made to recall early listening experiences, the times when something got through to us in our lonesomeness, but it’s all on the edges of a frenzy of frightened, frightening but somehow friendly people letting themselves in. This is all in keeping with a family line-up JT arranged over time in collaborative appointments he refers to as Camp Voodoo. They include his partner Jo Meredith (Sad Penny), Daniel Tashian (producer and co-writer with Kacey Musgraves), K.Flay, Bantug, Abby Wright, Angela Plake (Bandit), Oran Thornton, Josh Lippi, his longtime engineer Josh Lovell, and Gregg Alexander of New Radicals.  

These players served as JT’s dream band of beloved co-conspirators. It was a lovingly arduous process which involved sharing, talking about, pitching, and performing his vision. In something of the Tame Impala vein, he produced, mixed, and played everything himself in an effort to make believers of his fellowship, campaigning here, there, and yon. While much of the recording occurred in an actual ranch outside of Nashville decreed a Camp Voodoo outpost for a weekend, it’s also a mobile concept which, in the case of tracking down the notorious elusive Gregg Alexander to write a song together, required braving sleet, snow, and cancelled flights. 

Instant Nostalgia attempts an emotional reset for creator and listener alike. Daly explains, “I think when I really break down what I’m hunting every day...it’s a feeling. I’m not even sure what that feeling is, but I do know when I can’t feel it.” This can’t-quite-put-your-finger-on-it anxiety over beginnings and worry over lost time, the urge to hurry up and matter, is at work in “Caroline” (“It’s never gonna feel this way again”) which Daly likes to think of as a companion piece to Douglas Coupland’s Life After God.  It gives righteous way to “Let’s Get Married,” a song which confronts insecurity over aging and loss of control with romantic resolve (“When everything changes I want you there”) right alongside deep freshness (“I looked at you and I was never the same”) all mixed with sonic saturation reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine. Instant Nostalgia offers consolation and lamentation and keeps urgent questions in view with.

“Nostalgia,” JT attests, “becomes addicting, like some weird drug. It makes sense to me that it was considered a mental illness. I didn’t realize this though until I spent time reading about it.” It turns our understanding of the phenomenon has changed over time. “Consistent with its root meaning in Greek (‘homecoming’ and ‘pain’) nostalgia was, for centuries, a potentially debilitating and sometimes fatal medical condition expressing extreme homesickness. I wondered if relying on nostalgia too much could be a bad thing. Sometimes I’ll be working on something and my body will just cave because of how heavy the nostalgia makes me feel. I guess it’s my barometer.” 

What to do with this? Make music of it. Something like this vibe, cooperating with your own sense of lack and longing, is voiced in “Follow Blind”: “I move through space and time, that voice in my mind, over and over.” Daly admits that nostalgia can be a kind of crutch, but he’s determined to use it as a pivot point. Dramatize and lyricize your inner situation or die.

This is accomplished to great effect on “Mad Wave” which was partially inspired by the Satanic Panic of the 80’s and the siren song of Nashville as a mecca of artfulness for a young Ohioan hearing tell of Starflyer 59 and church music. “Come and see what we do...It’s ready for the taking,” beckons an imagined motley crew of ragtag resistance fighters, trying to make a way through a world gone horribly and surreally wrong, a scene he spied and embellished as he tried to reach and receive the outer worlds. Today, often holed-up in his own East Nashville space, dubbed Mother Mary Kelly Studio after his grandmother, JT has found his mix, his people, and a way of arranging lights and shadows to make it all new again amid the decay. Instant Nostalgia brings it all back home.