Joey Cape

Having been active in California's punk and indie circles since the early 1990s, singer/songwriter Joey Cape first gained recognition as the lead vocalist of the influential punk band Lagwagon. Known for his extensive output and frequent collaborations, Cape also handled guitar duties in the supergroup Me First and the Gimme Gimmes while guiding the alt-rock project Bad Astronaut through several albums during the early 2000s. His production credits include work with the Ataris, Nerf Herder, and Ridel High. Cape began his solo career in 2008, adopting a more reflective acoustic approach that carried through releases such as 2011's Doesn't Play Well with Others and 2016's One Week Record—the latter forming part of a studio series he established at his own residence, where visiting artists are invited to finish an entire album in seven days. He maintained occasional ties with Lagwagon, which reconvened in 2014 after a nine-year break. Toward the close of the decade, Cape generated new material for both endeavors, issuing the solo album Let Me Know When You Give Up in 2019 and, several months later, Lagwagon's ninth album, Railer.

Cape assembled Lagwagon in the late 1980s in Goleta, California, adjacent to Santa Barbara. The group became the first act signed to Fat Wreck Chords in 1990 and grew into a central pillar of the label's influential roster in the years that followed. Blending skate punk and melodic hardcore, Lagwagon attained broad success throughout the mid- and late 1990s before entering a hiatus, during which Cape founded the alt-rock outfit Bad Astronaut; that band delivered its debut album Acrophobe in 2001 and followed it a year later with Houston: We Have a Drinking Problem. When Lagwagon resumed activity the next year, Cape kept balancing his assorted projects, among them guitar work in the Fat Wreck cover band Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, which he had joined in 1995. In 2004 he teamed with fellow punk singer Tony Sly of No Use for a Name on a split album presenting acoustic versions of songs from both artists' primary bands. Early in 2005, Cape's longtime friend and bandmate Derrick Plourde took his own life. Issued that November, Lagwagon's seventh album Resolve was composed about and dedicated to Plourde, who had also belonged to Bad Astronaut. After Bad Astronaut released its 2006 album Twelve Small Steps, One Giant Disappointment, which incorporated some of Plourde's final recordings, Cape disbanded the group and turned to solo work.

His first solo album Bridge appeared in 2008, featuring stripped-down renditions of several Lagwagon songs alongside original material. Beginning in 2010, Cape issued the songs one at a time that would form his second album, 2011's Doesn't Play Well with Others. Reversing his previous method, he also created an electric band called Joey Cape's Bad Loud to record full-band interpretations of the acoustic solo tracks from his initial two albums. After a second acoustic collaboration with Tony Sly titled Acoustic, Vol. 2 (2012), Cape rejoined Lagwagon, which had been inactive since 2008. Their 2014 album Hang marked the first release in nine years and was followed a year later by Cape's third solo album, Stitch Puppy. An admirer of raw, minimal recordings, Cape started the home-studio project One Week Record, hosting artists at his facility to complete a full ten-song album in a single week; he issued his own One Week Record in 2016. Both the solo album Let Me Know When You Give Up and Lagwagon's ninth full-length Railer arrived in 2019.