Today we’d like to introduce you to Anne DiGiovanni and Joseph Lewczak.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Anne and Joseph. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
In what may come as a surprise if you don’t know us, we’re both lawyers. We specialize in marketing law: Anne works in-house for Hulu and Joseph is a partner with the New York-based law firm Davis & Gilbert. We met through work when Joseph hired Anne as an associate at his firm, and we played together in a cover band for a few years. As an outgrowth of the band, we started writing original music together, trying to discover tour compatibility as songwriters and musicians. Before we could record those songs, Anne took off to start a new life in Los Angeles in 2015, and Joseph soon realized he couldn’t live without her. We got married in 2017 and released our first EP as Only Bricks nine months after that – kind of a shotgun wedding!
While we’ve each been involved with music, in one way or another, for most of our lives, juggling an extremely demanding career – where you often have to work late nights and weekends – with the time and emotional investment needed for songwriting can be quite difficult. The EP, Foundation, was the culmination of the numerous writing sessions we were able to cram in when work wasn’t overwhelming us and Joseph wasn’t traveling around the country giving talks at industry events and client offices. We wanted to put out more than a single or two as our first release as Only Bricks, and now that we’ve established our core sound, we’ve adapted to more of a drip feed release model, with our tracks “Alright!” and “Happy Now” being the latest releases.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Being an artist is never an easy journey. You’re constantly exploring your emotions and putting them out in creative form for the world to criticize. Now, we’re physically separated from the community we’re starting to build, and it’s going to feel lonely while we’re all living in this coronavirus isolation, but the Internet can connect us to each other. We tend to collaborate with each other mainly and need to take our own advice. We’re trying to put ourselves out there and find people who are like-minded and want to try collaborating. They say it takes some trying to find your tribe, but they’re out there. Other songwriters who love pop music, hit us up! It’s a golden age for artists having the ability to create and produce on their own, without the help of the music industry establishment, and to leverage the many platforms for distributing to and reaching people. That said, the flipside of the coin is that everyone is making so much music! There’s intense pressure to release new music and more content all the time in order to stay relevant and to break through the noise. Looking around, it’s an inspiring time to be a creator – the key is to stay true to your pace and your plan and not get caught up in comparisons to what others are doing.
Please tell us about Only Bricks’ sound and lyrical aesthetic.
We write unapologetically upbeat and melodic pop music because it’s our favorite feeling to hear or play a well-crafted, uplifting pop song that makes you want to dance. The past four or five years have been so indulgent of musicians in their feelings, in the most depressing and somber ways, and we’ve been suffocating. We are on a mission to keep creating anthemic and undeniable melodies and start the wave of poptimism that is hopefully just on the horizon, because if people didn’t already need to feel better in the Trump era, they definitely need it now.
Our writing process usually starts with an idea that one or the other of us brings to a writing session. It could be a lyric, but it usually starts with a melody. We’re both really inspired by pop melodies, so that’s what we tend to write. While some songs come easily, most are a labor of love (we’d love to say we’ve written a song in 20 minutes – our record is probably more like 2 hours). From that small kernel of an idea, we work on song structure, developing the verses, chorus and bridge, refining the melody and agonizing (and arguing) over word choices within the lyrics. Anne likes to get what’s inside of her out quickly and leave it at that. Joseph is more methodical, preferring to revisit and refine the work until it feels right.
Since the outset, we’ve wanted to make a visual for an Only Bricks song, and we spent much of 2018 and 2019 concepting and making plans with several directors and producers, but for various reasons, none of it ever came together. Enter our talented and innovative director, filmmaker Heath C. Michaels, and we finally got things off the ground to make a music video for “Happy Now.” Other than the final scene, it was shot in one take, at a speed five times slower than the original song, presenting an unforeseen challenge for Anne to sing so slowly. Shot in a loft in downtown LA as coronavirus was becoming enough of a threat on the horizon for our germophobic producer to issue dire warnings about what was coming, it really captures not only the raw emotion of the song but also a simpler time when holding your hands over your face for six minutes, surrounded by a crew of people, wasn’t viewed as a health hazard.
We also love playing live shows, which are as much an impetus for Only Bricks as the need to express ourselves through songwriting. We’ve played some of the clubs in LA (Genghis Cohen, The Mint) and New York (Bowery Electric) over the past two years and were gearing up for a show at Hotel Cafe in Hollywood when the pandemic hit, so we’ll be back when everyone can safely gather in public. For now, live streaming our set has been a nice substitute, allowing some of our fans in other places a chance to watch us in action and sparing us from the hassle of being our own roadies. We want people to leave with the same feeling after engaging with Only Bricks, whether it’s listening to a song, watching our video, or seeing us play live – empowered, joyful, and uplifted. That even when we deal with sadness and pain in our lyrics, we’re helping move ourselves and our listeners through it, to know we and they can fight on.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
Our music — including our latest singles Alright! and Happy Now — can be found on all of the major streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and SoundCloud, and we’re excited to be releasing a new single that we’re finishing production on in the next month or two. While we typically play live a few times a year in both LA and NYC at various venues, for the foreseeable future will be livestreaming from Facebook and Instgram. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and sign up to our email list for updates.
Contact Info:
- Website and Sign-up for E-mail List: www.onlybricksband.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @onlybricksband
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onlybricksband/
- Twitter: @onlybricksband
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1MOIvKhyiHMByd5l6ObPZq?si=AazbaBInRwGQZGigQUMbEQ
Image Credit:
Josh Withers Paul DiGiovanni
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