Joe Camerlengo came into possession of a five-year journal at some point in 2020 and almost immediately began penning daily entries. It’s an exercise that coincided with a time of immense personal change for the musician, especially the months that followed the 2023 birth of Ozzy Lee Hall, Camerlengo’s first child with his partner, the educator, musician and artist Courtney Hall.
“It’s amazing watching the transformation of my life,” said Camerlengo, who on each page of the journal can now get a glimpse four years into the past, seeing in a single glance, for example, how he spent his time on June 17 in 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021. “When it was just me and Courtney, I’d be like, ‘We watched the Stooges documentary and ate pizza.’ And the next year it’s, ‘Courtney had morning sickness.’ And the next year, ‘Ozzy laid on the floor and smiled and we listened to the Beatles.’ And then this year I’m like, ‘We were all dancing at the playground to Funkadelic.’”
Over the last decade-plus, a similar evolution has gripped Camerlengo’s music, which has ecstatically traced his arc from “shy little weirdo” () to the tender-hearted parent of one who surfaced on New Things, from 2023, a soft-lit, lullaby-ish album written amid the sometimes sleepless, full-hearted nights that followed the birth of Ozzy.
, Camerlengo spoke of the internal tug that can exist as a musician ages from a 20-something intent on conquering the world with guitar in hand to a 30-year-old inundated with adult responsibilities. Maybe at some point you had children, he said at the time. Or maybe you purchased a home. Or decided to go back to school, beginning the path toward a new career. “You have all these weird, adult parts to living,” he said, “which you didn’t think about when you’re 21 and in a rock band.”
But first on New Things and now , Can’t Wait (out today, Tuesday, June 18), Camerlengo has continued to hold space for wonder deeper into adulthood, particularly as it relates to his child, who inspired a handful of Can’t Wait’s most immediately heart-rending tracks, including “Love U,” a slightly scruffy, pogoing pop-rock tune, and the rootsy, sun-kissed “Rainbow.”
“When I wrote ‘Lighthouse Song’ [off New Things], Ozzy was in a little carrier, and they couldn’t do anything other than cry or sleep, and we’d be sitting by the fireplace in the living room,” said Camerlengo, who will celebrate the album release on Saturday, June 22. “And now I’ve got a full-grown kid who’s trying to climb onstage at Arts Fest and saying, ‘Da-da!’ and wanting to come play with me. Watching Ozzy grow and understand the world, it’s a really magical thing, and it’s beautiful.”
Elsewhere, Can’t Wait finds Camerlengo reconciling his artistic and personal sides, delivering stream-of-consciousness lyrics in which he unpacks what it means to pursue music amid life rather than a life in music. “My intent was that maybe if I was honest about how I feel about my creative process,” he said, “other people might hear it and find their own footing in there.”
Camerlengo said repeatedly that he approached the writing process absent a level of intent, with songs emerging haphazardly from dreams (“Making Art Will Break Your Heart”) and in the wake of listening to podcasts (“Fly,” which lands littered with phrases uttered by Andre 3000 in a 2023 interview with Questlove). Other tracks were a product of the moment, including “Rainbow,” which arrived in the early morning hours as Camerlengo strummed a guitar and sang to Ozzy, his words capturing the many-hued emotions that swelled in his heart as he took in the scene.
“That was another one where the lyrics came very organically, and I didn’t even really try,” said Camerlengo, who created a rainbow-based Apple Music playlist the night before he wrote the song, highlighted by “The Rainbow Connection” and Kacey Musgraves’ “Rainbow.” “And then Ozzy and I woke up at like 6 a.m. And they’re running around the living room doing their little Ozzy thing while I’m sitting there trying to drink my coffee. And I was like, ‘Okay, we should write a rainbow song.’ … And so, I grabbed an acoustic guitar and wrote the music pretty quickly. Then I went to the dining room table, grabbed a pen, and the lyrics just came out. … It was about really trying to trust my instincts as an artist.”
Camerlengo is no stranger to keeping a journal. Even in his early days playing in This Is My Suitcase, he would keep rambling tour diaries on LiveJournal, tracing his desire to document the moment to a deep-seated fear he his memory would evaporate. But when he started to keep a five-year journal, he took a different tact, embracing the writing as a means to more positively refocus his attention, describing himself as someone prone to dwell on anxious thoughts with such intensity that he sometimes loses sight of the good things in his life.
“And so, I’ll get to the end of the day, and it’s like, ‘Well, that sucked. Ozzy skinned their knee. I was at work all day. I don’t make enough money. I’m miserable,’” he said. “For as long as I can remember, my mind has gone down these dark holes. … So, I got this journal and I only write the good stuff. And finding these moments of joy in my day to write about, and compiling them in this book, it feels like proof to myself that I live a good life.”
Perhaps unintentionally, the glow from these positive daily affirmations bleeds over into Can’t Wait, Camerlengo delivering reminders to stay young at heart and to watch for the rainbows that can follow the storms – a sense of perspective he said he lacked as a younger man, and which keeps him hopeful even better days are yet to come.
“It’s allowed me to grow in a positive way, where, as I get older, I think I only get better,” he said. “The only thing I don’t get better at … is feats of incredible strength. At a show in my 20s, I could throw myself off a ComFest stage and not even care. And now I’m old enough to be like, ‘Oh, if I do that, I might break my ankle.’ So, other than the physical limitations of age … everything is better than it was in my 20s or even early 30s. It’s not like I’m finally a human, because I don’t know I’ll ever feel that. But I feel like I finally feel well. And that’s a really great way to approach art, as opposed to all the dramatic, sickly, sad ways I’ve approached it in the past.”
