Ladies Choice

For as long as I have known him, my good friend Joel Barber has always been a devoted music fan. With an expansive music palette, he has listened to a variety of records. He's one of the few people that I can always count on in discovering new music. But other than music, another one of my friend's passion is comedy. In fact, I've had the privilege of listening to his long-awaited comedy album, Ladies Choice. The album is available to listen and download via his Bandcamp website. It's a great and absolutely funny record. Some of my favorite bits are "Wine and Cheese Party", "My Luck With Women" and of course my personal favorite, "The Field Goal of Sex". It is a comedy record worth recommending for music lovers and comedy fans alike.

In honor of the release of Ladies Choice, I have taken the time to talk to Joel about music, his favorite albums and how an idea can spark a joke. All of these are his personal words.

I grew up on soul/R&B. There was some hip-hop, but during the early 90’s my folks hid those kind of albums from me. I didn’t get heavy into hip-hop until I was in high school when I had money to buy my own music, then I brought all those albums my folks tried to hide from me. I was a latchkey kid who had cable so I watched MTV religiously in the mid to late 90’s. I was hooked to MTV 2 when it came out; it was nothing but music videos from bands I had never heard before I was in heaven. I remember one day seeing videos from the Clash, English Beat and The Specials, my mind was blown. At the time I thought Ska was this thing created in Orange County California by the band No Doubt, I was in middle school at the time and my music knowledge was little to none, please stop laughing at me. Back then I just soaked up whatever MTV or BET played that I thought sounded good and wasn’t Hanson or The Spice Girls. If I didn’t fit a band on TV, it was the radio, back then and I might be wearing some rose colored glasses, but radio stations had a more diverse playlist, you didn’t hear the same ten or fourteen songs every hour. Maybe because my music knowledge was so limited at the time, but in the mid to late 90’s early thing sounded so new and different, now I listen to a band and I can either hear their influences or worst think of five other bands that do that band’s sound better. God that sounds jaded, but today’s sound doesn’t really sound that innovative to me. I can’t remember when was the last time I found a good band via MTV, BET or the radio, most of the artists I really like I find through blogs, friends, internet radio or worst tv commercials. Every time I find a band through a commercial I always feel like I showed up to the party late and missed the good part.

Does music inspire the way a joke is written no, but it does spark a memory or idea that leads to a joke. What usually happens is I’ll be out with a friend and a song will come on, we will talk about the song or I’ll hear a line that sparks a memory. I share that memory with my friend; if they laugh I start thinking about how I can turn that into a joke. When it comes to my stand up I let that grow naturally, it’s rare that I sit down with pen in my hand and say let’s write some stand up. Every time I try write a joke about a song, I always feel like someone has beat me to the punch, when I do address music in my material I try to focus on the culture around it instead of the art itself. I have a joke where I talk about how I wanted to be a rapper when I was young, but since I grew up in what you would call the suburbs I would need a gimmick and that gimmick would be rapping as Mr. Peanut, the Planters nuts mascot. The whole bit is about how I want to wear a hat, monocle and walk around with a cane, say boastful things about myself with a really annoying hype man behind me.








Influential albums

Roll With The New by Chris Rock: Chris Rock is my all-time favorite comedian, hands down. I don’t remember how I got this album, if it was my mom or I who brought it, all I remember was getting it my freshman year of high school. I played the crap out of this album, I would play the whole album two or three times in a row, each time listening for a different thing like subject matter or how Rock carried himself each time I would found something new. I think almost for a year back then every one of my mixtapes featured a track from this album.

Paul’s Boutique by The Beastie Boys: This album was my gateway to music nerddom. They sampled so many people and so many classic records on this album that if you tried to recreate something like this today you would go broke before you got to a fifth of the samples. I spent a few years trying to at least hear most of them. I got turned onto some really good music that way. This album also made me step up my pop culture references, I figured it they name dropped them in a song they must be important. When I used to freestyle rap, which was a very short summer in high school where I learned that I can’t rap, I found myself biting a lot of rhymes from this album. No one knew I was jacking lines from this album because they didn’t get the references. I don’t condone a biting rhymes or jokes reader, that’s why I stopped before it got out hand.

They Might Be Giants (S/T): their self-titled debut album, if you want to understand me and my style of comedy just listen to this album. This album is full of so many beautiful and funny songs about dark things. I took that idea of saying or exploring dark themes in upbeat comical tone and ran with it. The funny thing about this album, I didn’t really like it the first two times I heard it, I had ordered the wrong album by mistake and I gave it one final listen before I was going to sell it to a used cd shop. I played the song “Number Three”, a song about a musician who only has two songs in him who has just written a third and the confusion that it has given him, it hits during the middle of the song they were talking themselves as artists, being creative and selling out. The song could have been bitchy, but instead you get this get look at humorous look at selling out when you have run out of ideas. Thing about this song that really trips me out is that its third track on the album, implying that they had run out ideas by song three themselves. This album is full of clever jokes like this.

Resurrection by Common: This album had a great impact on me growing up. If Beastie Boys made me step up my pop culture references then this album made me step up my figurative language game up. After hearing this album I knew if I wanted to stand out I would need to creative, I couldn’t just make fart noises or use a funny accent, I would have to put some serious thought into my material. This album has everything I want my material to have clever wordplay, humor, personality, and a feeling that it can stand on its own that you don’t need the author to get the full effect. When I was developing the track “My Luck with Women/ My First Apartment” on Ladies Choice I was definitely thinking about this album.


Keep Your Eyes Ahead by The Helio Sequence: I don’t know much about this band, I found them through Pandora, but the shuffle on my ipod made me a fan. Their song, “Back to This” came on Pandora and I was hooked, I love the drums on it. I hear those drums and I just rocking along to the music, almost if I’m chanting the words. “Back to This” was a serious self-esteem booster during a very long period of unemployment, but I kind of ignored the rest of the album. It wasn’t until my ipod randomly shuffled to this song, “Lately” while I was washing dishes a few months back, that I became a fan of the whole album. This album could be called emotional, not an emo kind of way more of a facing ones fears kind of way, but at the time I needed it, I was dealing with a horrible break up and mourning the death of a friend, it was good to hear feel good music that didn’t feel like a motivational poster. I like to put this album on now in moments where I don’t know what to do next life wise, it helps me clear my mind and help me get back to being me.

Ladies Choice is available for download for free through the Barber Comedy's bandcamp site. You can also follow Joel Barber on Facebook and Twitter.