Pride month might be over, but we’re never done bragging about Bend’s queer community. Transgender and queer artist and singer songwriter, Matti Joy challenges the status quo of gender, sexuality, religion and culture, describing her original gender-fluid music as “Fingerstyle guitar and lyrically driven folk to make you laugh, cry, swoon and fight for your friends.”
Living in a self-converted bus with her wife and daughter on desert property at the outskirts of Bend, Matti Joy dedicates large amounts of time to the community. She hosted three Queer Writers Workshops at Spork during Pride month, offers music lessons locally, performed main-stage at Bend’s 2022 Pride Festival, often hosts queer gatherings at their home, performs at venues around the county, including a show at Deschutes Brewery Public House during Bend Roots Festival and an upcoming show at Bunk and Brew on Sept. 30, and she’ll be co-hosting a drag show next month.
Gender-fluidity is at the heart of Matti Joy’s artistic expression and how she presents herself both in fashion and personality, calling it an “umbrella of trans-ness” where her “specific flavor of trans is gender-fluid.” Matti Joy prefers the pronouns she/they/he, often wearing a collection of gender-fluid attire ranging from drag to grunge punk to cut-off tees and high heels.
She’s currently recording a collection of demo songs titled, “Love Over Law” to take her music to the next level and record a full-length album. The collection’s title and her favorite of the six or seven songs, “Close Enough,” featuring her delicate rhythmic finger-style guitar, recognizes our culture’s unhealthy expectation of constant self-improvement and how damaging it is, she says, “to constantly have this picture of yourself that is looking at all of your imperfections.” Matti Joy isn’t out to banish self-improvement; moreso, to shine a light on the love that allows rest and recovery, because without love the self-improvement ends in burnout.
That very idea is ingrained in her creative process by “leaning into the times that I don’t [write] because I know that sometimes you just have to let your fields lie fallow. They have to empty. You can’t just keep growing meaningful art,” she says. Meaningful art to Matti Joy incorporates pieces of herself to inspire others and encapsulates various mediums. Her spoken word piece, one of the “Love Over Law” demo tracks, “You Have Been In This Place Before,” does both. Originally titled and written as “I Have Been In this Place Before,” about her own story, she changed the lyrics of this poem to address her audience directly and evoke a different response.
Most of her songs begin as either a poem or guitar riff, both of these working in concert to form a song, which is often a quick process once it’s rolling, she said. But before that, there’s lots of waiting and patience. Matti Joy takes great care in not forcing her process, saying she prioritizes “listening for this part of me that is — this thing that is demanding to be experienced… not being able to see it or know it until it is suddenly there,” likening it to the gestation and birth process: nine months of forming and then in a matter of hours to days it’s finally here.
She’s learned that part of being a successful full-time creative means having multiple projects brewing simultaneously. Another demo set in the works to take center stage once “Love Over Law” takes root, Matti Joy’s project, “The Past Is Now And So Am I,” will be a compilation of trauma-focused music set amid gritty folk-punk vibes.
Now with a young daughter, Wren, who’s perfecting the mud pie in their backyard, Matti Joy is learning the mental shifts involved in caring for another human so fully while building a full-time creative business alongside her wife, Jamee, who’s studying to become a licensed professional counselor.
“I’m so thankful for Jamee because she understands my creative process,” Matti Joy says, truly appreciating that “when the lightning strikes, she is willing to give me that time, so I just have to carry a really high level of gratitude for my family.”
Catch Matti Joy performing live at Bunk and Brew on Sept. 30.
This article appears in Source Weekly September 28, 2023.
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