Joe Keery gets by — and makes some pretty stellar music — with a little help from his friends.
Case in point: The 32-year-old actor and musician, who performs under the mononym Djo (pronounced “Joe”), celebrates his longtime camaraderie with his Stranger Things costar Charlie Heaton on his new album, The Crux, devoting an entire track to him.
“I guess part of trying to be as honest as I could was realizing that I could use these songs to sing about the people that I love in my life, and to memorialize these times that I’m experiencing,” Keery tells Entertainment Weekly over Zoom, explaining why he wrote it. “And so it just kind of came about.”
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The jaunty tune, titled “Charlie’s Garden,” was specifically inspired by Keery sharing a backyard with Heaton and his partner, fellow Stranger Things star Natalia Dyer, while they were filming the hit Netflix series in Atlanta. Heaton even makes an unexpected cameo in it, putting on his best American accent to call Keery about rescheduling what sounds like an audition in a cheeky voiceover that is interspersed throughout the song.
“Charlie and Natalia lived together, and I lived with a friend, and our backyards touched,” Keery recalls. “Charlie is always in his yard doing all these chores. Over the summer, we’d have off days, and I would be hanging out, playing guitar, and I’d look back in the yard and he’d be digging, he’d be burying wire.”
The track started to materialize when Keery was visiting Heaton and Dyer’s home one day. “He and Natalia were taking their dog Penny for a walk at the park and they left, and he has a piano in his house and I was just dinking around,” he says. “‘Hey, can I play your piano while you’re gone?’ ‘Sure.’ [I replied,] ‘Okay, lock up.’ So this song just comes out. Charlie and Natalia come back, and I say, ‘Hey, listen, I got this song!'”
He kept the idea in his back pocket until he returned to Electric Lady Studios in New York City to work on The Crux, laying down the track, with Heaton recording his contribution later. “It’s one of my favorites now, just because the influences are very clear,” Keery says. “It’s the Beatles, but [Paul] McCartney specifically, and ELO [Electric Light Orchestra]. It’s an homage to my great friend and my time in Atlanta. So I get a real kick out of listening to that song.”
Netflix
It’s also one of the very few musical crossovers that exist between members of the Stranger Things cast, despite so many of them pulling double duty as actors and musicians. “[Heaton is] a musical guy — a great songwriter and a great drummer,” Keery says. “Maya [Hawke] is fantastic. Finn [Wolfhard] has that new song that just came out [“Choose the Latter”], and his new album is amazing. He’s talented, interested in recording. And Gaten [Matarazzo] and Caleb [McLaughlin]…”
For Keery, it just makes sense that they would be equally gifted at songwriting. “Ask most artists — and actors, too — and I think if you’ve got one creative outlet, odds are you probably have another,” he says. “So it is a surprise, but not too much of a surprise.”
“Charlie’s Garden” isn’t the only time that Heaton and Stranger Things get a shout-out on The Crux. “Delete Ya,” a Police-indebted breakup anthem, also includes a quick nod to the guys’ friendship and the series, with Keery describing how he navigated his heartache by teaming up “with Charlie” and taking their younger costars “for a ride.”
Keery admits that it felt a bit “daunting” at times to be so vulnerable about his personal life on the record. “But then that’s also your job, I guess, as a songwriter and as an artist,” he says. “If you’re just watering it down, what’s the point? I think you really should try to be as direct as possible. And maybe the thing that you don’t think you should say is the exact thing that you should.”
The Crux is out now.
