"Joey" is the ninth track from Concrete Blonde's third and most successful album, Bloodletting. The song was released in 1990 and was written and sung by Johnette Napolitano. Napolitano mentioned in her book Rough Mix that the song was written about her relationship with Marc Moreland of the band Wall of Voodoo, who would eventually die of kidney failure following a liver transplant. The song was written in a cab on the way to a photo studio in Philadelphia; it was the last vocal recorded on the album due to Napolitano's reluctance to record the lyrics, which were hard for her to deal with. The song became the group's biggest hit, spending four weeks atop the US BillboardModern Rock Tracks chart and crossing over to pop radio, reaching number 19 on the BillboardHot 100; it remains their only charting song on the latter listing. The song also reached number two in Australia and ended 1990 as Australia's sixteenth best-selling single. In Canada, "Joey" reached number four on the RPM Top Singles chart and was ranked number 53 on the magazine's year-end chart for 1990.
Lyrics
In a 2013 interview with SongFacts' Dan MacIntosh, Napolitano described the process for writing "Joey" as starting with a wordless melody, to which lyrics were eventually added. According to Napolitano, she avoided writing the lyrics to "Joey" until the last possible moment due to the difficult nature of the subject matter. In her words,
"I knew what I wanted to say, but I wasn't looking forward to saying it. So it was the last vocal that I recorded. And I remember Chris every day, "Do we have vocals to 'Joey' yet? Do we have words to 'Joey' yet?" And I'm like, "Not yet." So I literally wrote them in a cab. I knew what I was going to say, it's just a matter of like a cloud's forming and then it rains. The lines are forming in my head and they're all in my head, and I know the chorus, and I know what I'm going to say. It's just a matter of fine tuningthe details and how I'm going to lug it out. And then it rains. The clouds all formed and it rained. And then it happened. And that was it. And it was just there."
Music video
has described the music video for Joey as " this love triangle in the truest sense, spotlighting frontwoman Johnette Napolitano performing for an audience of one in a dark, dungeonesque bar. The lone member of the crowd could only be Napolitano's lovesick lover…who's only sick for the bottle of alcohol from which he can't avert his eyes." The video for "Joey' was the only Concrete Blonde song to receive significant airplay on MTV. The digitally remasteredmusic video was uploaded to YouTube on Mar 12, 2009.
