Joanna Sternberg can still remember the time they were almost beaten up over the band Maroon 5. It was a middle-school birthday party, and Sternberg’s classmates had found out that Sternberg didn’t share their taste for songs like “Moves Like Jagger.”
“I was like, ‘Oh, God, turn it off,’ and everyone else was like, ‘Yay, it’s my favorite music,’ ” says Sternberg, 31. “It was a legitimate reason to beat me up.”
Sternberg’s tastes have never been in line with their generation. By age 12, they were listening to gospel, a solitary pursuit until they discovered a group of fellow jazz snobs at their arts-oriented Manhattan high school. But those musical idiosyncrasies are exactly what made Sternberg’s 2019 debut, Then I Try Some More, a word-of-mouth cult favorite. That album’s distinctive mix of piano chops à la Scott Joplin with Elliott Smith-level emotional intimacy earned Sternberg fans in everyone from Jeff Tweedy to Phoebe Bridgers, who has called the singer an “emo Randy Newman.” (“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, she gets it,’ ” Sternberg says.)
The pressure and opportunities that arose from such unexpected acclaim led to a difficult several years for Sternberg. But the end result of that trying time — their second album, I’ve Got Me, out June 30 — is a stunning showcase of Sternberg’s musicianship and songwriting, and it feels like a hard-won triumph. They describe the period leading up to its recording as a series of setbacks, both professional and personal, that left them feeling taken advantage of by the music industry right as they began to fully address their own longstanding mental-health challenges.
“I was hiding in my room for weeks, just being sick,” says Sternberg, who has been open about their past struggles with addiction. “This record just kind of symbolized me trying to get better.… It really cured my life.”
The songs on I’ve Got Me, which Sternberg recorded with veteran indie-rock producer-guitarist Matt Sweeney, are openhearted reflections on healing, heartbreak, and hope. Several of them are so honest about real people that Sternberg shudders at the thought of singing them in public. The piano ballad “Drifting on a Cloud” is about the short-lived elation the singer felt when first prescribed Zoloft; the decade-old album closer “The Song” is about a former best friend; on the title track, Sternberg proudly claims their own “faults and flaws” as part of who they are. “Between self-hatred and self-awareness is a very small, thin line,” they sing.
“Joanna’s songs are working out these struggles, but the really powerful ones feel like victories, in a strange way,” says Sweeney. “They flipped this horrible thing into something we can all relate to.”
Sternberg is a tough judge of their own work, sometimes intensely so. They had to be convinced by various loved ones (their mom, their friends) to include several songs on the new album, and they say that performing many of their songs live makes them “physically upset.” “I hope nobody’s a harsher critic than me,” they say. “Because that would mean that somebody really hates me.”
“Artists like Joanna are a rare breed,” says the singer Mary Lou Lord, who became a mentor to Sternberg during the pandemic. “They’re sensitive, and they’re not built like everybody else, which is what makes their music so beautiful. Their brains don’t work like normal, regular, boring people.”
If Sternberg’s debut was a snapshot of a specific time and place in their life, I’ve Got Me is a musical mission statement Sternberg has been waiting their entire life to share, one where they play every single instrument (cello, violin, guitar, piano, double bass, to name a few). “I’ve been secretly saving these songs, hoping for something like this,” says Sternberg. “This is an album in the sense of, ‘I finally get to do this! This is my dream come true, and I’m doing it, this is me!’”
For Sweeney, the album’s premise was self-evident: Let Sternberg do exactly what they want. “I had it in mind right away … to leave them the fuck alone,” he says.
Sternberg’s classical musicianship did not come from nowhere. Raised by two bohemian parents (their father a visual artist and folk and Klezmer musician, their mother a local theater actress), the singer grew up in the artist-subsidized Manhattan Plaza apartments, where Alicia Keys’ former piano teacher offered lessons in the building. When Sternberg says their “building is Seinfeld,” they mean it literally: Larry David moved there in the Seventies, and the real-life inspiration for Kramer is still a resident.
By the time Sternberg had graduated high school, they were gigging in far-flung Brooklyn bars with their the Band-inspired collective Squirrel Ship, whose name makes Sternberg cringe 10 years later. (Sternberg’s take on being a bandleader: “It’s like hosting a party, but you feel guilty you’re not paying people enough.”)
Before long, Sternberg moved into performing solo and writing copious amounts of songs. They estimate they’ve written several hundred, and share that they’ve already written the bulk of their next two or three albums.
Some time after Then I Try Some More was released, Sternberg says, they received “the biggest, best opportunity I’ve ever been given” to make their follow-up LP. But without going into details, they say the experience went sour, one of several toxic industry encounters that they attribute to their propensity to be overly trusting of others.
“I’ve been taken advantage of and humiliated a lot, and I’m just sick of it, but I don’t know what to do,” says Sternberg. “I’m not going to stop being who I am.” At a certain point, they say, receiving some proper medical diagnoses helped them understand the pattern of their trust being violated. “Autism, ADHD, whatever I have — all the stuff that I have — the thing is: Now I know I have it, and I didn’t know until now. Ever since I got diagnosed, I was able to see what happened.”
Sternberg was still struggling in the months immediately following the recording of I’ve Got Me. During one period, they holed up in their apartment, drawing roughly 100 versions of the artwork for their album. (Sweeney eventually convinced Sternberg that the very first version they drew was the best.)
These days, Sternberg is feeling healthier than ever, with a new team of trusted advisers that includes both Sweeney and Lord — and newly confident after a springtime solo residency in Brooklyn that left audiences rapt.
“I was able to quit substances and do all this stuff, but it really came from [my mentors] guiding me,” Sternberg says, “and being able to finish this record I’ve dreamed of making my whole life.”