The Short Version
Seven Years Dreaming is Joe Davis and Jocelyn Scott, a New Jersey-based singer/songwriter duo. We have a hard time confining ourselves to one genre (country, pop, jazz, ballads, gospel…), but we lean toward a warm, vintage/retro sound. Our lyrics make a concerted effort to artfully tell stories worth thinking about. We both sing, and Joe plays almost all our instruments, though Jocelyn will sometimes jump in on piano. Our two families (each of us is married and has three kids) are pretty much inseparable.
Our History (and our name)
We became friends at church more than twenty years ago and have played and sung together nearly every Sunday since. In 2010, at Joe’s piano-bar-themed surprise birthday party, we performed pop and classic covers in public for the first time, and we just kept going from there. Soon we were playing in talent shows and county fairs and tea bars, talking along the way about writing our own songs. It took us seven years to get that process underway. In 2017, with a few songs ready to go, we gave our duo its name and started to build our catalog. Even then, production moved slowly because we were fitting music in around careers and busy families (not to mention a pandemic), but here at the latter end of 2020 we’re finally ready to launch our first album, What You Find.
Our Bios
Joe Davis has been a lover of all things musical as long as he can remember. Sinatra and Beatles records in his grandfather’s basement, his mother’s choice of country music on the kitchen radio, broadway standards, the hits of the MTV generation – all of these and more continue to influence his tastes. He hated practicing piano as a kid, but loved to play, later adding guitar, drums and a variety of other instruments to his collection. He also finds creativity in the more analytical, such as his “day job” in knowledge management, an MBA degree and writing for a variety of legal technology magazines. Joe was born and raised in NJ, where he lives with his wife Kathryn, their three teenagers, and their (mostly) good dog.
Jocelyn Scott grew up singing in church and studying classical piano. Pursuing an early love for literature and writing, she used her English degree to teach high school English after college. She now works for a missionary nonprofit and is working on a graduate degree in theology. She helps to coordinate the vocals for her church’s worship team in Piscataway, NJ, where she lives with her husband Mark (who is also a missionary as well as a master griller and a rabid fan of Chicago sports) and their three highly dramatic children.
Our Music
We wrote the words and music for every song on What You Find. Because we work in such a wide range of genres, it’s hard to nail down our primary influences–it depends on the song. Names that come up over and over include James Taylor, the Eagles, and Taylor Swift, but in making this album we’ve also discussed Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles, Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, Billy Joel, Eric Clapton and Paul Westerberg to name a few.
Though our genre shifts a bit from song to song, though, our work does have some fairly consistent defining characteristics. We don’t have much of a modern edge, preferring the classic styles of the music we have loved our whole lives. We gravitate toward strong melodies with a few unexpected chords. And we both value words, so we work hard on our lyrics and love to include wordplay and vivid imagery.
The stories our songs tell aren’t our own–almost none of our work is autobiographical. But every song seeks to find a new perspective or angle, to tell a story that hasn’t been told a million times before, at least not in this way. We hope that the result is a fresh look at the joys and tribulations of being human.
We should mention, though, that while the songwriting process has been a delight, none of it would have made its way through production without the help of David Manheimer. David was one of Jocelyn’s high school English students a million years ago, and when we connected with him on social media almost a decade ago, we had no idea how integral he would be in this process. We recorded What You Find in his studio. He will tell you that the album was all us…he just pushed “record”…but that is a lie. He has been generous, patient, and capable at every step, and his input helped to shape our final product in significant ways. You can also hear his guitar work in most of the tracks on the album.
Honestly, though we’ve been doing this for years, it feels like we are still at the beginning of our journey, and we’re having the time of our lives. We can’t wait to see where it goes from here.