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Joey Wit isn’t the first person to make the transition from sports to music, but he’s surely going about it in his own way. After a baseball career cut short due to injury, the Middletown native decided to pursue his other passion in life, which is playing guitar and writing original songs derived from a vast array of influences. This path has garnered him a substantial local following along with the ability to tour around North America, Ireland and the United Kingdom while collaborating and sharing the stage with some legit legends. His approach is a combination of ‘90s alt-rock and a modern singer-songwriter approach, which is best exemplified in his latest single “A Point of No Return”. The song came out on March 29 via the Boston based record label and digital distributor H1 Massive and it’s currently available on all streaming services.
We had recently had a talk about the making of the track, how he got into forging a career in baseball, coming from both an athletic and musical family and the album that “A Point of No Return” will eventually be off of later this year.
RD: “A Point Of No Return” is an introspective examination of a past relationship that was inspired by a trip to New York City. How did you initially wind up in “The Big Apple” and how did this experience translate to you writing this song?
JW: I was there for a gig at the Bowery Electric and New York City isn’t terribly far from where I live in Connecticut so I figured that I’d make a weekend getaway out of it. I was exploring the Lower East Side and going to places. The history of music in that neighborhood is obviously a rich one and it honestly felt like a movie, it really did. I was walking around and I felt that nothing sad could possibly happen in that little bubble, being very much in love and traveling around in the before times in New York City was very special. I went to college there and it was nice to explore these special places with someone that you really care about.
Fast forward a couple years later, I was in the middle of a lot of writing and thinking and I kind of got to a point where I wasn’t sad about those experiences. It was kind of nice to look back and reminisce about how wonderful they were, so I figured that it was a good place to start with a song. Rather than have it be a heartbreak song, it’s more of a hopeful song, at least what’s kind of what I hear when I listen to it.
RD: How were you able to get guitarist Ricky Byrd from Joan Jett & The Blackhearts and drummer Matt Starr involved in the recording process?
JW: Lucinda Rowe from Flying Key Entertainment and the Red Room Sound Studio had a connection with both Ricky and Matt. I just kind of developed a relationship with those guys, I had them play on the record and we had so much fun. Sitting there and hanging out with Ricky Byrd, watching him play guitar and the stories, the laughter and the genuine happiness that he brought into the studio. He’s a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and a true certified rock star, so to have him play with me was mesmerizing. He’s such a wonderful guy, we were talking baseball and he’s a big Yankees fan from growing up in New York.
We talked about guitars and he’s such a wonderful, wonderful person. Matt is from Connecticut originally, even though he lives out west these days, and when he came in to play drums, we established an instant musical connection. We tracked everything live to tape and he just nailed it. I think we rehearsed for one day, then the next day we tracked half the record and then the third day we tracked the second half of the record. It was totally old school, we just started rolling tape, laid the track down and he just nailed down an absolute highway for us to record on top of. Oh man, what a professional and he’s such a genuinely good person who loves music.
He’s absolutely completely positive, willing to collaborate without trying to take over and he’s so knowledgeable and wonderful.
RD: That’s fantastic. Before pursuing music, you were a professional baseball player. Which team or teams did you play for and which position did you play?
JW: I played at St. John’s University, won a Big East championship there, and then I turned professional after my senior year. I got signed by the Houston Astros as a catcher, I kicked around in that organization for a couple of seasons in the minor leagues and then I got a concussion. It was kind of like an oddball injury and it was right when concussions were kind of starting to get the recognition they’ve always deserved, but it was a freak incident where I got hit with a bat in the back of the head.
RD: Oh, wow.
JW: Then I ended up taking a foul ball off my mask during the next spring training a year later and I couldn’t quit the headaches, so the writing was on the wall. I realized that this wasn’t working out and I was aging quickly in baseball years, so I ended up splitting ways with the Astros. Then a friend of mine who was acting as my agent in a way contacted me saying that the [Los Angeles] Angels reached out to see how I would work out as a pitcher on the mound. I hadn’t pitched since high school but I knew that I had a good arm, so I gave it a go and I got on the mound. I think I took a train down to Virginia where the tryout was and I was lighting up the radar gun pretty good but I really had no idea how to pitch.
I spent a couple months learning and developing a pitching repertoire, I worked out with the Angels a couple more times and then I eventually signed with the Washington Nationals. I spent a very short time with them, I was in spring training and then the injury bug kind of took over so it was kind of a mutual decision to part ways. With the headaches and the concussion symptoms, I just couldn’t get over the hump. Every time I tried to exert myself, I would get these terrible instant headaches and I couldn’t pass a physical. It was getting really rough, so I ended up turning to coaching at my alma mater at Xavier High School in Middletown for a season.
Then I went to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, which was a wonderful experience.
RD: It’s good that you had the wherewithal to get out when you did instead of causing any further harm to yourself with those symptoms you were experiencing.
JW: Absolutely. It was such a heartbreaking time but now in retrospect when I look back I’m very grateful for it because it set me on a different path.
RD: What initially made you want to start playing baseball and have athletics and music both been a big part of your life simultaneously or did music not have a major presence until your baseball career ended?
JW: My family is very big into athletics. My dad is a Middletown Sports Hall of Famer, he was a state All-American back in the ‘70s, he played college football and he kind of had a short professional career with the [New York] Giants like I did with baseball. He’s a massive baseball fan, so out of all the sports I gravitated towards that one. I just kind of fell into it naturally and I loved it, I loved everything about baseball. I would pour over catalogs of baseball gear, kind of like I did with guitar catalogs, and I was obsessed with it.
It was the most fun I think you could have, especially while growing up in the ‘90s as a kid. It was a throwback era where you and your friends would ride their bikes to Crystal Lake Park in Middletown and we’d be playing pickup baseball games. Then as we got older we’d go from little league to American Legion and then high school and it was my favorite thing in the world to do. I would be at the batting cages all the time and I would always be working on something. I would be in my backyard throwing a ball against a wall and practicing diving plays. I’m sure that the neighbors thought I was a little crazy because anytime I could, I would be throwing balls in the air and really working on the game.
With this being said, I have a very heavy influence also from my family of music. My sister still has an amazing voice, she is a classically trained vocalist and she plays the piano. My parents had an amazing record collection, which is where I started getting my influences from. They didn’t play but my uncle played and my cousins all played guitar, drums, bass, anything they could get their hands on. My uncle had a blues band that my dad would take me to see all over Connecticut. Instead of me hanging out with my friends, we’d go watch my uncle and his band play and that was what I wanted to be doing.
Around the holidays, my family and I would jam out and I would try to keep up with everybody who was lightyears ahead of me. I think trying to keep up with them made me want to practice and get better at guitar, but those are some of my favorite memories. It really all goes back home with baseball and with music, that’s where it all started. I never played or gigged while I was playing baseball, the guitars during that time were more like pieces of artwork. I collected them and I wanted to get good at them, but I was focused on the baseball career so the guitars kind of took a backseat.
I was always listening to music and I wanted to get deeper than the average Top 40, so I was learning, experiencing and finding new bands and new music. I was fortunate that I had some cousins my age who were very into that and they showed me different music and different bands, but gigging came a couple years after my baseball career had ended. When I was coaching, that’s when I started picking up my guitar to write songs and using these experiences through baseball and that part of my life as lyrical content while focusing on them and how they made me feel and how I was feeling during those times. There was a serious point of reflection where I found myself asking what was next, but fortunately now I’m on a different path. There are some similarities with the grind of traveling, touring, being on buses in the minor leagues, long road trips and being away from family and friends for extended periods of time.
I love them both dearly, I don’t know if I could pick one over the other but I’m very happy to be playing music now. Music is something that you can do for your whole life, so I’ve let the baseball part of my life go and I’m moving on with this musical journey that’s been absolutely wonderful.
RD: It’s awesome that it’s worked out for you that way. This new song is off of your upcoming album “Rose Gold”, so do you have a release date set for it yet? What can people expect from the record when it comes out?
JW: We do have a release date set, it should be out on September 13th. It’s a Friday, which I guess is supposed to be unlucky but 13 was my first college number and nine was my second college number. I wasn’t trying to go back to baseball with that, it was total happenstance with two of my college baseball numbers being the release date for this record. We have a few more single releases planned, but so far “A Point of No Return” has gotten some really good reviews from all over the world and I hope the other songs do as well. As far as what people can expect from the record, I write all of my songs on an acoustic guitar so it kind of lands somewhere between that singer-songwritery old school classic rock band sound.
I’m not a trained musician so I’m willing to experiment on guitar and take songs to a place that goes a bit deeper than your average verse-chorus-verse. There’s some twists and turns that I think listeners will like along with some layers. It’s a complete sonic experience that may be new to some people who aren’t used to going below the surface level of music, but it also keeps the familiarity of traditional pop sensibility. I think it’ll hit for some folks, I think it’ll be something that people gravitate to and maybe from a lyrical standpoint they’ll connect to the feelings and emotions that’s poured into it. The twists and turns from a sonic standpoint kind of hint at some of those progressive rock classics of Pink Floyd, Yes or even those late ‘60s Beatles songs.
There’s an aura of familiarity to it, but it’s also completely new. I’m very proud of it and I think for listeners of my first record “Eastern Standard”, they will notice a leveling up and a graduation into a different sound so I’m excited to roll the whole record out.
Rob Duguay is an arts & entertainment journalist based in Providence, RI who is originally from Shelton, CT. Outside of the Connecticut Examiner, he also writes for DigBoston, The Aquarian Weekly, The Providence Journal, The Newport Daily News, Worcester Magazine, New Noise Magazine and numerous other publications. While covering mostly music, he has also written about film, TV, comedy, theatre, visual art, food, drink, sports and cannabis.