Another Stroke: Little Joy

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"UH OH, we just passed a cop."

Normally, this wouldn't be much of a concern for Fabrizio Moretti. If he was on the road with alt-rock megastars The Strokes, for whom he plays drums, there would surely be someone on one of the band's massive tour buses to tend to such a matter. But Moretti's new band, Little Joy, is a much more low-key affair. So now he gets to deal with things that most bands consider to be just part of normal life on the road: watching out for cops, getting lost in different cities, being his own roadie and playing for small audiences. But he's enjoying it all. Well, almost.

"Some days it's like, 'Man, I really don't want to go set up my stuff right now.' But we power through it and it's fine," Moretti said as his band trekked from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. "And it's exciting to see into the eyes of every single one of our listeners. In Detroit, for example, there were very few people there because the weather was bad, it was a Sunday night. Maybe we just didn't draw well. But it was one of the best shows of the tour. I invited everyone to come forward and sit down and have a good time with me, and feel like they were part of some secret."

After the whirlwind success of The Strokes and his four-year, tabloid-fodder relationship with Drew Barrymore, it's easy to see and hear Little Joy as a liberating venture for Moretti. The band is collaboration between him, Rodrigo Aramante (singer/guitarist for Brazilian rockers Los Hermanos) and Binki Shapiro (whom Moretti is currently dating). Just as The Strokes were the embodiment of hardened, East Coast urban angst, Little Joy represents the breezy, carefree attitude that comes with living on the country's other coast. The band's self-titled debut album, on which the three members shared all writing and playing, is the soundtrack to sunny days and starry nights, far removed from the Big Apple.

Moretti recently moved from New York to L.A., and it proved to be an easy and welcome transition.

"I've been trained well by living life on the road, out of suitcase all the time. So it wasn't that difficult for me to displace myself. Just living out in California, it really puts you in a different mind frame," he said.

He also enjoys the collaborative nature of the L.A. scene. "In New York, I never felt a real big sense of camaraderie between bands. But in L.A., I'll tell you, it's alive and kicking. People have jam sessions. Devendra [Banhart] is one of the ringmasters of that kind of vibe. He invites people to collaborate with him. It's such a driving town. When you live in a house in L.A., you feel so isolated. You urge yourself to go and find the nooks and crannies where people are having a good time."

That Little Joy exists is more of a happy accident than anything else. Moretti and Aramante met two years ago at a festival in Portugal, but playing music together wasn't something they thought about doing. It wasn't until they both found themselves in L.A. that Little Joy came together — and the way Moretti describes it, it sounds almost like a courtship.

"We really started focusing on music was when Rodrigo arrived to work on Devendra's record. We met up for coffee a bunch of times, dinner, a couple of drinks and I started playing him songs, he started playing me songs. Binki started playing us both songs. So we thought, 'Hey, we might as well demo these things.' When we started working together more ideas congealed and we decided to make a record. The imminent return of The Strokes was always in the back of my mind, so as much as I was trying to have an organic process, I was always kind of wanting to work, work, work so that I could get it done."

And for those worried that all of these side projects — guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. recently released his second solo album and bassist Nikolai Fraiture is readying his solo debut — mean the end of The Strokes, don't worry. Moretti is certainly enjoying getting out from behind the drum kit and showing off his songwriting skills with Little Joy, but when he talks about his Strokes bandmates, he still refers to them as "the boys in my band." He said these new ventures were necessary to keep things from getting stale.

"It's only natural that people feel they should be doing something, or have a certain amount of creative initiative, they just do it," he said. "What we needed to do was make sure that our music was preserved. Our mode of operation was preserved. And we weren't doing it for the sake of doing it; we were doing it for the love of doing it."

» Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW; with The Dead Trees, Tue., Nov. 18, 9 p.m., $10; 202-667-4490. (U St-Cardozo)

Written by Express contributor Meg Zamula

Photos by Autumn de Wilde