Odes to Joy is a festival tour company that makes localized music, watercolor prints, and one-of-a-kind Fordite jewelry — one street, one neighborhood, one weekend at a time.
What would it feel like if every neighborhood had its own song? Not a city anthem. Not a jingle. A piece that sounds like the specific block — the stoop, the corner store, the willow tree out back, the diner that's been open since 1963.
We show up at a festival. We write a piece for that specific place. We sell prints, digital albums, and Fordite jewelry alongside it. Nothing gets reused. The Sweet Auburn song will never be remixed into an Atlantic Antic song. Every block gets its own.
The records are made by five people who met across four cities and twenty-six years — a French-Vietnamese neuroscientist from Paris, her long-lost sister from Laos, a surgical-neurologist-turned-bassist with a four-foot pink companion, a German clockmaker who became a drummer because clocks asked him to, and a Svalbard-raised gen-Z polyglot who walked off a Reykjavík stage and sat down at the band's table. Plus, since 2025, the sixteen-year-old twin sisters Sisukiro and Dr. Pôpé adopted on a one-day stop at Point Nemo — Bouba (the round one) and Kiki (the spiky one) — who lead the Bouba & Kiki album. Read their bios →
Year one is the ramp: Atlanta as home base, the Southeast as the proving ground. Then West (LA → the Bay), Northeast (NYC), Texas, Midwest, and the Airborne Strike Team — a single floating rep covering 24 national mega-events a year. The plan is six full regional circuits operational by the end of 2026, ~$4.5M projected net annual run-rate by Year Two.
The booth itself is the main artifact. A baby-blue-topped tent over a watercolor backdrop reading "where streets become stanzas." Two glass cases of Fordite, a velvet riser of Tears of Joy. Print bins for the local neighborhood, a Greater Georgia sampler, plus the occasional song streaming over the speaker as people stop to look. A QR code on the A-frame poster sends scanners home with a free song before they've decided to buy anything.
Buy any Fordite piece, get "Ode to Fordite Love" — a love letter to the stone itself: layered paint hardened into rainbow cross-sections of factory time, no two alike. A small souvenir alongside the bigger souvenir.
Atlanta-based. Inman Park porch. Songwriter-turned-festival-operator, making a national tour out of an idea that started as a local one.
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