Joanna Sternberg is a singer, songwriter, musician and visual artist born/based in New York City. Joanna started taking piano lessons when they turned 5. Joanna taught themself how to play the guitar and electric bass when they were 11. Joanna attended LaGuardia High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. They started studying double bass during their freshman year. Joanna got a full scholarship to Mannes College of Music, and studied classical double bass there for a year and a half. Joanna decided to leave the school and take a year off. During that year they did nothing but stay in their room and draw comics. Joanna has been a freelance musician and visual artist since they were 18-years-old. Joanna finished their double bass performance degree at The New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music, where they got a full scholarship. When Joanna was 23, they began writing songs and learning how to sing. At the age of 24 Joanna started singing in public while accompanying themself on different instruments. Today, Joanna continues to write songs, sing, create visual art and play instruments (double bass, electric bass, guitar, piano, violin, drums, banjo and mandolin.)

I am clearly writing this biography in the third person because a bunch of people told me that I had to…but now I’m gonna switch it up! I learned how to draw by copying my dad’s drawings (his name is Michael Sternberg and he is an amazing visual artist and musician and singer and songwriter!) I am so lucky that my mom and dad have been encouraging me to draw and play music since I was born! My family and friends have also been so supportive of my music and art, and I am beyond thankful. I am also so grateful for all of the other amazing people I have met along the way, and I can’t wait to hopefully meet more and more people. I really do want to be friends with every single person I meet but I understand if this makes me come across as strange and even frightening to some people.

On June 30th, New York City-based singer-songwriter Joanna Sternberg released their acclaimed new album, I’ve Got Me, on Fat Possum Records.

Produced by Matt Sweeney and recorded at Brooklyn’s Strange Weather Studios, I’ve Got Me was recorded and mixed over six days of intensely productive sessions during the summer of 2022. In their glowing, Best New Music, review of I’ve Got Me, Pitchfork writes, “Think of this album like an oblong version of Carole King’s landmark 1971 album Tapestry: Sternberg is presenting a new canon of inverted love songs, each one so sturdy and true that they could withstand being covered by the lowliest of bands and still sound like gifts.”

The songs on I’ve Got Me are a Bat Signal from Sternberg’s Manhattan Plaza spire: the middle income artists-only residency in Manhattan where Sternberg grew up and still resides. Some of Sternberg’s Manhattan Plaza predecessors include Charles Mingus, Tennessee Williams, Alicia Keys, and more. It is a massive, 46-story universe of living New York City history, artist families and legendary elders. There is no place like it. Returning to their family’s apartment, 40 stories in the sky, for what was meant to be a short stay, Sternberg wrote the songs for I’ve Got Me. This being 2020, and for reasons no longer necessary to explain, society went sideways, so Sternberg stayed up writing in the towers, and the stunning I’ve Got Me came out of their time up there.

Thelonious Monk said “a genius is the one most like himself”— in 2023 we’re lucky Joanna Sternberg knows the most vulnerable parts of themself well enough to make music that shows how strong each one of us can be. Sternberg’s got all this and more.

Fat Dog

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