The race is just starting for Joey Aich

Coming up, rapper Joey Aich had a relatively narrow definition of success.

“I’d always be like, ‘Man, I’m not going to any of those festivals – Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Coachella – until I play them,” Aich said in late September. “And for a while, that was my benchmark for success. And if I wasn’t playing any of those, then the year was a failure.”

As he’s gotten older, though, this stance has softened, enabling the musician to more easily embrace the moment. So, while he didn’t play Bonnaroo in 2024, he did travel with his band to West Virginia for a concert where the crew stayed in a Four Seasons paid for by the promoter and whose rooms overlooked the river. “And I’m like, that’s cool. That’s what success looks like to me,” Aich said. “That’s why I’m always trying to redefine what my vision of success is, because if I just keep harping on one thing and say that if I don’t have that then I’m not successful, I’d just be beating myself down, and I’d be a very horrible person to be around, because I’d never be happy.”

Aich celebrates his incremental climb on new single “Midsummer,” which releases digitally on Monday, Sept. 30, rapping about those near-past days when he survived on dollar McDoubles and spaghetti while trying to carve out an early lane in the industry. In an email sharing the new song, Aich described “Midsummer” as a track that points toward the end of the Open Treehouse era – a reference to the album he first released in 2020 and then revisited three years later with Open Treehouse Deluxe. Collectively, the albums and the new single have revealed Aich as a work in progress, documenting the myriad, sometimes imperceptible internal shifts that have taken place as youthful dreams begin to square with adult realities.

As he moves to close this most recent musical chapter, Aich is still figuring out what might be next – a process that led him to put down his pen for much of 2023. At the time, Aich said he was more focused on learning how to properly go about touring, which took up a significant amount of his bandwidth and often left him struggling to find inspiration. “And so, every time I’d sit down to write, it was just bad, because I wasn’t 100 percent into it,” he said.

In retrospect, though, he now realizes he also needed to step back from writing so that he could simply live and amass new stories that might be worth exploring in his music. And the gambit worked, with 2024 ushering in a steady stream of new songs, a handful of which find Aich confronting head on the continuous blend of ups and downs that make up existence. At one point in our conversation, the rapper said he learned that he was not awarded a hoped-for grant in the hours before we hopped on our call – a rejection that arrived just two days after he received word that one of his songs would be played at Ohio Stadium during the October 5 Buckeyes game. 

“Sometimes everything feels like it’s within reach, and the next minute you’re so, so far away,” Aich said. “That’s why I say in [‘Midsummer]’ that I’m a ‘mid-class American,’ because there are way worse stories than mine and I’m not struggling in that way. But to talk about wanting to achieve something, and the pain of not being where you want to be, and the self-doubt that comes in, I could write those songs like there’s no tomorrow.”

Other developing songs take a more outward view, including the unreleased “Footprints,” which Aich said was inspired by his work at Wedgewood Middle School, where he served as a facilitator for the nonprofit We Amplify Voices. “It’s about this idea of how we want to leave our footprints in life,” he said, “but also how we as adults are setting up the next generation so they can leave their footprints.”

This concept has been further reinforced in Aich by his work at Land-Grant Brewing Company in Franklinton, and in particular by the neighborhood kids who have adopted the adjoining Gravity Experience Park as their own – much the same way Aich embraced the entirety of his Woodmere Village as a playground while growing up outside of Cleveland. 

“This is where they live, and over the last couple of years [in Franklinton] we haven’t seen any playgrounds built, but we’ve seen a bunch of skyscrapers go up,” said Aich, who has pushed back on calls to involve the police when these kids treat Gravity Park as their own. “Oh, my God. I don’t ever want to do that. And I make it very apparent we shouldn’t do that. But just talking with them and being playful with them, it’s brought out more of that purpose in how I want to present myself even outside of the music.”

Working at Land-Grant has also shifted Aich’s perspective on time, with his 30th birthday serving as both a point of reflection (the rapper said the number was one that naturally led him to look back on how far he’d come and from where) but also as a natural launching off point for whatever might be next.

“I performed at the Land-Grant anniversary party last week … and I was talking to [brewery cofounder] Adam [Benner], and he was talking about opening the brewery at age 30,” said Aich, who spoke in awe of the radical growth and evolution the brewery has undertaken in the 10 years since. “Especially in music, you get to this point where people are like, ‘Man, you 30 and you still making music, trying to keep this dream alive. What are you gonna do at 33? What are you gonna do at 35?’ And I still feel like I’m just warming up to what’s going to happen. I don’t even feel like the race has started yet.”