WITF Music: Hot Dad Calendar

Confronting what makes you who you are while also being really hot.

• Joe Ulrich
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Joe has been interested in audio and music since he was a kid. What started as a fascination with his parents’ vinyl records and cassette tapes turned into a love of both performing and recording. He grew up in Elizabethtown, Pa. and moved to Pittsburgh in 1999 where he majored in Photography at the University of Pittsburgh.
  
  In 2004, he attended the Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences in Tempe, AZ. He returned to Pittsburgh to work at a recording studio.
  
  In 2008, Joe arrived at WITF, where his skills have found a good home as an on-air host, audio engineer and producer of WITF Music. In 2016, Joe earned a National Edward R. Murrow award for Best Use of Sound.

Hot Dad Calendar performs for WITF Music . Jeremy Long - WITF

What started as a joke band between friends at Albright College in Reading turned into a gritty alternative/indie rock band with staying power. Since leaving college, Jordan Santiago, Jack Duncan and Savannah Peck live further away from each other but have kept the band going out of a love for playing music and an affection for each other as friends.

Joe Ulrich: On your website it says, “Being a hot dad is not just about the aesthetics of fatherhood. It’s about earnestly confronting what makes you who you are while also being really hot.” [laughter]

Jordan Santiago: We needed a bio for something, so I just put something together [this] stream of consciousness. But I think that’s the whole core of how we write and perform and create music is like off the cuff and trying to be as earnest as possible in not only our art, but also our person.

Jack Duncan: We all went to Albright together and we all got together for a school project.

Savannah Peck: You were supposed to work with an artist on campus and at the time Jordan was an artist on campus. It kind of started as a joke band though because it was just like for class. And then people started liking us and we’re like, hmm.

Jack Duncan: Why don’t we like write some meaningful songs?

Joe Ulrich: I love that one line about tempo 122.

Jordan Santiago: I wish that had more meaning.

Joe Ulrich: Well, that’s the fun thing about it. When it doesn’t have meaning, to me, it’s like choose your own adventure.

Jordan Santiago:  Yeah! I think that ambiguity allows me to sort of take whatever I have at the time and put it into that which is fun.

Savannah Peck: It feels wrong to say the words don’t have meaning at all. Because I think a lot of it’s with the delivery and the emotion that’s put behind it in that moment.

Jordan Santiago: Definitely latching on to one word and then building around or one phrase and building around that is typically how like the more formed lyrics come about.

Joe Ulrich: What are some of the hardest things about playing in a small band?

Jack Duncan: I think it’s playing music together and finding time to also just be friends.

Savannah Peck:  We’ve definitely had our challenges over the years just being close friends and also navigating a business and a band. There’s come times where we question if we should still do things with how difficult it is to meet up and how time consuming it can be.

Jordan Santiago: We want to prioritize our friendship more than anything. And cause that’s what the music and this project has been built around is us being friends first and foremost. And if that goes away, then it’s not worth it.

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