“I don’t think I had a choice,” Sandi Joy says about her love of music. “And that’s not a complaint whatsoever. I was literally born into music.”
With a pianist, vocalist, and professional dancer mother and a touring guitarist father, Joy grew up in an aspiring musician’s dream household. Her musicianship, though, blossomed not at home but in an environment least expected: the Coast Guard.
“It’s so cringy,” Joy laughs, “but I joke about being half mermaid, half human, and that I have the ocean in my veins and stuff.” This reality makes her name even more apt, finding joy in the sand. “I knew I was not an academic person whatsoever all through school. I skated through because I had so many more interesting things to do—art and music and hanging out. So college wasn’t really an option for me. I didn’t even consider it, to be honest. It wasn’t a money thing, but a reality thing for me. Then I realized the Coast Guard [was an option].”
Seasickness was not the only revelation Joy discovered while serving, as this is when she began singing professionally. Stationed in Florida, Joy regularly sang karaoke. This is where she met her future bandmate and close friend. “We connected immediately,” Joy recalls. “She’s still like a sister to me to this day. We started doing these little band projects together. So that’s where my journey as a vocalist began.”
This, though, is still not where her journey ends.
“So here’s the plot twist of my story: I was diagnosed with epilepsy a couple of years ago,” Joy reveals. Discovered around 2022 through her frequent absence seizures, Joy’s epilepsy wasn’t an end to her career; it opened more doors for her than closed them. Hypergraphia, which is associated with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, is now a part of Joy’s daily life. “It sounds scary, and I was terrified once I got diagnosed when I realized the reality of this. But in the same exact window, I suddenly developed these artistic abilities that I hadn’t had before.”
Always a creative person, Joy could doodle well by recreating drawings of cartoons. However, a mental block guarded Joy’s originality. “The epilepsy unlocked some sort of neural pathway in my brain that now allows me to be both a visual and a music artist,” she says. “It was the same exact thing with songwriting. I always wanted to be a songwriter because I was so passionate about music, but I wouldn’t even know where to start, how to begin. I’m not prolific enough of a poet, and I don’t read music. So there was just this understood thing in me that I’ll never be a songwriter.”
Now, Joy boasts nine original singles in her discography, with even more on the way and an independent business for her art. “I say it’s a beauty from ashes is really what I call it, a blessing/curse kind of thing,” she says. “It’s wild. I’m totally riding the wave, but when I sit back and I think about how insane it is, it’s fascinating.”
Her art business channels her love of the beach through the painting of seashells. What started as participation in a trend, though, quickly turned into something more. “I shared one of [the painted seashells] on TikTok, and I went viral. I had people all over the world asking, ‘Is there a way I can order one for you?’ And I was like, ‘Whoa, I guess I gotta do something with this.’ So I dove into the business aspect before I even honed in on a skill. You can see the progression from the first shell I painted to where I’m at now. It’s like two different universes.”
The seashells, though, are not Joy’s only means of visual art expression, as she also creates symmetrical designs. “I don’t use any measuring tools or anything to measure the mathematics of it,” she explains. “It’s all by eye and all completely freehand. And then if you check the math afterwards… I don’t speak math. I don’t do math. We are not friends. So it’s all just this weird visual thing of whatever is going on in my brain. I’m going to do things that I should not be able to.”
RiverJAM Music now serves as a musical haven, a community that Joy stumbled upon when she started working with Johnny Kasun on his Jim Croce project through the connection of Reagan Richards and Gordon Brown. “Through that, I came to know Meredith [Kasun] and the rest of the amazing souls that are involved in RiverJAM, from her blood family to this creative family that she’s built,” she gushes. “Just the organization is a family, and every day I’m like, ‘I can’t believe I’m a part of this. How did I get here?’ Because it’s an answer to everything an artist craves.”
Joy will be performing with the RiverJAM family at their routine Songs & Stories event hosted at Triumph Brewery in Red Bank, NJ, on September 23. “I am blessed with the gift of Johnny Kasun being my accompaniment for [Songs & Stories] because I don’t play instruments live,” Joy says. “I want to make sure that I’m picking songs that are going to allow him to shine. I mean, he shines no matter what. But I want to do the songs that are going to just be the most acoustically impressive. And my stuff kind of aligns with that anyway. So I already have the ones in mind.”
Ideally, Joy would like to have a new song ready for the performance, since, in her words, “When that iron’s hot… It could happen in the middle of the night or while I’m driving to a gig or something. A song could just birth itself when I least expect it. If that’s the case, that’d be cool.”
As much as Joy’s recent ventures are fulfilling a passion since childhood that she’s finally able to tap into, they’re also allowing her to process grief in a tangible and meaningful way. “I lost my brother to cancer a couple of weeks ago,” she shares. “So a lot of these artistic endeavors, I’ve been taking on since that happened. I’m just kind of doing it in honor of him because he was also a creative type, and it’s given me a new fuel, a new purpose, and a new way to bond with him in some ways, even though he’s not here on earth anymore. I see what I’m doing through a different lens now, especially through the lens of grief. It’s tragic that I lost him, but I’m gonna take that, and I’m going to kind of blossom something out of it. I’m gonna use it to inspire my art and my endeavors and projects and opportunities.”
Photos courtesy of Sandi Joy | Interviewed on July 13, 2026
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