Actor and musician Joe Keery, known in his musical role as Djo, joined Audacy host Kevan Kenney to talk about his latest single, "End of the Beginning," and more during his stop at the KROQ studios in Los Angeles.

Though you may know him as Steve Harrington from Netflix’s Stranger Things, Joe Keery is also known professionally in music as Djo, breaking out in a big way with his song, “End of the Beginning.”

Djo tells us he first came up with its basic structure -- “power chords throughout the whole song” -- then focused his energies on the melody and chorus while driving around with it buzzing in his head. “It wasn't something that flowed all the way,” he admits, “I like to kind of create the instrumental track, take it home, and then kind of listen to it and walk around with it, and then fill it in with the meaning.”

“I mean, I’ll get a notion of maybe what I would want it to be about,” Djo says of his songwriting process, “or the feeling that the chords are pulling from me, but generally I like to leave it really open so that I'm not trying to put myself in a corner.”

Lyrically, as his nostalgic thoughts of his birthplace of Chicago show in the new track, “In terms of knowing if something is right,” he says, “I guess it's just sort of about trusting your gut… That's exactly what songwriting is. I think the more specific you can be the better and in a lot of art, the more you're trying to play to an audience, the more vague you are, the less, I don't know 'real' it feels."

“I think in the specificity of your own life, you, you feel that it's really only your experience, but the human experience is such a shared thing and this has been a lesson to me in that I didn't write this song necessarily to connect to a bunch of people -- I wrote it because this is the way that I felt and this specific feeling of returning to a place where you developed, felt like something worth putting into music, and people connected with it.”

Don't miss Kevan Kenney's full chat with Djo above.

Words by Joe Cingrana Interview by Kevan Kenney