Joey Ramone was born Jeffry Ross Hyman in Forest Hills, Queens. he wanted to make sure all the diction was there." "Joey was a perfectionist with his performance," Stasium says. He and Leigh say they tried hard to be faithful to what Joey Ramone would have wanted. Stasium worked and played on more than 10 albums with The Ramones. You'd never know if I didn't tell you, so you didn't hear it." "Some of them are very scratchy, a little distorted," Leigh says. "And that's all we kept from the originals, were Joey's vocals," Stasium adds. "All we wanted was the bare bones," Leigh says. "Sometimes, there was just drums on one track, a guitar on one track. "We just basically had vocals," Stasium says. Then, he and producer Ed Stasium went through a time-consuming process of stripping those demo recordings down and building them back up around Joey Ramone's vocals. Leigh also negotiated for the rights to other unreleased recordings, some of them dating to the 1980s. He says the idea for the album started with the two demos he recorded in Ramone's East Village apartment in 2001. Ya Know? after one of Joey Ramone's favorite expressions. Leigh is the executive producer of his brother's new album, which he named. "And I never thought these were going to be used for this purpose." "The ones I had were recorded on a $38 microphone that I had gotten from Lester Bangs," Leigh says.