I met Jack Johnson once, just about three years ago, outside his solar-powered Brushfire Records studios down a side street in the quieter Larchmont Village of Los Angeles. Along with the rest of the local music press, I’d been invited out to a house party to hear his fourth album, Sleep Through the Static, four months before it would meet the masses and six before its maker would headline the first night of the Prince/Roger Waters Coachella.
It was an emotionally heavier set of songs, that album. As warmly intimate as its predecessors yet informed by untimely deaths within Johnson’s family circle and pre-election tension, it was a darker listen than the sun-kissed joy millions had basked in via breakthrough works like 2005’s In Between Dreams and the 2001 debut that lent its name to both that studio and a record label. It’s fitting that Brushfire co-founder Emmett Malloy made last year’s European tour documentary Jack Johnson en Concert so storm-dotted and bleached-out, interspersed with grainy black-and-white footage; the skies of the album that trek supported were just as dampened.
But that night in October, when Static was unveiled direct from the master tapes, you wouldn’t have necessarily known it — at least not from the shy but smiling and unfailingly polite demeanor of the evening’s host. Now, however, Johnson admits “it was a really hard time for us.”
“We were losing a really close friend to cancer,” he explained a few weeks ago, chatting a few hours before performing in Dallas. It was his wife Kim’s cousin: “somebody I taught how to play guitar when he was a kid. And then he’s 20 years old and dying.”
Before he finished recording the album, he also learned his dad had cancer. “That was a really tough time for everybody.” Static, then, he regards as “one of those ones that I’m happy to have in the catalog, but it wasn’t necessarily an easy album to go out and play every night. There are certain songs off it that we still play now, that feel good, but this new album …”
The Hawaiian North Shore native is referring to his altogether sunnier fifth proper album from June, To the Sea, which will be spotlighted at five Southern California shows starting tonight at the Hollywood Bowl and followed by encores Saturday at Cricket Wireless Amphitheatre in Chula Vista, Tuesday at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine, and finally Wednesday and Thursday at Santa Barbara Bowl.
Conjured and for the first time co-produced by Johnson and his longtime band — bassist Merlo Podlewski, drummer Adam Topol and keyboardist Zach Gill, also of Animal Liberation Orchestra — the disc still floats along a stream of introspection, yet it does so with a more buoyant spirit, balancing sadness with love songs. It debuted at No. 1, selling nearly a quarter-million copies in its first week of release.
“We’re starting and closing every show with a song from the new album,” Johnson pointed out, “and it’s pretty easy to work in maybe six or seven every night. Whereas that one (Static) … you know, we’d mix in as many as we could, but it didn’t always feel natural. They didn’t feel as social. They were more inward than outward. But it’s a nice one to have. I get a lot of people who’ve lost loved ones who tell me that that album really helped them a lot, and that’s a good feeling to know that a song was able to help somebody through a hard time, ’cause I know a lot of other people’s music has done the same for me. I know how that feels.”
To the Sea, it turns out, is a different sort of healing record — one that celebrates life rather than grieves a death. Johnson, 35, lost his dad the summer before it was recorded, “but it was a different time. He had a very full life, and it became a time when I started reflecting on all the times we’d had, all the good parts we’d shared, and all the lessons I’d learned from him.”
Plus, he and Kim “had a new baby girl pop into the world around the same time that he passed, so to be able to see how spirit travels through a family in that way … it was definitely more of a celebratory album for me, this new one. Even though it’s dealing with a lot of emotions, it was an easier album to make uplifting than Sleep Through the Static was.”
The Nicest Guy on the Waves
I mentioned meeting Johnson at the outset because, well, he’s the kinda guy you’re happy to have met, as amiable as his music, a laid-back gentleman who radiates tranquility. But I only had a moment with him back in 2007. The short version: I headed toward Brushfire’s front door instead of a side entrance where media needed to check in, not realizing as I approached that Johnson was just lounging on his porch steps. That’s how much this unlikely superstar of increasingly Buffett-esque dimensions remains just another chill dude.
Seemingly a bit of a wallflower anyway, he disappeared fast that night — wouldn’t you if you’d just played your new album to a bunch of blowhard journalists? We didn’t get a chance to talk about it for three years. Yet, all that time later, he’s still the same ponderous yet permanently Zen surfer he’s always been. “It’s been neat to be able to watch him have all this success,” another Brushfire Records talent, Mason Jennings, notes in Jack Johnson en Concert, “and then be able to come back together. He’s just stayed so grounded through all of it. It’s amazing.”
There’s no artifice dividing the man from his music; he might just as well have named his label WYSIWYG Records, though that acronym isn’t as fitting an umbrella as the one that currently shelters many of his friends and fellow artists: Gill’s ALO, O.C. native Matt Costa, noted British singer-songwriter Neil Halstead (of Mojave 3 and Slowdive), indie rock band Rogue Wave, his tourmates G. Love & Special Sauce and Zee Avi.
His music does so much of the talking for him that Johnson doesn’t grant many interviews these days. “For me, I feel like there was a peak there with In Between Dreams,” an album whose widely beloved tracks have become the bedrock of his shows. “I guess I feel lucky that we’ve sustained it. That was definitely a time when I went out and supported that album — I barely had one kid in the world yet, and I had a lot more time to go out and push the idea that we have a new album out. Nowadays, I’ll agree to do some interviews here and there, but I’m not really working as hard to promote the albums anymore. I just really appreciate that we can still go out and play these venues, play these songs, and people still seem to find the new albums.”
They take to them because all of his work, even the more difficult Sleep Through the Static, has been cut from the same cloth; it’s sometimes hard to know which song is from which album. That’s the easiest criticism of his insinuating music, yet it’s also the backbone of his success; the same charge has been leveled at Jimmy Buffett and James Taylor, and it hasn’t hurt them in the slightest.
“You know, it’s funny … it gets to a place where (critics) start accusing you of changing too much, then of changing too little, and that feedback loop gets so tight, in this day and age where everything is so instant, that you have to be careful. You can really become a caricature of yourself by reading that stuff if you’re not careful.”
Besides, “a lot of my favorite artists — people like Greg Brown, guys who may never become pop artists, they stay songwriters — what I love about their stuff is that I can just put everything I have on my music player, and everything he’s played all blends really well. It’s just the whole body of work that I like. There are certain bands that I love to see how they’re going to reinvent themselves — like Radiohead, what are they going to do next?
“But for our band, I don’t really feel like that’s our goal. It’s more about presenting the songs I’ve written in the last year in the best way we can. I think with this new one, for instance, there are slight changes – more electric guitar, different layers that we didn’t have on the first few albums. But we kinda like to do it pretty slowly. As long as it’s natural — that’s how we like to do it.”
He points out that there are no windows in the Brushfire studio. “I don’t really want to get stuck in there all the time, so we work most of the stuff out ahead of time. Every day (when working on a new album) we’ll all break and have dinner together, then work out some more stuff in the living room … we’ve got a piano in there, some acoustic guitars and hand drums … and once we feel like we’ve got a song figured out pretty well, we jump in the studio and track it … then try to go back outside.”
I asked the obvious just to hear his response: Does he ever need to go surf to gain perspective on a song? Does just the opposite happen — that a melody hits him while surfing and he has to rush ashore to capture it?
“Yeah, both of those are correct. Sometimes I’ll be surfing and a line will come into my head — and sometimes I’ll cut my session short because I need to find a piano or a guitar so I can kinda work it out, ’cause I don’t want to lose the idea. It’ll be hard because it’ll come and I’ll have no way to record it or even write it down; I’ll find myself humming tunes.”
“Losing Keys,” from Static, more or less came about that way. “I remember I had the keys to the studio in my pocket, and I was gonna go up to the studio after I surfed, and I came in and realized I had this hole in my pocket. So I swam back out, and I was looking for the keys with a mask, ’cause I knew exactly where I had been surfing. And I actually did find ’em: they were in this little hole where rocks and shells gather. But I started singing the line — ‘I’ve been losing lots of keys lately’ — and that just kinda started looping in my head. Then I said out loud, ‘I don’t know what that means — maybe I’d be better off with things that can’t be lost at all.’
“That all came to me while I was out in the water. A lot of times, if I’m working on a line in the studio and I can’t figure it out, if I get too introspective, it just never comes. But as soon as I take a break and go surfing … it’s definitely a pretty magical place, where I get a lot from the ocean. It’s a place where I find balance in my life. A lot of energy comes from that place for me.”
But it’s an energy that’s hard to define; the rush of riding a great wave isn’t easily articulated. “It’s a lot like flying for me … that gliding feeling. Anytime I’ve had a dream where I’m flying, that’s the closet thing to it. It’s all muscle memory, too, so you don’t have to think about it much — you just get out there and do it. It’s the only thing I know how to do that doesn’t make me feel like a human. It feels supernatural — like a superpower.”
He needs it to feel whole. These days, to ensure the feeling doesn’t slip away, Johnson routes his tours to keep from getting landlocked for more than a week or two at a time. Anything longer and he becomes … well, “My wife describes it as being kinda PMS-y. I don’t notice, but she does. Which sounds kinda PMS-y, too.”
Jack Johnson, with G. Love & Special Sauce and Zee Avi opening, plays Friday at the Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., $40.55-$89.45 … Saturday at Cricket Wireless Amphitheatre, 2050 Entertainment Circle, in Chula Vista, $45-$65.35 … Tuesday at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, 8800 Irvine Center Drive, in Irvine, also $45-$65.35 … and Wednesday and Thursday at Santa Barbara Bowl, 1122 N. Milpas St., $50.65-$71.50. All prices include fees. Show time is 7 p.m. except in Santa Barbara, where it is 6 p.m.
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His gray skies cleared, Jack Johnson gets happy again as he arrives in California for five shows is a post from: Soundcheck