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What Lies Beneath On a Freedy Johnston record, even the sunny songs can cast a shadow. By Drew Pearce The true test of a great song is whether or not it holds up when performed with just voice and acoustic guitar. A few years ago I watched Freedy Johnston perform his song "Mortician's Daughter" solo, without the haunting cello or percussive punctuation that fill out the recording on 1992's Can You Fly. Despite the spare, elemental performance, the song's emotional resonance was exactly the same as in the recorded version. Johnston's songs are a testament to the power of restraint. Although his records sometimes feature full-on power pop productions alongside his signature acoustic ballads, the songs have one thing in common: they are more about suggestion than declaration. On first listen, you might get caught up in their bright and breezy sound; the friendly, familiar feeling of the tunes; and the catchy guitar riffs and memorable vocal melodies. It takes a bit longer for the lyrics to sink in. Take "On the Way Out," for example, from 1997's Never Home. It's hard not to sing along with the opening lines: Just kinda walk around, check it out Take two, put one down, don't think you saw it On the way out I'm smiling, look nice you might be photographed On the way out you're thinkin' "looks like he never put it back." Sometime over the course of the song's two minutes and 48 seconds, it hits you: You've been singing from the point of view of a shoplifter. There is always a lot going on beneath the surface of a Freedy Johnston song. The more layers you peel away, the more you find. On the title track of his 1994 major-label debut, This Perfect World, Johnston sketches a story and lets the listener connect the dots. I see her in your face, hear her in your voice Last time I was here, they'd found her in the lake You ought to see my scar, you think I'm made of stone Didn't you tell me that? Lake? Scar? What happened? The details suggest so much about what came before and what's coming after. So you listen again. But the words don't provide answers; they inspire more questions. With such a well-developed eye for lyrical detail, it's tempting to categorize Johnston as a storyteller first and foremost. But for Johnston, the music comes first. "I begin with a chord progression and a melody," he says. "Then that proto-song will be around for a while, usually a long time, until it gestates long enough and is ready to be finished lyrically. It takes me a while to figure out what the song's lyrics should be, because it's not always clear. I'm not one of these people who can sit down and write a song in ten minutes." And because the music shapes the structure of the song and determines what the words will be, Johnston considers the sound of the words to be part of the meaning. "When you put the melody and the meaning of the words together, they are a whole new thing that you developed," he explains. "It's easy to get too caught up in the literal meaning of the words when you're writing songs. But the exact opposite can be tempting as well--not to make sense just because . . . it sounds cool. I try not to let myself get away with that. I want to be able to 'get' the song myself." Johnston says he has to "see the story" when it's time to write the lyrics. So he approaches it much in the same way a screenwriter would. Once he has a good idea of the scene, he can begin to move around in it and populate it with characters. But he recognizes that if the musical soundtrack isn't compelling enough to keep you listening, the stories that go with them might never get noticed. "Guitar parts can be essential," says Johnston. "Dave Schramm's guitar part on "Bad Reputation" is so integral to the song that, without it, the track might be less compelling. The guitars are very orchestrated. It really makes the song for me." Johnston's knack for composing beautiful backdrops that serve the song are especially evident on "Evie's Garden" from This Perfect World. The cello sets a mood and punctuates the story. On other songs, though, the music works as a counterpoint to the story. "Two Lovers Stop," for example, begins with a buoyant rock riff. Just when you expect an equally upbeat story to begin, Johnston sings: Lovers cry, one last kiss on the edge, then hand in hand Two lovers stop their hearts, better than to be apart. So how did he pull such a sad story from such a happy-sounding tune? "It's not always a direct interpretation of the melody that I'm going for," he explains. "It's a combination of factors. The words have to be revealed. It's almost like the words were always there; I just had to find them." Johnston's melodies draw the listener in to what feels like intimate conversations between fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, or even the interior monologue of a guilty conscience. He prefers not to comment much on the meanings of his songs. "No matter how specific you are," he says, "people are still going to put their own meanings on songs. I've learned that you're usually wrong when you talk about your own music." His guitar style has clearly evolved over the years. The strummed chord progressions in songs like "Bad Reputation" have given way to more arpeggiation and fingerpicking. "After Blue Days, Black Nights came out, I basically went on the road solo, because it's just too expensive to take a band out," says Johnston. "That taught me to be a better player because there was no one else to fall back on. So I'd rehearse on my own with a metronome. It makes all the difference in the world. I'm not a trained musician; I learned guitar by ear. I've learned to play less, to play fewer strings at a time. It was a revelation to me." Johnston says he has three recommendations whenever anyone asks his advice about guitar playing: "Practice with a metronome, use Jim Dunlop orange picks, and if you're an electric guitar player, and you're not a lead player, always use 0.12s with a wound G. It sounds really mundane, but I wish I'd been told that." Arriving on a Train Johnston wrote the main riff from "Arriving on a Train," recorded on Right Between the Promises, five or six years ago on a tenor guitar he bought in New York. "It took a while for the music to make sense to me," he says. "It was hard to get the melody and the riff to work together at first, so it's kind of tough to play. I try not to write lyrics to songs I can't play yet, so it took me a while to write the lyrics." He tuned his tenor guitar C G D A. The transcription below is for six-string guitar tuned *X X X X X X. "The song actually began with a couple of riffs, two different song ideas I put together when I was working on music for the movie Kingpin," Johnston explains. "I used the music in the movie, but I knew I was going to write a song around it, so I had them specifically put in the contract that that piece of music didn't belong to the filmmakers. Then I just waited around until the lyrical idea presented itself. I think many people work that way. You wait for the title, the hook line, or chorus line, and then the song can be written. I've got to have an overview first, then I can dig in. "The song is a dream setting. I was thinking of a person who wakes up on this empty train and doesn't realize where he is. And finally, when he's just about to step off the train, he realizes he's stepping out of his life." --Drew Pearce © 2001 Trouble Tree Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission What They Play Johnston also owns a 1960 Gibson J-45, and uses John Pearse or Martin strings for his acoustics. He recommends using a hi-fi tube DI whenever playing an acoustic guitar through a PA. His electric guitar of choice is a Telecaster played through a Fender Vibrolux or Vox AC-30 amp. He also plays Hamer and Les Paul electrics and uses either a Shure Beta 87 or an SM 58 for his vocal mic on stage. "I also have a Bakelite banjo that belonged to the grandfather of a close friend of mine," he adds. "That's a great-sounding banjo, and it's made out of plastic!" Discography FREEDY JOHNSTON |