Freedy Johnston

Rain On The City

Bar/None Records

By Don McLeese

I can’t think of another album that sounds so warm on its surface yet so dark at its core.  It’s most definitely an album rather than an assortment of cuts, this first collection of new material in eight years by Freedy Johnston, with an emotional coherence and a sequencing through which the whole illuminates the individual tracks.  It just may be his best album, or maybe it’s just that I’ve forgotten with the passage of time how hard his subtle artistry hits me.

Since the 1992 cult breakthrough with his second release, Can You Fly, the vagabond singer-songwriter has specialized in boy-girl pop for men and women, combining the simplicities of classic hooks, harmonies and melodies with lyrics that explore the complexities of love and life.  The critical renown that the album earned Johnston led to a major-label hit with 1994’s Bad Reputation, produced by Butch Vig (best-known for producing Nirvana and forming Garbage, though his earlier band--the great Spooner--mined a musical vein more akin to Johhston’s).

I almost never pay much attention to lyrics unless they’re really, really good (e.g. Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna,” Iggy Pop’s “Search and Destroy”) or really, really bad (so much of the self-consciously poetic mewling that strikes some listeners as really, really good).  I listen to words more for sound (and the sound of the voice singing those words) than for sense.

And so my first time or two through this album, as Johnston returns to the indie Bar/None label, I was seduced mostly by the spare shimmer of the arrangements and Richard McLaurin’s Nashville production, by the grace of the melodies and the propulsion of the uptempo material, by the inviting intimacy of Johnston’s vocals.  With this album, the sound sucks you in, and then the lyrics deliver the sucker punch, as the surface buoyancy masks the unremitting despair that lurks inside.

The tip off comes with the first two tracks--“Lonely Penny” and “Don’t Fall in Love with a Lonely Girl”--in the repetition of a word in the title, not the redundancy it might first seem but a clue to the manner in which this material unfolds.  For the lyrical perspective reveals more about the narrator than it does about the objects of his attention/affection/obsession.

After the album opens with the disarming strum of a ukulele, the song of romantic yearning finds the singer reading a whole lot of significance into a chance encounter with a young woman who may not even be lonely.  “It was arranged in the stars that we should meet,” he serenades Penny, who apparently has yet to say anything. “Hey Penny, are we the same? Are we both just waiting to be taken away?”  She may or may not be needy; he obviously is.

The more muscular second song puts “lonely” in a whole different perspective, as the word means something different to the narrator than it might to the listener.  The woman he’s singing about isn’t lonely in a conventional sense--she’s running around on him while he’s sitting at home, alone, miserable, unable to leave her, making excuses for her.  “Man, she’s out doing things I can’t imagine,” he sings.

The beguiling contrast between inviting music and despairing lyrics marks much of the rest of the album as well, from the Spectoresque drums on “The Other Side of Love” (“when the heart is broke”) to the lilting samba of “The Kind of Love We’re In” (“some love’s over, man, and that’s all she wrote”) to the Buddy Hollyesque karmic payback of “It’s Gonna Come Back to You.” Most striking of all is the tension between the anthemic twang of “Livin’ Too Close to the Rio Grande” and lyrics that channel Cormac McCarthy: “Now the river has turned into a flood, and the sun’s the color of real blood.”)

For me, here’s the test of when music really works--when a song keeps running through my brain and I’m barely conscious of what it is, not immediately identifying the artist. For the last week, there have been a number of such songs in my psyche’s heavy rotation, and every one has been Freedy’s.  By the time this album has some full circle, closing with the same note of yearning with “What You Cannot See, You Cannot Fight” where the song cycle opened, every chord has been embedded deep in the brain.