A lot of Daniel Johnston's most vital music was recorded alone, and in strange ways. On a weight bench, most famously, in his brother's garage, with a chord organ and a boombox microphone. This was back before his bipolar disorder really exploded on him, well and truly seized into his life. A lot of that music is hard to separate from the way you hear it-- the tape hiss and the vulnerable voice, the excitement of hearing into someone else's strange, pretty world, straight from boombox to boombox.
And then a lot of his most vital music has also been recorded by other people entirely: a whole raft of covers by musicians who listened to those spare weight-bench sketches, heard a ton going on inside them, and wanted to play them big-- wanted to take the sketch and turn it into a big painting or a full-color animation. In between, well, it's been dicey: Attempts to make Johnston himself mesh with collaborators and backing bands and expensive studios haven't always gone well. How do you make the big colorful painting when the private sketch is right in the center of the canvas? Often they both lose out.
The biggest, greatest news about Is and Always Was is that it does it right, beautifully and unawkwardly-- something that, if I were producer/musician Jason Falkner, I might be prouder of than having played with Paul McCartney. The record avoids the old mistake of thinking that Johnston is a "weird" musician and therefore needs a weird backing, or that he's a "raw" musician and needs a scrappy one: Johnston writes pop songs and loves the Beatles, and on this record he gets the rich Beatlesque pop arrangements that are surely in his head. They even find a sweet spot between forcing too much personality into the instruments (and having them overwhelm Johnston) and not putting in enough (so that he sounds like he's singing karaoke); sometimes a little bland or obvious, but in a good spot. This is as much as I've ever heard Johnston sound not like an individual, not like someone who's being supported, but like the lead singer of an actual band, one he's really part of-- a great, strange, and ambitious psychedelic band. Even amid the grand, triumphant rock pomp of the closing number, Johnston sounds like he's really, genuinely in it.
It's a happy result that should bring even more cheer to Johnston fans than the news, reported recently in The New York Times, that he has a new cat. Better still is that his songs here shine and charm in a very comfortable way. Johnston doesn't sound so vulnerable; he sounds strong. "High Horse", another of those songs about the girl he fell for 30 years ago-- the Ur-girl of all Johnston songs-- pairs a supremely confident melody with a bouncy arrangement that's really, really difficult not to smile at. "Queenie the Doggie" has him sounding reassuringly strong, too, eulogizing a pet over a vaguely Hawaiian shuffle. There's successful Johnston rock-- a re-recording of "I Had Lost My Mind" with big guitars arcing all around it, a pastiche of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" ("Lost in My Infinite Memory"), songs with big dramatic dynamics that Johnston matches nicely. There's a punky little gem called "Freedom", and one called "Fake Records of Rock and Roll" that's like Johnston's equivalent of Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll"-- except, based on one interview quote, I think it might actually be about when you buy a cheapo release of some classic thing and it turns out to be a lame re-recording.
Johnston devotees will get a kick out of it, for sure-- out of the successful merging of Johnston and a rich, full-band aesthetic, and just out of the sound of Johnston doing well and writing well, finally rocking out on the wide screen he's usually had to imagine. What's funny is that this might not make it a good spot for Johnston newcomers to start. This, strangely enough, seems like one artist where it might be better to hear the lonely, private stuff first, to see the sketch before you see the attempt to paint it large.
