Breakthrough and backlash: with some exceptions, the former eventually begets the latter, no matter how wrongly deserved. The transition is part of the natural balance of things, and many artists unable to circumvent and survive the inevitable have been left behind, wondering what went wrong.
Freedy Johnston's no stranger to this familiar story. His much-lauded second album, 1992's Can You Fly, put him on the radar just as grunge was marginalizing singer-songwriters, and the conspicuous choice of Butch Vig as producer of his 1994 follow-up This Perfect World made the dialectic that much more apparent and severe. Johnston was an instantly unfashionable anachronism. All that and people still pronounced and spelled his last name "Johnson."
The funny thing about good songwriters, however, is that they often stay good, even when no one is listening. Or, in the case of Johnston, even when they stop releasing albums. Rain on the City marks Johnston's first album in eight years, following a series of the usual stopgaps, including live discs, demo collections, and a classy but still pretty MOR covers album. And you know what? It's pretty good. That much anyone aware of Johnston's past highpoints probably could have predicted.
What's more surprising is how effortless this long-in-the-making disc sounds, reminiscent of Johnston's best work without sounding consciously referential or reverential to the past, deceptively diverse despite its relatively conservative bent. Songs like "Don't Fall in Love With a Lonely Girl" or "Venus Is Her Name" are rootsy, but not quite roots rock. There are glimmers of jangly power-pop in songs such as "The Other Side of Love", country in "Livin' Too Close to the Rio Grande" and "It's Gonna Come Back to You", and soulful 70s AM rock in "The Devil Raises His Own", but none of those are really what this record is, either. Or rather, they are, but the disc is deeper than its default templates.
As a practiced journeyman, Johnston remains first and foremost an observant and tuneful chronicler of odd characters (one must presume including himself), small lives and lost souls with big feelings, struggling to get by in flyover country and cities alike. His sometimes wronged, often wrong-headed subjects here find hope in hopeless situations and comfort when love and luck has run out, and Johnston finds ways to convey those contradictions with a minimum of fuss heightened by plenty of melodic flourishes. His take on bossa nova, for example, "The Kind of Love We're In", impressively skirts light rock kitsch, and the song is better minus the knowing wink that lesser writers might have leaned on for support.
At every turn throughout the lean but hardly light album, Johnston once again proves himself a master of subtle songcraft, almost to a fault. Indeed, other acts would trade his ellipses for exclamation points. Yet here he is now, quietly residing in the same purgatory that houses such once-popular songwriters as disparate as Jackson Browne, John Hiatt, and Marshall Crenshaw, among countless other acts betrayed by cultural flux. It's not a question of whether someone like Johnston will ever reclaim a larger audience; it's whether an audience even exists for music like this anymore. His loss is their loss, too, but at least he can be confident that he tried his best.
