People often fret about what it means to be a fan of Daniel Johnston, wondering whether interest in his songs means rubbernecking at his severe mental illness. His true believers worry less. Despite amateurish recordings and peculiar performances, they'll say Johnston is a classic songwriter of the most traditional sort. Hear your way through Welcome to My World, a collection of his most memorable work, and careful listeners would have to admit the believers are onto something: There's no train wreck in the music. These 21 songs might not be the work of the Brian Wilson-level genius some like to claim, but they're far more keen than most people give them credit for-- every bit as musically satisfying as a Bob Pollard or a Jens Lekman or an Anton Newcombe, and rather more emotionally astute, too.
It's not the success of a savant, either. Johnston is a student of the heart of the whole pop-rock enterprise, with a musical education that comes from years spent with a piano and a Beatles songbook, changing the order of the chords around to create new sequences-- check out the sophisticated double-time changes in "Lennon Song". Bob Dylan's in there, too, and Elvis Costello, who Johnston impersonates with comical efficiency on "Man Obsessed". Beach Boys, Big Star, Hank Williams-- this stuff comes from the wellspring of pop-music basics, and Johnston knows his way around it as well as the next rock geek. He writes compelling melodies, even when he can't deliver them well, and his lyrics are well formed, coherent, and consistent in their metaphors. He can be cutting and clever (look to the devil's lines in "Never Relaxed"), moving and seemingly wise ("Some Things Last a Long Time"), and alarmingly self-aware about his relationship with his fans ("Peek-a-Boo"). His subject matter pulls in a lot of very personal quirks, but its core lies in the same stuff everyone deals with-- lovelessness, making a living, all the good old standards. He has plenty to say about them, too, given that his illness has made all those things even more of a struggle than they already are.
What makes it all slightly different is the way Johnston made these songs, especially during the 1980s period so many of them come from: The most well known were recorded with only a boombox and a chord organ, in his brother's garage. The sound quality is poor, and Johnston's voice yelps and lisps, wounded and childish, making it that much stranger to hear the conviction in his playing; it's as if he doesn't think there's anything less than star-ready about this music. These are things indie rock fans have been known to cherish, but only so long as they feel like the person on the other end of the tape is just like them-- self-conscious, wilfully amateurish, in on the "joke." With Johnston it comes closer to what art-- and "indie"-- claim to be all about: This is a more honest, less mediated peek into someone else's world. In some ways, we're used to hearing and enjoying the music and ideas of people whose worlds aren't like ours: We happily listen to rock musicians who are almost certainly morons, or whose politics we find ridiculous. How squeamish should we be about looking into the goodhearted world of someone like Johnston-- his naivete, his struggles with everyday life, and the illness that manifested after those early recordings? Why is it we'd praise a song about Casper the Friendly Ghost if it seemed like whimsy, but get uncomfortable when Johnston intends the metaphor in earnest?
With the best of these songs, though, even that question falls away: Listen through the strangeness of the circumstances, and Johnston's songs are as normal as yours or mine. Knowing his biography, as many do, helps even more. After failing in college and being shipped off to live in Texas, he taps out a happy rag called "Chord Organ Blues" and tries to figure out what he's doing: "Everything's big in Texas, you know it is/ I think I might have made a big mistake." He runs away on a moped and writes "Speeding Motorcycle", a much-covered ode to the freedom of it: "We don't need reason and we don't need logic/ Cause we've got feeling and we're damn proud of it." Knowing that the girl he came closest to loving married a funeral director explains a bit of "Man Obsessed": "The only way you could get her to look at you is to die." Lines like these are clever, universal, and delivered passionately, with emotional readings that are complicated and convincing. There are times when Johnston's earnestness and naivete work against him, when cliches about love and live seem to spill out of him unexamined: The happy back-porch bounce on "Living Life" goes on about "learning to cope with the emotionless mediocrity of everyday living," and the haunting autobiography on "Story of an Artist" has a pretty teenaged conception of what being an artist means, complete with banal shots at the normal folks who "sit in front of their TVs." But even then we know it's no self-satisfied pose, and Johnston's fundamentally good-hearted enough that it's hard to mind his flaws.
Welcome to My World turns out to be a lovely package, and probably as much Johnston as the average listener will need; it's also notably short on the Johnston recordings that sound harrowing and depressed enough to be difficult listening. Lost and Found, the 45-year-old Johnston's newest album, is somewhat harder to recommend. These days, Johnston is better known as a visual artist than as a singer-songwriter, and this makes sense: His magic-marker drawings come from the same place as those early recordings, executed in private and for the sheer expression of it. His music, on the other hand, has come to require collaboration, something Johnston doesn't seem well-suited for: At times it feels like the backing band has shoved him to the front of the stage and started improvising bland, inappropriate things behind him, self-conscious and unsure how to really enter into his songs, leaving him sounding lost and awkward. He also seems a lot more labored and sluggish, in his performance and his emotions, than as a young man, which is where some of the aforementioned fretting comes in: Some of that is surely the result of how medicated he is, bad for his music but good for him. The songs center more and more on that lovelessness, which surely weighs harder on a middle-aged man-- more and more songs revolve around funeral home Laurie-- and some of them still hit. But it probably says something that the most exciting of them is "The Beatles", a recreation of a song from the 80s.
