Interview: Dean Johnson

Dean Johnson: “If I finish lyrics in a span of two weeks, that would be really fast.” Photo: Coco Foto

The late-blooming songwriter on slow-grown ideas, tender melodies hiding sharp truths, unfinished ‘babies’, creative doubt, and finally trusting his voice

“Words don’t come easily to me/I notice you don’t have that problem,” sings Dean Johnson on Death Of The Party, one of the sharpest character studies found on his recent album I Hope We Can Still Be Friends. A country singer-songwriter who can slip the cruellest aside into a melody so tender you could mistake it for affection, his rise has been steady rather than sudden. After years embedded in Seattle’s local scene, he released his solo debut Nothing For Me, Please in 2023, a record that introduced a honeyed voice rooted in everyday observation and unvarnished honesty.

This year’s Blue Moon single followed, a nocturnal ode to restlessness wrapped in pedal steel and electric piano, backed with a cover of Lucinda Williams’ Lake Charles. I Hope We Can Still Be Friends deepens his interest in the thin line between kindness and candour. Its spacious and unhurried arrangements give that Orbison-like croon room to shine. Tracks like Carol and Before You Hit The Ground find him looking at modern anxieties with wry resilience, reaffirming his gift for honest storytelling. Utterly hooked on his songwriting, we couldn’t turn down the chance to dig into his process…

Discover more interviews with songwriters

Are you someone who starts with a blank sheet of paper, or are you always collecting ideas for songs?

“It would definitely be the ‘I’m doing a slow collection’ thing. My first 10 or 15 years of having a guitar… I got one when I was 14, and I made up my own stuff mostly. I didn’t have much guidance for learning stuff, and I felt intimidated to try to learn other people’s songs. I was making up my own thing. Composing little guitar things has been something I’ve always done. Often, songs for me start like that. I didn’t even write songs with lyrics until I was around 30 years old, besides one or two joke songs I did in my 20s.

“Usually, a song will start for me… maybe I do have a lyrical phrase in mind or something, but mostly it’ll be a guitar thing and a melody will come to it. Once there’s a segment of a song that I feel really strongly about, whether a verse or a chorus or something, just some collection of chords together and a melody, then that’s what gets me rolling.

“It’s probably just icing on the cake if I have any segment of lyrics to go with it. Often, I haven’t. I have a lot of compositions from recent times – and old times – that I never finished lyrics for. I don’t have much of a writing discipline, so lyrics, for me, can come really slowly. If I finish lyrics in a span of two weeks, that would be really fast.”

Wow, you’re really not just churning them out…

“I’ll have a fairly established song with melody, and maybe I have a third of the lyrics done, I’ll just be walking around… One of my habits also is, if I am working on a song late at night, I’ll sit down with the guitar and I will chip away at it. I’ll be chipping away at melody and composition too, trying to make myself really satisfied for liking it. It is hard for me to like something. I really enjoy that process of honing and honing and trying to get it to be satisfying. But with lyrics, I just avoid it. I avoid the lyric thing.”

Do you do the mumble thing, where you will put sounds in as placeholders and then try and fit words into those sounds?

“That’s it, pretty much, and sometimes there will be a lyric or some sort of meaning I am going after, and there will be a phrase or two that I know I’m going to stick with. They’ll be a guide for what the rest of the lyrics will be like.

“But that is a puzzle, to choose words that mean something to you and phrase well, sing easily. It is a tricky puzzle, and me being my own worst critic, I probably get heavily slowed down. I should be more playful with lyrics in the future and try to get more things done. Having a practice of finishing things is something I haven’t established very well, and that’s not a good way to go through life in general. It’s better to finish things, have that experience, and move on. I have all these babies that have never been born.”

Now that you’ve had a couple of albums out, and you’re in the cycle of releasing albums and playing shows, is there more external pressure for you to finish songs and put them out?

“It hasn’t been put to the test too much, because I think all of the songs that went on the second album… Well, some of them had been written after the first album was recorded. The first album was recorded in 2018, and it didn’t come out until 2023. A handful of the songs on the second album were written after that, but they were pretty fully written with lyrics, and a lot of the other ones were old.”

So you didn’t experience “second album syndrome” where you’d written the first album and had to rush the second one?

“No, not so much. There are new things I’m working on that, if lyrics came for those before anything else, I would love to put them out. But I don’t have any pressure right now for the third album. The biggest pressure is coming from myself. I would ideally put out three albums in the next two years, because I’m sitting on so much stuff.

I would like to have the pressure of making decisions with lyrics and getting those songs out there, because I really have strong feelings about a lot of the song compositions, and I’m getting older. Sitting around on them, it feels kind of crummy. I don’t feel a lot of pressure. I’ve never felt really great about any lyrics in the past. I want to get better at choosing a theme, going with it, and getting the songs out.

“A tricky part of it is that a lot of my touring will be solo, and if I have crappy lyrics for singing solo songs, that’d be much harder. Even the lyrics I have, I feel a little bit embarrassed by. The first record has a bunch, there are three possessive and jealousy songs, and they are exaggerated songs with extreme lyrics. It feels pretty embarrassing to do this. I mean, I really do like them. I like those songs, but it seems like some redundancy of heartbreak stuff.”

Dean Johnson: “It’s better to finish things, have that experience, and move on. I have all these babies that have never been born.” Photo: Jake Johnson

There’s some great wordplay and use of language on songs like Death Of The Party and A Long Goodbye…

“Those opening lines for Death Of The Party got me really excited. I always wanted to write a song about an energy vampire. And actually, I had those lyrics mostly done for years. Some of the best lyrics I thought of for that song, I didn’t write down, and I forgot them quickly. Once I got those first lines and started on that song, I was really excited. I thought I’d easily write lyrics for a song like that, and I didn’t. I wasn’t satisfying myself too much with being clever and mean at the same time. But in the end, I feel good about all the lyrics on that song.”

And do you work for that juxtaposition where, on first listen, everything sounds sweet and nice, but then you listen harder and the lyrics are a little bit more cutting?

“I don’t know. I’m not consciously thinking about that… I know people say that I have a sweet, gentle voice, but I’m not intending to be like that. That’s just how I’m singing. People think I sing in falsetto. I often get that. I hardly ever do. That song Possession on the first record, I do hit a falsetto part, but I’m usually just singing gently.”

A song like Blue Moon definitely feels like it’s up in the top register…

“Oh yeah, but if we were in the same room, I could push that really loud if I wanted to, in a full voice. Even in the future, more and more I will sing with a quieter voice, hopefully more razor-honed. If I’m warmed up, I think I can make my voice sound the best in a quiet way. But I do want to sing songs with a lot of power too, and I will do that in the future. I will have some more rocking types of songs, more like a Carol type of song.”

Do you look after your voice?

“I haven’t smoked for three years. I used to smoke regularly and I love cigarettes, but I haven’t done that. But I don’t sit around singing very much at all. That’s another oddity about me, I’m not singing songs very often.

“One of the unusual things about growing up, my dad was around the house a lot of my childhood, especially from me being 10 to 18 years old, and we didn’t have any instruments. Nobody played anything in the house. My older brother gave me a guitar. He’s 8 years older. He never ended up being much of a player or anything. It was a cheap nylon string guitar. He would have been 22 at the time he started playing. So, he hands me a guitar, and it was a really nice gesture. He showed me the basic chords, and slowly, over a span of months, I gathered steam with it – from barely touching it at all to having little spans of time with it.

“But anyway… nobody played anything in the house. But my dad did sing in the house all the time: Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Harry Belafonte, and also opera. He was an incredible singer, one of the best singers I’ve ever been in a room with, but none of us appreciated it. None of us knew. But my point in telling you all this is that none of us kids did this. None of us sing. We don’t sing around our friends.”

You weren’t that showtune kid or taking a guitar everywhere you went in case there was a campfire to sing around…

“Right, exactly. I really do appreciate people who do that, but I’m just as shy as the typical next shy guy. If I sit down and practice my songs before a show, if I haven’t played for a while, it is satisfying, and it’s something I should do a lot more. I should be using my voice, experimenting with it, and strengthening it. But as of right now, I don’t have those habits.”

Your voice is definitely an instrument in itself. It’s so distinctive and a key part of your sound. Will you change lyrics because you know what words are better to sing, or is that not really part of your thinking at that stage?

“That’s definitely part of my thinking. I’m maybe not thinking of it too consciously, just doing it more as an automatic. I still have a lot of room to grow with singing in general. For instance, to what you’re talking about a little bit, just shaping vowels consistently… some words are hard for me to sing, and I don’t think they’d be hard for somebody else – just certain vowel sounds. I definitely struggle with trying to find an easier word sometimes.

“I’m still trying to remember to breathe when I’m singing songs. And also, more recently, to make sure that when I’m going to start to sing a vowel, or some word, to get my mouth open and shaped for it before I start doing it, rather than starting the word or syllable and shaping to it. I’ve sung most of the time without even opening my mouth very much. That’s not a very good singing habit. I am changing that stuff a little bit, being more thoughtful of it.”

That technical side of things must be hard to think about in the moment, like if you’re playing golf and have to think about your feet, your backswing etc?

“You’re exactly right and I do probably get compromised to some degree on stage. I’ll be thinking about my posture… I’m thinking way too much. I’ve always done that. I played electric guitar in bands, and because they’re bands that maybe don’t rehearse that often, it’s up to me to rehearse a lot on my own… I’ve always been somebody who’s had to think too much on stage rather than just enjoy the moment. It’s not ideal. It would be more ideal to have it all sunken in, and you could enjoy your experience more on stage.”

Dean Johnson: “That’s another oddity about me, I’m not singing songs very often.” Photo: Coco Foto

Some of the songs on the album were written a long time ago, and others you’ve been working on more recently. Was it easy to decide which ones to include?

“We recorded 14. That’ll be a year ago, right around Halloween, that recording session. Halloween was right in the middle of those five days. Blue Moon was one of them and there are two other songs that we didn’t put on the record because we wanted to have fewer tracks on the vinyl. I think that they will be put out before Christmas, but there’s not a conclusive decision on exactly how they’ll be used, maybe to make an extended album version. Blue Moon came out as just for that 45 (RPM), and there are 13 other songs from that session.

“The album title was heavily inspired by when I would play Death Of The Party to audiences. I would say, ‘I hope you’re not afraid to come and talk to me after the show.’ I Hope We Can Still Be Friends came from that between me and the audience thing. I’m bringing this up because one of the songs that didn’t make the record is called The Rapture and it could be very divisive with me and Christian people.”

How come?

“The lyrics say, ‘Christian, go to heaven/We’ll be all right without you/Christian, start ascending/We’ll be just fine without you.’ It’s pure comedy, but it could really rub some people the wrong way. I thought that would be on the record, and that was going to be part of the reason the album was titled I Hope We Can Still Be Friends. Even more than Death Of The Party, it could upset some people.”

Have you had audiences be upset with your songs or lyrics?

“I’ve heard comments from Nothing For Me Please on the first album. Those lyrics have to do with getting to heaven and then wanting to get out of heaven. It’s basically, ‘Be careful what you wish for, eternal life is the definition of hell.’ That’s kind of what the song is trying to say. It’s vague but it does literally call Jesus Christ a vampire. That was meant to be something to stir people up. But people don’t necessarily even take it that way. I’m saying, ‘Christ, you drank us dry,’ and I think they just take it as a swear word. Anyway, people have made comments like, ‘Oh, I love Dean Johnson, but now I can’t because of this song.’ So putting out The Rapture is probably a risk.”

How about the other song that didn’t make it?

“The other song that didn’t make the album is called My Mistake, and it’s really dark. It’s kind of somebody who has let life pass them by without trying; being too afraid to ever get themselves to do anything, which is an exaggeration of me, in a sense. I’ve been pretty passive, you know. You’ll hear them both, hopefully in the next couple of months.”

And you recorded them all over Halloween last year?

“We were at the studio up in Anacortes. It’s a big old church studio, you play in the giant room, at least that’s the main option that people usually do. That was five days and then we went to a studio in Seattle and did a bunch of overdubbing.”

Do you like the process of being methodical in the studio?

“Making decisions on where and who to record with, the whole process – it intimidates me a lot. I don’t have a lot of studio experience. Once the decisions were made and we were doing it, everybody I worked with on this record was pure joy. We did the live tracking: me, Sera Cahoone on drums, Abbey Blackwell on bass… We tracked live, and nine of the songs were sung live.

“There was one song, Painted Smile, that we had to go over and over again, and it wasn’t even the lyrics. To lock in with the rhythm, Sarah and I, especially, it was tricky. I think we had nine passes of that in a row, we didn’t take a break. We weren’t a very rehearsed band, and it does show, as far as being really cohesive rhythm tracks. Carol, for example, doesn’t feel that locked-in to me. Abbey wrote a great bass part for that. It has nice muscly parts, it could have felt more heavy, but it’s still neat.”

Is that because you’re chasing a sound that you have already heard in your head?

“It was like hearing a sound, like Radiohead in Creep when they hit those big chords. I kind of wanted that thing for Carol, to be monstrous and vicious. I wanted a better guitar tone. That didn’t reach its artistic potential. Neither did the Death Of The Party, for example, as far as a composition. It has these sections that were only there to be fleshed out in some beautiful arrangement way, and we just kept it really simple. I feel like some of those sections are a little bit superfluous. But everything on there seems like a nice touch – Sam Peterson is playing that baritone guitar that’s really pretty on there.”

There are mentions of Buddy Holly, Father Mackenzie and Harvest Moon on the album. Are you happy to wear your influences on your sleeves?

“I guess it was pretty natural. I didn’t think too much about it. Actually, the Buddy Holly one; once I had the Buddy Holly thing going, I was almost going to make each verse about a different artist. I was going to start with Neil Young, ‘I found a heart of gold,’ that would have been the opening line, and I would put in John Lennon, and maybe Sam Cooke, and Buddy Holly, but I didn’t end up doing that. I like the abstract lyrics of that opening song.”

Which part of writing, recording and performing would you say is your favourite?

“I guess my favourite is writing. If I’m in the middle of making a song I’m really liking, doing that tinkering at night, I love doing that. But it’s kind of a tie between… if I’m playing a show and the sound is really good for me, if I feel really connected to my voice and guitar, especially my voice, it is fun to sing well to an audience and really connect like that.

“My shows are really sweet if I’m opening up for a bigger band, doing solo sets, and people come to my merch table and they’ve never heard me before, and they want to buy a record. I’ve done really well with that. Of course, that’s really charming. Now that I’ve done a little bit of headlining, they’re small shows, but my audience has really bonded with my music, especially the first record. That’s really charming and pleasing too…Touring doesn’t necessarily feed me that much; I’m not wanting the ego boost… but I have enjoyed doing all that bonding with people who have bonded with my music. It has been very special.”

If you were an 18-year-old overnight sensation, it perhaps wouldn’t mean as much. Are you able to put into words what it means that your songs get to take you around the world?

“Well, it sure has been a big surprise. It does feel like people are bonding more with my music than anything else. I think some people, maybe, are charmed by the old person’s story, but it’s more of a sign of people really liking the music. That feels good, and it’s a really positive, sweet thing that I can start a touring career at 50-plus years old.

Lastly, what can we expect next year?

“I have to start planning when I will record. I’d like to be getting going by somewhere between March and May. It’d be nice to be done recording another album by May. And it’s pretty likely I’ll play the Roskilde festival again… and I’m sure I’ll do some surrounding stuff. I bet I’ll be in Europe for a couple of weeks anyway, if not more.”

I Hope We Can Still Be Friends by Dean Johnson is out now on Saddle Creek. For music and tour dates, head over to deanjohnsongs.com

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.