I will not dwell on the biography, after all, for those who want, all the details are in the chronicle. Besides, I am one of those who believe the artist matters. Van Gogh was a great painter, Dino Campana a great poet, and everything else matters less than a cabbage.
Sure, it’s nice to tell stories, except that when faced with a psychiatric face, the risk is to overdose on the picturesque. So if we really have to talk about a slightly touched gentleman, the only touch that will interest us is that of genius. Moreover, almost entirely devoid of mimesis, the work of Daniel Johnson speaks for itself. Or rather, it tells the story much better than we would. "If there is a color, that color blinds me, if there is a color, that color is not mine."
And it’s not just the live expression of an emotional state, which, if it were so, we wouldn’t care about such a work. It would be, just to say, like facing the drawings of a disturbed subject, a subject like Emma, for example, and Emma is a kind of wolf. You should see her drawings: contrasts like knife strokes, color that becomes clump or matter, the power barely contained by the sheet.
Well, Daniel Johnston also has that power. But that’s not the point. The point is that on that power crashes the hurricane of talent. The ability to write songs that can both break your heart and send you to heaven.
All his material from the eighties is incredible. Melodies almost in their natural state amidst chaos and background noise. Something wonderfully imperfect.
Even though Daniel Johnston, like all great songwriters, was a champion of classicism and found himself in that chaos almost against his will. It couldn’t have been otherwise. Where else could that mix of eccentricity, amateur recordings, and quirky songwriting lead?
Think of fragments of amusement parks, velvet-like thumping, abrupt mystic gospel hints, cloud-catching melodies, angelic and jammed keyboards, snippets of Beatles, and strange folk blues artifacts. And to all this, add the very tender frog in the throat of an angelic and ungainly voice.
With “1990” things change, “1990” is his first real album. Almost all the extravagances of the past have been banished; it is a direct, essential, no-frills work. Few notes that dig deep, a seedbed of raw art dictated solely by need. Far from the fabulous patchwork of the beginnings, it is surprisingly unified and settles on a very personal gospel-tinged folk.
Prayers, hallucinatory apparitions of the devil, songs of impossible redemption, absurd hopes...
And here and there, crystalline melodies suspended in a somewhere, the same somewhere from which they come...
A kind of ragged Pink Moon, imagine. "I am as faded as the palest blue," said Nick Drake.
Yes, I know... Nick Drake is always perfect and Daniel Johnston always imperfect. But the result is the same.
Tracklist Lyrics and Samples
01 Devil Town (01:05)
I was living in a Devil Town
Didn't know it was a Devil Town
Oh Lord it really brings me down
About the Devil Town
And all my friend were vampires
Didn't know they were vampires
Turns out I was a vampire myself
In the Devil Town
I was living in a Devil Town
Didn't know it was a Devil Town
Oh Lord it really brings me down
About the Devil Town
11 Funeral Home (03:13)
Funeral home, funeral home
Going to the funeral home
Got me a coffin shiny and black
I’m goin’ to the funeral and I’m never coming back
Funeral home, funeral home
Going to the funeral home
Got me a coffin shiny and black
I’m goin’ to the funeral and I’m never coming back
Funeral home
Funeral home
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