Description
BIO :
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.
2LP TRACKLIST:
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Peek A Boo
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Casper The Friendly Ghost
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Some Things Last A Long Time
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Walking The Cow
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I’m Nervous
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Man Obsessed
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Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievances
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Never Before Never Again
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The Sun Shines Down On Me
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10 Chord Organ Blues
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Living Life
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Speeding Motorcycle
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True Love Will Find You In The End
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Never Relaxed
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Sorry Entertainer
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Ain’t No Woman Gonna Make A George Jones Outta Me
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Lennon Song
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Devil Town
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Laurie
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Story Of An Artist
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Funeral Home
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Go *
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My Yoke Is Heavy *
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Wild West Virginia *
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I Live My Broken Dreams *
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Marching Guitars *
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The Great Tune *