Jack Johnson: Wide Awake
By Team JamBase Jan 29, 2008 • 4:52 pm PST
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“Hey Timmy, you think I should play for them afterwards?” he asks me. “If you feel like it man, then do it,” I reply. “Why don’t we go upstairs and check on them in a couple minutes,” I add to ease his mind. “”Sounds like a good idea,” responds Johnson. Well, suffice to say, we stayed upstairs a little longer than we thought we would and when we returned to the backyard, he wasn’t thinking of playing for the invited guests. “Uh, I may be too loose,” he laughed. Instead, Johnson thanked everyone for coming and shook their hands while looking them straight in the eye as they left. That’s Jack Johnson: great host, funny dude and slyly shy superstar.
What the suits and influencers were listening to was a quintessential Jack Johnson record – breezy, uncomplicated, soulful and straightforward. Sleep Through the Static comes after the Curious George movie soundtrack exclusively done for rug scratching bambinos and their parental units. Those looking for nursery rhymes on Sleep will be sorely disappointed because Johnson has the universe on his mind this time around, and his outlook is deliberate and democratic.
“I try not to get introspective on what I write and how I go about the songwriting process. I write the ones I write that time around, and they end up as a group on the record. A lot of times it’s about what is going on with the world, but I don’t necessarily sit down and watch the news or read the paper. Things going on become part of the social consciousness, and over time it seems hard not to write songs like that,” he says.
“Going into it, I was pretty comfortable. I felt like I didn’t have anything to prove. At some point here, things are going to go downhill. I don’t mean that in a negative sense. Everything has its peaks and valleys,” Johnson says. “To me, this thing has been going on a while. Each record has kind of surprised me that it keeps going in that direction. I’m at a place now where I am ready if it sold half of the [usual] amount, so that kind of pressure is off in a way.”
It’s not that he doesn’t care about sales but he’s not in competition with himself, nor has he ever been. “What an amazing ride it was to get to keep putting out records. If I can keep on doing this at some level then I am happy to put out a record every coupla of years,” Johnson says.
Johnson was a film major at UC Santa Barbara, so it’s no surprise that he “sees” an arc that runs through his records. “Almost every record I do I want it to feel like it’s a whole unit. They always have. Sonically its felt like they always fit together in a nice sequence, and thematically they jump around a little bit,” he says. “On this one, I’ll be curious to see whether people see it as a nice whole piece or a little redundant. To me, a lot of the songs on this record are dealing with the same topics and thinking about them from different angles. The songs tie really nice together in my mind. A lot of times getting songs off your chest or outta your mind is one thing, but fans listening to them is another thing. I feel like it is a nice thematic record with a nice cinematic ride through the whole thing.”
For Sleep Through The Static, he enlisted producer J.P. Plunier (Ben Harper, G. Love), the man who helped launch Johnson’s career with his breakthrough debut, Brushfire Fairytales. Plunier knows him and for Johnson it allowed him to take things a little further than usual, especially on the electric side of things.
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“J.P. thought not to make it ‘4 to 6 feet and glassy,’ he wanted a couple of ‘one-foot long board’ days and ’20-foot big paddle in a storm’ days to make it more dynamic. The interesting thing about this record is that there is more electric [guitar] on it. But, there are [also] more songs that are just voice and acoustic than any other thing I have done. There’s ‘Angel,’ ‘Same Girl,’ ‘Adrift’ [and] ‘While We Wait,’ but there is more electric and more stripped down acoustic. Does that make sense?” he laughs.
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“We are all getting older. The Curious George record brought in more kids than ever but that’s a whole different trip. I meet a lot of people after the shows that say they are in college now and they got the first record when they were 14 years old or younger. It’s a weird trip that somebody sticks with it and doesn’t grow out of it with a musician,” he comments.
However, Jack Johnson is like that, too. He’ll buy the new Pearl Jam record. He’ll buy the new Jackson Browne record. He’ll buy an old Minor Threat 7-inch. “I have bands like that. No matter what, I’ll go out and get their new record. They might lose relevance in the radio world and those concerns, but it’s fun to have a relationship with listeners and vice versa. I want to go on and keep writing the songs for every point in a person’s life. There are a lot of people who have been going through a break up with their college sweetheart or whatever and now they are 32 or 33 and having kids. It’s fun and hopefully we can enjoy having that parallel thing happening with the songs and their lives.”
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“Sometimes it’s dangerous to let people know exactly what you mean in a title because it’s fun to let people read into it. To me Sleep Through The Static comes from this one line in that song that says, [he begins to sing] ‘I will cook all your books/ You’re too good looking and mistook it/ You could watch it instead from the comfort of your burning bed/ Or you can sleep through the static.'”
His intentions are wide open to interpretation and yet it’s a pretty linear thought. “You can read it in different ways depending upon the mood,” says Johnson. “That whole song actually came pretty easy. It was a stream of consciousness kinda thing. I saw a sticker on a car and it said, ‘Support Our Troops.’ There was another sticker next to it about Jesus. I thought to myself, ‘What would Jesus think if he saw this?’ I was trying to see it objectively and not too be cynical about it. He was human and lived here on Earth at some point. What would he think about a bumper sticker with his name on it and right next to ‘Support Our Troops’?’ Now that got me thinking. There is nothing wrong with supporting our troops, but when supporting our troops becomes synonymous with supporting this war, then [pauses]. I have a friend who had a sticker that said, ‘Support Our Troops. Bring Them Home,’ and somebody took it off their car. You get labeled as being unpatriotic if you think the troops should come home.”
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Johnson’s on a verbal roll and when he’s got momentum he rides his words like wave, cutting and turning with a desired result in mind. “I started thinking one of Jesus’ famous lines, ‘Love your enemy.’ It would be interesting if Jesus could tell us what he really thinks. So I had the first line, ‘C’mon Jesus/ Tell us what you really think/ That’s no way to treat an enemy.’ From there the whole song came out, even though that first line didn’t make it into the song.”
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“Conversation is important. When we decided to do the Vote for Change in 2004 there were a lot of conversations on our website about it. Some people were upset about us doing it, saying that they didn’t like it when musicians talked about politics. It seems so funny to me. Then don’t listen to it. When you write songs it’s not a democratic process, it’s not a group effort. When someone’s got an opinion they are going to write songs and you either like those songs or you don’t,” he says without a smile.
“The whole message board world these days, fans and musicians can communicate and they feel it’s a group effort where they put their opinion in,” he says. “It doesn’t really matter what the songs should be about. The musician and writer are going to write about the topics that are on their mind. It’s fine if you don’t want to listen [but] at some point they tried to put up a petition on whether I should play those shows. If enough of the fans decided that I shouldn’t play those shows, then I shouldn’t play it? What’s that? That’s not gonna change anything.”
Johnson puts his time, energy and money where his mouth is. His new recording studio and the Brushfire Records office is completely Green, down to the nontoxic carpet fibers and enviro-friendly paint on the wall. It’s fully solar powered, and it doesn’t feel or look any different than if it wasn’t “greened out.” It just fits the business and life model for Johnson and his equally concerned pals.
“This kind of stuff is two worlds and sometimes it bleeds. Sometimes bits of it come into the songwriting and how things are connected,” he remarks. “The studio runs off solar power. The wood we used was all reclaimed lumber. It feels nice every time you look at that to think about my Australian friend Luke coming in here and stripping the wood and building it and doing so many things that are low impact. I forget that its solar powered. It’s not like we make music because we have a solar powered studio.”
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His main goal is to get “the tailgatin’, music lovin’ seekers of fun” to get off their ass and do something.
“The main thing is to help activate the fans. [We] give tickets to non-profits that they can use to motivate people to come down and be active, be stewards of their area and make people aware of the groups in their towns. We want to talk about voter registration. It’s about policy change. You have to vote the right people into office, and you have to vote with your dollar. Climate Counts will be there. It’s a website [where] you can check out the publicly traded companies and how they score environmentally so people can be aware of how they spend their money.”
Jack Johnson’s band is comprised of bassist Merlo, drummer Adam Topol and now-permanent keyboardist Zach Gill of ALO. His shyness, which still bubbles under the surface, has been replaced by a newfound confidence thanks to his expanding library of songs. “Over time, I have become more and more comfortable on the stage, and [we’ve] added Zach to the band,” says Johnson. “When you add one more musician you have to make more space, so the songs get longer. The main thing now is the amount of songs we have is starting to add up. You can’t play all of your songs live anyway.”
“There was definitely a record or two where we were wanted to make sure we could play those songs live. That’s going to give us more stuff than we’ve had. It’s something we knew we could do live. This time out, that conversation never came up. It’s hard to pick the set every night. We do play the same songs, but the one that flops around, it’s hard to decide which one we want to do. Now there’s even more songs to choose from, but we can pick one or two from each record and it adds up to a set. It will give us nice places to go live and it’s not going to limit us.”
For more on Sleeping Through The Static check this YouTube clip…
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