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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. Jack Johnson |
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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."
 Jack Johnson |
The Dixie Chicks had their career hijacked by neo-conservatives. Springsteen continues to put his art and neck on the line. Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam stand up to the madness, trying to make sense of it and rise above it all, and now so is Jack Johnson.
"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."
 Jack Johnson |
"We are going to do the [next] tour as low impact as possible, like bio-diesel trucks. All the merchandise will be recycled or organic cotton. A while ago it seemed like some kind of a special thing to do, now it seems like people are running their tours on bio-diesel. Whether that is the answer, it's a great way to do your busses for now. We'll be doing recycling at the shows and carbon offsets."
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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