For years the best songwriter in Seattle was pouring drinks. Dean Johnson worked the bar at Al’s Tavern in the Wallingford neighbourhood, where the regulars passed a rumour around like a secret worth keeping. There’s the best songwriter in town. He was local lore, a long-held family secret, until his debut Nothing For Me Please arrived in 2023, when he was fifty.
That bar did more than pay the rent. It wrote alongside him. “‘Death of the Party’ is a great example of that,” he says of the sociological experience of tending bar. “Being in that environment, lyrics did solidify. If I was working on a song, it wasn’t unusual for some new aspect of it, or a line that was too vague, to suddenly come into focus.”
The figure at the centre of that song was never one specific patron. “Death of the Party is an amalgamation of all the energy vampires I’ve ever known,” he says. “Surprisingly and luckily, bartending is not where I’ve experienced the most monstrous ones, but if you hang out in bars a lot, you will inevitably come across many a bore.”
Now he has reopened the record. The deluxe edition of I Hope We Can Still Be Friends, his debut for Saddle Creek, adds two songs, The Rapture and My Mistake, to an album that already felt finished. He had a separate reason for each one. “The Rapture was added to join Death of the Party as a song on the album which is saying, I Hope We Can Still Be Friends, directly to my audience while, otherwise, the album title refers to past relationships, however glibly,” he says. “My Mistake was included for being a special and haunting composition in chords, melody and arrangement. It’s also an exaggerated part of my character and it helps build a fuller picture.”
The title carries two meanings at once, a warm line to a room and a farewell to an ex. He heard the friendly one first. “I heard it as a ‘warm line to the room’ foremost, in regards to the song Death of the Party, but there were enough break up songs which seemed to suit the album title’s sentiment, too.”
My Mistake is the darker of the two additions, a song that sits with someone so afraid of getting it wrong that they never try at all, then wake to find they have missed the boat. Johnson does not hold it away from himself. “My Mistake, however exaggerated, comes straight from the relatively passive way I’ve gone through life,” he says. “The fact that I didn’t record an album until I was 45 years old, and then it didn’t come out until I was 50, is a great example.”
Roughly half of the record is what he calls his mean songs, enough of them that the back cover carries a warning, Beware of Dean. The meanness, it turns out, points back at its author. “If I have any tendency to be mean, I think it basically comes from anger or frustration with myself.”
Then there is So Much Better, the one that folds electroconvulsive therapy into a story about heartbreak. Ask how a detail like that ends up in a love song and he makes it sound like the most sensible idea going. “If you’ve tried to drink someone off your mind, you know that it doesn’t work. And hangovers make it all the worse,” he says. “Electroshock therapy could be a way to truly forget someone as long as it was a pretty short relationship. It seems like a pretty easy thing to think of. I’m sure people have done it, right?”
The record was made at Unknown Studio in Anacortes, Washington, produced by Sera Cahoone, the songwriter Johnson calls a soulmate sibling, with a small band of friends around him, Abbey Blackwell on bass, the multi-instrumentalist Sam Peterson, and Cahoone on drums and backing vocals. His voice has drawn comparisons to Roy Orbison and a misfit Everly brother, and his writing lands in the country-adjacent lineage of John Prine and Kris Kristofferson, the humour and the ache arriving in the same breath. When he reaches back for where any of this began, he keeps it plain. “I was raised on a bluff,” he says of his childhood on Camano Island in the Puget Sound. “I’m not trying to make it sound dramatic, but I did have a sweeping view.”
He brings these songs to l’Escogriffe in Montreal this Thursday, with Georgia Harmer opening, a small and close room. He knows exactly what he wants the night to feel like, and what he would rather it did not. “I hope the audience in Montreal feels intimacy and empathy and joy at seeing my awkwardness onstage,” he says. “I hope they do not feel sympathy. I will be happy for the challenge of singing my songs the best I can, period.”
Photo – Coco Foto
Share this :
