Before pop came from bedrooms, it came from basements. Before Lana Del Rey, Phoebe Bridgers or Elliott Smith, there was Daniel Johnston. Pitchfork called him ‘The Godfather of Bedroom Pop’.
Among many things, Johnston was the founder of Outsider music. In his ranks are the idiosyncratic folk trio, The Shaggs, who played each instrument on every song at a different tempo. Their cacophonous, jarring blend of noise and Johnston’s lyrical quirks, voice like an ‘exposed nerve’ and catalogue of shoddily recorded home tapes have something in common. Outsider music represents a pure, distilled strive for originality; to make a sound so new to the ear, it can unsettle. It is the reason Kurt Cobain cited both artists as great inspirations.
Some critics laud Johnston as a genius on par with Lou Reed and Nick Drake. Others claim this is patronising. Johnston first appeared as a feverish young man full of unfiltered and childlike enthusiasm, glancing skittishly at the camera on his first-ever MTV performance. He would be slowly worn down by mental illness in the years to come. He lived with schizophrenia and manic depression, leading to years of involuntary hospitalisation that caused trauma but never curtailed his creativity.
Johnston began recording songs in his parents’ basement as a teenager and self-released his first record in 1981, Songs of Pain. It was equally lewd and delicate, blithely idealistic and often self-aware. He later moved to Austin and became a staple of its indie music scene.
1990, released in the same year, was the first and only of Johnston’s solo record to show him on the cover; a solemn image where he points to a painting, one of his own, of a new leaf growing under a dead tree in a barren landscape. It’s this Chinese box duality; hope and destitution side by side, that shapes the record.
It surely was not the intention; but ballad-led 1990 is an excellent candidate for asserting Johnston’s technical proficiency as a musician amidst his quirky ways of bringing songs to life. On religiously allegorical ‘Don’t play cards with Satan’, the accompanying piano isn’t Hendrix but elegant and fitting. In a 1988 home video, Johnston performs the song at a dinner with a group of radio executives. By the third chorus, he begins sobbing his way through the lyrics. It is rare to see an artist this un self-consciously emotional performing their own music. The disarming rawness of such sincerity is why imitations of his style are like crying on demand. The mechanics of reproduction may seem simple, but the same cadence that sparked its inception will never be there.
As in every Johnston record pre and post, a track is dedicated to a woman named Laurie Allen, his high school crush and object of lifelong unrequited love. ‘Some Things Last a Long Time’ pines for her; he stares at this woman’s picture above his bed, fixating on its colours and nursing his grief. Today, it is less acceptable to publicise a lifelong fixation on a married woman he didn’t know well. But according to those who knew him, she was the first person who both accepted and took him seriously. If you dislike his dedication, you are not someone Daniel Johnston would have written songs about.
The album’s iconic stand-out ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’, is innocently offered to the listener. “Don’t be sad, I know you will / but don’t give up until true love will find you in the end” It’s a line steeped in the assurance of a naive child and an almost motherly intimacy.
Johnson knew that he was perceived as odd. ‘Portrait of an Artist’ speaks in the second person; “Why’d you only do that only / why are you so odd” asks a speaker hinted to be his mother. The third party is himself as a child, the object of his religious mother’s embarrassment. ‘The sun doesn’t shine on your TV’ is his breathtaking refutation to scorns of his art by people who don’t understand what it means.
On his final tour in 2017, Johnston couldn’t stay on beat, barely acknowledged the audience and shook violently because of his medication. He couldn’t harmonise or stay on time. But his presence proved something. That the delivery of a song can be more important than its production- and that anyone can and should make the art they are inspired by, no matter what tools are at hand to produce it or how it may be received. The things that made Daniel Johnston’s music iconic had nothing to do with playing the right note.
Image Credit: “daniel johnston” by evilcabeza is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.