Still perfect

Freedy Johnston knows what lurks in the hearts of men

by Richard C. Walls

Freedy Johnston's new Never Home (Elektra, in stores this Tuesday) has a lot to live up to. After two well-received but poorly distributed indie efforts, his major-label debut, 1994's This Perfect World (Elektra), was a modest commercial success but a critical smash. The songs were folkish, slightly dour and slightly droll, carefully allusive and with a patina of pathology running along the edge of their narrative. It was just the sort of thing that hits the spot for people who are paid to wade through a lot of dreck. Raves ensued.

Now we're all lying in wait. Fortunately, Home is both a continuation of and a subtle advance on World. It rocks a little more, which may be a bid for a wider audience. But it still maintains that basic man-with-guitar singer/songwriter integrity. The lyrics, which were never verbose, are now pared down even further. Fiercely sparse, Johnston manages to do 11 songs in 40 minutes and still have repetitious out-choruses.

"I wanted to make it 10 songs in 39 minutes, but they wouldn't let me," he explains over the phone. "I tried very hard to keep the songs simple, and you can't have too many threads going when you only have three minutes to do it in. Saying more with fewer words was a big goal on this record. The challenge was to make the songs clear without showing my hand too much, keeping the images from being too obvious and yet allowing people to get the song."

Many of these very simple songs give off a complex emotional vibe. "Western Sky" tells of a man who's afraid to fly because his father, a pilot, died in a plane crash. As the song begins, he's driving to a rendezvous with his wife, who's flying in the same direction. At the end, knowing she's arrived at their destination first, he stops to call her and make sure she's safe. The mood of tender anxiety sustains the track at first, but then you start to wonder why she doesn't just drive out with the husband, since they're starting from the same place. The answer is in the song: he needs to put her at risk (as he sees it) in order to get something he didn't from his father: "I need that look you get/Before you say goodbye . . . I need those words you say/Before you say goodbye."

The men on Johnston's disc are a needy bunch. Sometimes they're actually weird, like the arsonist who feels compelled to take his unsuspecting girlfriend to witness his latest creation ("Gone To See the Fire"). More often they're just everyday neurotic, like the guy who walks out on his wife (or girlfriend) and makes it only to the nearest phone ("He Wasn't Murdered"). Or the poor bastard who becomes distressed at how his new girlfriend reminds him of one he had many years ago, especially when she starts wearing the old girlfriend's clothes -- which, of course, he's kept in his house.

"Yeah, there are definitely some sad, creepy guys on this record," says Johnston. "Maybe it's my Midwestern roots. I dunno . . . a lot of my lyrics are melancholy, but I have fun in life. I do relate to a lot of the sadness my characters have. I know what it's like to lose things in life -- not that I've gone through more than anyone else has, but I really understand it."

There's also a recognizably minimalist post-Raymond Carver style to Johnston's lyrics. "I'm a writer," he says, "in the sense that I write lyrics and e-mail. But if I were to try to turn `Western Sky' into a short story, to paint in the details, it'd probably be boring. Besides, although I like Carver, the writers I like the most are those doing something very different from what I might attempt -- writers like Nabokov and Martin Amis. Similarly, I don't buy records by people like me, I buy records that rock: Urge Overkill, Pixies, Beck. And I like lyric writers who riff on the language and yet make a profound kind of sense -- like Tom Waits or Mark E. Smith of the Fall. I love that style but I could never do it -- I'm too anal about my writing."

A perfectionist?

"No, I just work on a song until it becomes what I had in mind." There's a pause, as though he might be pondering the contradiction of being a perfecting non-perfectionist. Or maybe there's a more succinct way of putting it. "I just work on a song until the budget runs out," he finally says, laughing.

Freedy Johnston plays with Shawn Colvin and Patty Griffin at the Orpheum Theatre next Friday, February 28.