Daniel Johnston

Tried to remember

but my feelings can’t know for sure

try to reach out

but it’s gone

Californian outsider Daniel Johnston, who passed away in 2019 and was nicknamed “the Van Gogh of rock” (partly for his painting), was undoubtedly one of the brightest minds of his generation. Deeply bound to religious dogma from a young age, the Sacramento musician quickly reveals a certain love for pop-rock, particularly for the Beach Boys and the Beatles: a true all-round artist, Johnston writes, records, performs and self-produces all his work in the early Eighties, before moving to Stress Records with the album “Retired Boxer”, released in 1984. Three main factors bind these projects together on a visceral level: home recording on cassette tape, the quintessential portrait of the independent artist; a recurring fondness for deeply grotesque drawings; and a constant, almost too-genuine refinement of style, halfway between raw blues and the most inspired avant-folk.

After completing an initial trilogy made up of “Song Of Pain”, “Don’t Be Scared” and “The What Of Whom” – studio works that reveal a complex analysis of Johnston’s alienating life experience – in 1983 one of the most iconic albums of his entire discography was released, “Hi, How Are You”. A simple greeting and the usual perfunctory question; such banality, such indifference. The artist needs no further words to briefly describe such a repugnant, anxiety-inducing feeling. And from here begins his anguished song. After a brief a cappella introductory piece of total self-pity, “Poor You”, the record opens with the abstract “Big Business Monkey”, on which Johnston violently pounds the chord organ. Dedicated to his older brother Dick, the musician’s future manager, the track’s ending anticipates the main melody of the following song, the Holy Grail of the Sacramento outsider. Remembered as one of his greatest pieces, “Walking The Cow” has a charge that is as neurotic as it is minimal in its harmonic structure: the creativity of the lyrics, with their strong social impact, ties back to Johnston’s autobiographical side, here emerging from an inner war in which he “walks the cow”, a figure representing the weight of his existential sacrifices.

“I Picture Myself With A Guitar” seems to recall the sketches fully in the style of Syd Barrett's “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn”, though rendered in a coarsely lo-fi key. Next comes the melancholy psychedelic folk of “Despair Came Knocking”, a harrowing anecdote about the artist’s close bond with loneliness. Equally striking are the deranged spoken interludes “Nervous Love” and “I’ll Never Marry”, in which the illusion of eternal love suddenly shatters.

The nuclear bomb that is “Desperate Man Blues” teleports us into a post-apocalyptic setting. Johnston deconstructs the original piece, a rip-off of “Desperate Dan” by British big-band saxophonist Johnny Dankworth, and reinterprets it in a delta-blues key: the lyrics speak bluntly about depression – “There ain’t no fun in living/ anymore/ and I don’t feel much like living/ can’t see what for” – and about how it cannot do without the individual it afflicts, punishing them throughout their time on earth. The cabaret-blues “Keep Punching Joe” stands apart formally for its unusual liveliness. The closing “No More Pushing Joe Around”, which narratively ties back to the previous track, highlights Johnston’s improvisational skills, poured here into an a cappella-blues-spoken piece with a hallucinatory, unpredictable ending.

How much Johnston’s music influenced lo-fi songwriting from the second half of the Eighties onward is hard to put into words. But the respect that counterculture and alternative rock have shown him over time is plain to see. We miss you dearly, dear Dan.

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26/04/2026