Dean Johnson, 'I Hope We Can Still Be Friends' Album Review

I Hope We Can Still Be Friends Reiterates Dean Johnson’s Stellar Songwriting

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Like many great songwriters, Dean Johnson’s voice is universal, even if he’s only writing about what he knows. His music, rooted in country and Americana, sounds uncoupled from any one time or place, even if he’s a Seattleite through and through. On I Hope We Can Still Be Friends, Johnson’s second LP and first for storied indie label Saddle Creek, he’s drawing from the same well as writers like John Prine or Tom Waits, filtering the light of daily life through the grimy windows of a barroom. (In Johnson’s case, it’s the Wallingford tavern he tended for over a decade, absorbing the plights of boozers drowning their sorrows.) Everything is framed through the wreckage of unrequited love: depression (“Painted Smile”), rampant consumption habits (“Carol”), the sinister bliss of electro-convulsion therapy (“So Much Better”), the callouses we collect each passing day (“Shake Me”). Sometimes he writes metaphors about heartache, as on the shuffling “Long Winter”; other times, his heartache is itself a metaphor, like his words of wariness about the shallow, titular “Carol.” But Johnson never ceases singing the truth. It hangs onto every soft-spoken word that tumbles from his mustachioed mouth and falls, gracefully, onto his supporting chords.

The main change between his first two albums is fidelity. Nothing For Me, Please was recorded at New Orleans’ famed Mashed Potato Records, where engineers Duff Thompson and Sam Doores imbued the album with a resonant vintage vibe tailor-made for this era’s aesthetic priorities. For I Hope We Can Still Be Friends, Johnson decamped to the Unknown in Anacortes—a similarly-regaled studio in his home state—and worked entirely with established PNW-based musicians, including bassist Abbey Blackwell (La Luz, Alvvays) and folk stalwart Sera Cahoone (Carissa’s Wierd, Band of Horses), who spearheaded the album’s production. Their product bears an altogether cleaner, crisper sound, which is a boon for a group of songs anchored by Johnson’s crystal-clear sentiments. Without the classic dustiness of its predecessor, his songs are forced to shine on their own.

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And shine they do. Take the album’s opener and lead single, the comfortingly mellow “Before You Hit The Ground,” which is equal parts manifesto and memory. Within its first few seconds, amid sharp strums and near-imperceptible pedal steel, Johnson lays out his signature stubborn melancholy. “How do you put the sun in a song? / I still can’t find a way,” he sings. He ultimately links that melancholy’s source to love’s potent poison; that “you” in his lyrics comes into focus the moment he subtly inserts an extra minor chord into his verse. As slight as that chord may be, it exemplifies Johnson’s mastery over his craft, and those kinds of touches are all the more noticeable thanks to Cahoone’s production work.

There’s a wry joke embedded in the album’s title, given how, despite the tender sonics, Johnson’s candor makes him quite a prickly figure. Following “Hang Youie”’s pining is “Death of the Party’s” opining, where Johnson cuts relentlessly into the kind of chatterbox he’d serve on the regular. You find yourself laughing at the jabs (“Words don’t come easily to me / I notice you don’t have that problem / It seems to me you cannot stop them”) even as you begin to worry that the joke could be on you.

That frankness also makes his characters targets for the listener’s judgment. There’s a faint noxiousness in the way he writes his women—from the manipulative vixen at the center of “Pretty Stranger” to the way he only identifies a self-gratifying hunger in the titular “Carol” and not in the men that pursue her—that undercuts what would otherwise be a kindly, empathetic self-portrayal. As Johnson told Paste earlier this summer, his songs spend “a lot of time exaggerating stories of possessiveness, jealousy, and his antipathy for surrendering to those feelings.” I Hope We Can Still Be Friends sometimes blurs the line between fact and fiction, most clearly on “A Long Goodbye,” the LP’s conclusion, when Johnson is almost comically dour, pointing his scorn at both a self-absorbed ex-lover (“I took down all the mirrors, babe / There’s nothing here for you to see”) and his narrator’s own flaws (“You don’t have the power / To pull me out of my childhood / And all my precious doubt”).

Being a relentless downer is not a flattering look, but is the ultimate goal of life to be flattering? Someone as wise as Johnson understands that making real connections requires sticking to your truest self, warts and all. Given that “A Long Goodbye” is one of Johnson’s earliest compositions, its gruffness comes across as one of his immutable characteristics, as fundamental as the eagle-like swoop of his tenor or the faint lisp that blunts his fricatives. The kind of lover he was 20 years ago is not the lover he remains, yet it’s within him and his characters. The title of I Hope We Can Still Be Friends may be a jest, but it is also a reminder that Dean Johnson is unwilling to sacrifice himself for anybody—and we’re all the better for it.

Rob Moura is a Seattle-based writer and musician. He’s also a barista, in case you need to know what the restroom code is.

I Hope We Can Still Be Friends Reiterates Dean Johnson’s Stellar Songwriting

On his sophomore album, Johnson draws from the same well as John Prine or Tom Waits, filtering the light of daily life through the grimy windows of a barroom.