On Nothing For Me, Please, Dean Johnson Makes His Awaited Debut and Steals the Show
The Seattle folk singer’s first album shines through lush instrumentation, love songs and wondrous cowboy fantasies
Photo by Jason Neuerburg
I owe an endless amount of gratitude to the YouTube channel Western AF for all it has given me since the pandemic began three years ago. From Sierra Ferrell to Nick Shoulders to Charley Crockett, the online series has showcased some of the greatest singer/songwriters in the world, many of whom you’ve probably never heard of. I know I hadn’t known of them, nor had I any inkling that such an ecosystem existed. My own naivety be damned, Ferrell has found infinite fame on TikTok with her viral tune “In Dreams” and Shoulders’ yodeling prowess has opened the eyes of countless folks to the musical beauty of the Ozarks. In turn, there are countless more gems that similarly etch themselves in the hearts of whoever discovers them. At millions of views and counting, the underground world of raw, vulnerable and authentic country and folk music isn’t so underground anymore.
Likewise, Seattle-based balladeer Dean Johnson came into my orbit in 2022, when his Western AF performance of “True Love” tumbled into my feed. To see it nestled into the tracklist of his debut LP Nothing For Me, Please a year later conjured up something special within me. Unlike some of his younger Western AF peers, Johnson hails from a different generation. A staple in the local singer/songwriter scene, he parades around the alleyways of the Emerald City and the legendary Al’s Tavern singing his own tunes, though he is much better known as a member of a band called the Sons of Rainier. It’s taken nearly two decades for Johnson’s first solo album to reach the rest of us, and its release couldn’t be more bittersweet.
With a gritty guise like Sam Elliott and a heavenly voice like Vince Gill, Johnson’s approach to performance is singular. On Nothing For Me, Please, his storytelling is front-and-center, splayed atop troubadour instrumentals that wouldn’t be too out-of-place in Greenwich Village, the Midwestern prairies or a coming-of-age film set in 1974. Across its 29-minute runtime, Nothing For Me, Please is alive and beautiful in its back-to-basics approach to the singer/songwriter genre that so often gets lost in contemporary spaces. It’s a record about the shifting phases of love, whether it be for a person, a place or the unknown, and was recorded in 2018 at the legendary Mashed Potato Records in New Orleans under the tutelage of Duff Thompson, Sam Gelband, Charlie Meyer and Sam Doores.
Each song tells a complete tale, and Nothing For Me, Please is without filler. At a concise nine tracks, the album rings in like a portrait of Johnson’s life thus far, which makes sense, given that the oldest entry in the tracklist was written as long ago as 2004. Lead single “True Love” is a timeless ode to joyous love now lost. “If true love has no possessions / It has an open hand / I tried to hold you in my fist / Ever since the first time that we kissed,” Johnson sings in the sweetest tenor vocal imaginable atop a busking guitar arpeggio. “Acting School” is a humorous turn that finds him plotting a facade to convince his peers that he’s in a good headspace after a breakup. “Ya hardly ever cross my mind / ‘Cross my mind I’m doin’ fine / Or let the tears fall down like rain / My heart out on my sleeve / Go around sayin’ your name / Let everybody see / It’s killin’ me, can’t you see?” Johnson proclaims.
Standout track “Shouldn’t Say Mine” is a pure acoustic bliss with soft rock percussion that perfectly compliments Johnson’s voice. The song could be in communion with anything from Sweet Baby James-era James Taylor or anything Jim Croce put out in the Nixon years. As a high-pitched piano rings out, Johnson laments: “I held you too tight, my weakness it showed / I was in your way trying to get close / You’re after my world, a rolling stone / Alright, alright, I’ll leave you alone.” As the melody of “Possession” suggests, he has forged a world draped in sunshine and careening “oos”; the album-equivalent of a good night spent in the company of endless beloveds. It’s here that the thesis of Nothing For Me, Please arises: “I am bound, wrapped up in my past / And back here it’s certain no love will ever last,” Johnson sings.