How Far Caspian Found His Confident New World

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Joel Johnston, the man behind Far Caspian, has been fiddling with a tape recorder for eight hours now. This interview, he says, is a welcome distraction. Calling from his studio in Leeds, Johnston’s recent purchase is an extension of a newfound desire to try new things. It’s a calling he couldn’t have seen himself heeding a few years ago, at least not gracefully, but lately he’s been riding on a high. It’s a throughline that has permeated his life in recent months and come to shape his new record Autofiction.

The album is made up of stories of shifting perspectives, deepening relationships, and a lifelong navigation of Crohn’s disease. Framed by melancholy guitars and clean production, Johnston says the way he felt while making Autofiction was much different from the projects of his past. While previous works Ways to Get Out and The Last Remaining Light were acclaimed, Johnston felt a discontent between the substance of the songs and the thoughts he had while making them. “Pretty much everything up to this point has been me being completely self-conscious and worried about what other people would think,” he says. “A lot of my previous music has been rooted in that struggle, and the negative things that are going on in my life.”

When it came time to make Autofiction, Johnston found his motivations had changed. After years of emotional work, he had finally found a light at the end of a long tunnel. “For the first time in a long time, I’ve been feeling really good with my Crohn’s and my mental health,” he elaborates. “With all those things coming together at the right time, I’ve been able to let go of that inner critic and finally just express myself. I really wanted to celebrate that.”

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Stepping into this new mindset was not an overnight process. For Johnston, it’s been a gradual shift across a wobbly 10-year period. “A lot of my issues have started to calm as I get older. It’s really about having more time on earth and more experiences. I feel a bit more saddled within myself. This is also my third album, so I think it’s also about absorbing the lessons that I’ve learned from doing the other ones. I just feel like I can trust myself more and believe in myself.” While past Far Caspian albums were driven by anxious internal voices, Johnston is letting his internal compass guide him this time around. “I’m enjoying this right now, and therefore it’s good,” he says plainly. It’s a simple phrase, but perhaps the best one to live by.

Many experiences helped Johnston get to this new place of serenity, but the most influential were the days he spent working in his studio alongside other artists. “When I started producing for other people, that was a big turning point for how I viewed my own stuff,” he remembers. “I used to focus solely on getting it done so that I could release the music before I hated it. Now I’m able to take a step back and produce myself in a way that is more intentional.” He saw how other musicians approached their own songs, and the process helped him revitalize his routine.

“When people come in here to work with me, they’ll have demos, or at least a really rough idea of a song, and they present it,” he continues. “As I’m listening to it, my brain will start thinking about what I hear and how I can improve it. I realized I could treat my own stuff like that.” Songwriting is personal, but the refining process doesn’t have to be. The practicality of that realization stuck, and the perseverance of the studio musicians Johnston worked with inspired him just the same. “When people come in to work on their stuff, it won’t work for a while, but we will push through that together and figure it out. It’s such a great feeling when you get out the other end.”

Unfortunately, we’re our own worst critics, and Johnston wasn’t used to giving this same grace to himself. “When it’s just me in here by myself working on my own stuff, I haven’t really pushed myself to get past those things,” he says, admitting to his own habits of procrastinating, with YouTube being his trap of choice. I ask about his watch history, and he pulls out his laptop with a childlike grin. “My YouTube algorithm is just loaded with procrastination material. Surprisingly, I love watching golf. I play once a week and now just watch golf when I’m procrastinating,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of stuff on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and 4 release, the new Geese song. I also love those 40-minute short docs about the big barbecue restaurants in Texas. It all starts at like four in the morning, because they have to cook the briskets for so many hours.”

While diving into this endless spiral of videos is fun in moderation, Johnston eventually reached a point where he’d dug himself into a hole. Now, he was determined to crawl out of it. “There’s a lot of wasted potential with that sort of approach, and it’s completely my fault,” he acknowledges. “Eventually I thought, ‘I’m gonna give these songs at least the same effort I would give other people.’”

With this renewed energy, Johnston first worked to change the way he made his lyrics. “In the past, I’d kind of broadly written a song and dressed it up with imagery and metaphors. With this one, I wanted to be much more diaristic and as literal as possible,” Johnston explains. For him, this meant taking a long look at the reality of his life. While his days aren’t as exciting as they used to be, he’s grateful to swap temporary joys for comfortable routines. “I had a good mindset when I was writing the lyrics because I wrote a lot of them right at the end of a new treatment for my Crohn’s. I had just started feeling really good for the first time in about two or three years. I wanted to revel in that and tried to create some arc of positivity.” Johnston reflects on the simple joy of spending days with his partner (they’re currently playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom), long walks around his English neighborhood, and the now refreshing experience of being in the studio. In turn, Autofiction relishes the beauty of humble moments, transitional phases, and perseverance.

Take, for example, “Whim,” a surprisingly sunny track about a trip gone wrong. With grand plans to camp on the tallest mountain in Ireland, Carrauntoohil, a bad storm forced Johnston and his friends to make the 8-hour trip home. It was the middle of the night in the pouring rain, but rather than drown in a miserable experience, Johnston learned a valuable lesson. “I wanted to have a sense of contentment in the song, as opposed to like, ‘I hate it,’ because obviously, that is literally life. It’s trying to make good out of whatever comes at you.” With songs like this, Autofiction is the most optimistic album that Johnston has ever made.

Still, the album tells the stories of how Johnston arrived here. “A Drawing of the Sun,” for example, is about the jealous feelings he had toward other people, while “First Day” shows the wary sides of his optimism in the face of this unpredictable life. That gradual progression away from a negative mindset, Johnston says, is an important part of the journey. He wanted to acknowledge these moments, too, but this time, rise above them. “There were so many things about the album where I was like, I need to break out of whatever I have been doing. I even looked at my Spotify and realized that all of my album covers are 90-percent white and all imagery, so I was like, ‘I’m gonna do the brightest blue and call it a one-word album.’ I was just trying to break out of these cycles I didn’t even realize I was in.”

Johnston’s time in the studio was the catalyst that allowed him to break those old patterns. In turn, he approached this album with more confidence. “I remember when I was first starting to produce my own stuff, I would hear something and be like, ‘I wish I could get my snare to sound like that, but I just can’t,’” he recalls. “I really struggled with that for years. I’m finally at a point where if I hear something, I’ll be able to make it. Or, if I think of something, I can do it. That is such a freeing thing.” Inspired by artists like Clue to Kalo, Cate Le Bon, and quickly, quickly, the guitar-driven record sounds clean, self-assured, and directed.

Today, Johnston is not only more confident in himself, but he is also reviving his relationship with music overall. “There’s a really good Singaporean band called Vegetabl. They just put out an album, which is really good. I also really like the new Horsegirl album Phonetics On and On. I’ve just been trying to listen to more new stuff now. Not for inspiration or anything, just to enjoy. I kind of forgot to do that for a long time.” An independent musician himself (he puts music out on his label Tiny Library Records,) Johnston expresses the same gratitude for these musical peers as he does for his new approach to Far Caspian’s music. “I feel like we’re in a really good time for independent music, especially, and that just feels really great.”

How Far Caspian Found His Confident New World

The Irish musician sat down with Paste to talk about his freeing approach to music, an unironic love for golf and Texas barbecue, and his new album, Autofiction.