The prolific singer-songwriter and 400 Unit multi-instrumentalist spoke with Paste about demoing on his Tascam 424, influence woven into migration, Southern literature, working with Jason Molina, and his new album, Diamond City.
Will Johnson is prolific. Over the last 30 years, the Texas-based singer-songwriter has been frontman for bands like Centro-Matic and South San Gabriel, has collaborated with contemporaries like Jason Molina, Jay Farrar, and Conor Oberst, and has released even more albums and EPs as a solo artist. The prospect of making a dent in his discography would be intimidating, frankly, if it weren’t for his catalog’s thrilling diversity and the sheer greatness of each entry. As the proverbial saying goes, Johnson has “done it all,” and he’s done more than well enough to sustain a fruitful career. Craving a hearty folk-rock anthem? Coming right up. Yearning for a weeping, heavy-hearted alt-country ballad? He has those in spades, too. Oh, and did you know you needed a concept album about an ailing feline named Carlton? Well, you do now—it’s called The Carlton Chronicles: Not Until the Operation’s Through, and Johnson is the man behind it.
While a thorough dissection of Johnson’s music career would call for numerous pages of annotations, they’d still capture merely a fraction of his CV—he’s also a published novelist and painter, as well as a husband and father. Frankly, it’s difficult to fathom how he finds time to even take a breath, so I feel privileged he can spare an hour of his time to discuss his 10th solo album, Diamond City (released last Friday, via the Austin-based label Keeled Scales) in early March, just days before he embarked on a months-long tour with Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. (Yet another notch on his belt: He’s been a full-time 400 Unit member since 2023). I’m also thankful our video call goes off without any hitches, as Johnson reports from his farmhouse in rural Hays County—where his wi-fi has been spotty at best, he’d warned me beforehand via email. He’s relieved too, as I assure him that the sound and video quality are okay on my end: “It’s a miracle!”
Since his most recent tour with the 400 Unit wrapped up last November, Johnson has spent much of his time at home, keeping himself occupied with fixing up the place, painting, parenting, and tending to his chickens. And, of course, he’s written some new tunes—enough, in fact, “to put toward at least the next record, if not two records,” he reveals. Considering his productivity, I wouldn’t have been too surprised if he’d gotten up mid-conversation to play the drum kit situated directly behind him, seemingly in case a creative whim just so happened to strike. Maybe one did, but I wouldn’t have known, as Johnson is a gentleman—engaging, thoughtful, and humble, genuinely moved by my every compliment (he’s especially delighted—and equally surprised—by how much I love The Carlton Chronicles) and repeatedly expressing his gratitude to be able to continue doing what he loves for a living. “Oh my goodness, every bit of it is a blessing,” he gushes. “I guess I just feel lucky that anyone’s listening at all anymore.”
Since the inception of Centro-Matic 30 years ago, the first step of Johnson’s recording process has been as enduring and endearing as his humility: He’s recorded nearly all of his demos on his old Tascam 424, an analog cassette recorder you could hold in your hands. He used the trusty four-track to record the songs that would compose Diamond City, completing the demoing phase in two weeks in February 2023, soon before he’d sign onto the 400 Unit. Initially, he intended for the recordings to serve as blueprints for a new studio album, so he sent them to his longtime friend and collaborator Britton Beisenherz to mix.
By that summer, when he was out on the road with Isbell and the guys, those recordings more or less slipped from his mind—until Beisenherz started sending back a new mix every few days. His updates were minimal; rather than buffing out the songs’ rough edges, he’d simply dressed up their skeletal forms with minimal instrumental flourishes, fleshing them out with extra color and texture. “For the first three or four, I remember thinking, ‘Well, this sounds really cool. Maybe we’ll make an EP, or something like that,’” Johnson recalls. “And then, over the course of the next few weeks, he just kept sending more and more songs, fully developed with his contributions. By the end of the summer, I kept thinking, ‘Well, there’s a cohesiveness to this collection of songs that makes sense to me as a record, so why not just let this be a record?’”
In the vein of Sparklehorse and lo-fi pioneer Daniel Johnston—the latter of whom, specifically, Johnson cites as having written “some of the most compelling and interesting recordings that have come out in the last 50 years”—the songs strike a charming balance between raw intimacy and a childlike air of whimsy. Take, for example, “All Dragged Out”: The synthy burbles that float above the shuffling melody, like blue-green drifting in the breeze, lend a playful touch; while Johnson’s brittle acoustic strumming and the drum machine’s soft scratch evoke the feeling of being the room with him as he works out the arrangement. “There’s an immediacy to making recordings on a four-track,” as Johnson observes. “It takes me back to listening to vinyl, as opposed to just streaming music, and it makes me realize that not every record needs to be made in a studio.”
With Diamond City, has Johnson finally made the definitive Will Johnson record? That remains a matter of subjective taste; there are far too many strong contenders—and, knowing Johnson’s consistency, there are likely more on the way, arriving sooner than later. However, it seems fair to deem the album a testament to the strength and singularity of his ongoing musicianship: Its nine tracks are pure encapsulations of his inimitable artistry, and as inexplicably and inexhaustibly beautiful as anything he’s shared over the past three decades. They are, to use the obvious pun, diamonds in the rough—but see how they sparkle.
Considering how many projects he juggles, Johnson has found that intentionally carving out a number of days to treat writing “like a full-time job” is occasionally necessary to limit distractions and see compositions through to completion. “[The results] may not all be good,” he acknowledges, “but just the simple exercise of keeping at it and staying with it will inevitably produce at least a few songs that are worth it. Sometimes it is just a matter of taking time and writing as life gets busier.”
Johnson’s working ethos on Diamond City is something he largely attributes to his late friend, Jason Molina, who was also well-known for being a startlingly prolific and fertile songwriter. While they’d been fans of each other’s work and briefly met before, Johnson says he and Molina didn’t truly hit it off until he saw Molina play with his band du jour, Magnolia Electric Company, at the Austin venue Emo’s in September 2007. After the concert ended, Johnson approached Molina at the merch booth, and their chemistry was immediate—once they got to talking, they could hardly stop. “All the house lights are going on, and they’re trying to clear everybody out, and we just keep talking, and talking, and talking,” Johnson fondly recalls.
The interaction would ultimately catalyze the duo’s hauntingly gorgeous collaborative album, Molina and Johnson, in 2009. Johnson couldn’t quite have predicted that, though, when he left Emo’s with Molina’s email address—and a proposition to make an album together ringing in his head. “A lot of musicians say that, but it rarely comes to fruition, because people get busy, and bands go on tour and musicians have to go in the direction that pays the rent—and those projects don’t always pay the rent,” Johnson explains. “I definitely drove home inspired, but I wondered if it would actually come to be.”
His doubts dissipated when, about three days later, an email from Molina arrived in his inbox, affirming his desire to turn the record they’d conceptualized into a reality. He even had a time in mind to do it: the night of the first new moon of 2008 (echoing my thoughts exactly, Johnson laughs, “There’s nothing more Molina than that!”). While they missed the new moon, it didn’t take long for them to book studio time and get to work. “The way that we treated each day is that we would wake up and have coffee, talk, and then we would go off in our own directions for two hours or so and then reconvene around noon,” Johnson remembers. “And then, it was kind of like, ‘Well, show me your cards, what have you got?’ And I’d play what I got for him. And then I’d be like, ‘Show me your cards, what do you have?’ And he played what he had written. And whoever’s song it wasn’t [that we decided to record] would try to be the best backing person that they could be for the other.” Within 10 days, the duo recorded 20 songs, 14 of which ended up on the album’s final cut. “Really, it was like a workshop,” Johnson says of the session. “We went to camp, and we lived in the moment. I mean, we wrote the record right there on the premises for the greater part.”
Beyond the music they made together, Johnson cherishes his time with Molina for the friendship they shared, especially at a time when they both needed a pal. “We were each going through kind of tough times; like, I remember distinctly, we were both in kind of rough spots personally,” Johnson reflects. “But I feel like maybe that kind of helped the record along, and it probably allowed us to lean on each other a little bit more.”
16 years after recording with Molina, Johnson kept the spirit of their camaraderie alive as he set out to write the songs that would eventually constitute Diamond City. “The way that I carry out some of my writing sessions on is almost out of respect for our time and our friendship together,” he shares. “I was like, ‘Well, how would J-Mo have gone about today?’ Well, he would’ve gone into that room and not come out until he had at least two songs. And I think that’s fair. It’s an exercise, and he was really dedicated to it. It’s like, if you’re a writer, and you will yourself to write 10 pages a day, it may not be 10 good pages, there may be nothing every once in a while. But most of the time, you’re probably going to get at least two or three really good pages-worth of stuff, out of really just dedicating yourself to it. So, I try to focus on the writing sessions like that.”
Despite the vision its title might conjure, Diamond City is not a polished and pristine concept album centered around a metropolis of Oz-like glitz and grandeur. Not in the least. “‘Diamond City’—you find that it’s mythical,” Johnson says. “There’s no diamonds. There’s not even a city!”
Instead, much of the album sets pastoral imagery—like a small black rabbit, a red-tailed hawk, stumbling horses and a Wallace Stevens-reminiscent observation of “16 blackbirds in the lawn”—to ticking drum loops, fuzz-muffed riffs, and a fritz of static. If it sounds like Johnson was writing about what was right outside his window, that’s because he was (to an extent, one should note—his lyrics are so densely layered that it would be foolish to imply that he’s just singing about wildlife). “We do get a lot of critters here and there, and a lot of interesting bird life. Over time, I did start picking up on some things that I wasn’t always noticing as much up in the city,” he says, reflecting on the influence his departure from Austin has left on him. Without taking a beat, he continues our discussion of his small-town way of life with the sort of statement that could lend itself to a song or poem, in its own right: “The storms out here speak a little differently.” Obviously, Johnson is a keenly perceptive individual, so it seems almost inevitable that a change of scenery would reflect in his lyrics. “The more sparse landscape and the more rural living that we’ve chosen, it’s definitely gotten into the songs,” he affirms. “There’s no question about it.”
The album’s map extends beyond his current home base in Hays County, though: “Floodway Fall” contains several nods to his home state, Missouri, and the neighboring Blytheville, Arkansas; the namesake of “Sylvarena” is a tiny Mississippian village he drove through on tour decades ago; that of “Cairo” isn’t that Cairo, but a near-deserted town in Southern Illinois. These ghost towns and hinterlands are the sort of locales most folks would merely pass through, whizzing straight past the “Welcome To” signs on their way from Point A to Point B—but they’re what Johnson knows best, so why wouldn’t he spin them into song? “I’ve always been influenced by my surroundings, and I’ve always been drawn to writers that clearly draw from their surroundings,” he explains. “It helps me understand more about them as writers, and as people, I think. And I’m not talking just about songwriters—I’m talking about authors, painters, anyone creating. My first question is always, ‘Well, where are they from?’ I do associate geography with the work.”
Before Johnson’s music career took off, he was a student at the University of North Texas, double-majoring in English and elementary education. While he didn’t end up in any scholar or teacher gigs, he puts his literary background to very good use. “Going back many years, into Centro-Matic world and South San Gabriel, I’ve always kind of held that I was as influenced by literature, and by my studies, and by writers as I was [by] bands or songwriters,” he says. “Over all the years that I’ve been writing songs, I find myself just as influenced by authors as I do [by] songwriters. There’s even a John Updike reference on the record with the song ‘Rabbit Run,’ which is one of the titles of his best-known novels.”
Considering his professed literary leanings and the place-based thread connecting many of his lyrics, it isn’t surprising that the authors Johnson cites among his favorites are Southerners and Appalachians famously bound to their home region in their work: Eudora Welty, Larry Brown, Breece D’J Pancake, and William Faulkner. Like these authors’ classics, Diamond City is unmistakably a product of whence it came: a patch of the oft-forsaken rural South. It also boasts a crucial element to most every modern Southern masterpiece: ghosts of an undead past still lingering within. One of the tracks, in fact, is titled “Unfamiliar Ghost,” a subdued lullaby strung along a narcotically fuzzy guitar melody. “Honey, ain’t it just the most / How I was wasting all my time / On an unfamiliar ghost?” Johnson mutters, chromatic swirls of synthesizer twining around his shadowy self-harmonies.
Johnson’s admiration for these writers doesn’t solely inform his lyrics, though—he also channels their aesthetics on a sonic level, with Faulkner’s writing being particularly inspiring in this regard. “It’s complicated, and I don’t always understand it,” Johnson admits of Faulkner’s work. “But I come back to it. And even when I come back to it, I’m still not sure I understand all of it, but that’s part of the beauty of it. And so that bleeds into the songwriting, and even some of the aesthetic of what I’m going for with the sounds.”
Like Faulkner’s writing, Johnson’s compositions tend to be fragmentary, dreamlike, and visceral. Take, for example, Diamond City’s lead single, “Floodway Fall.” The lyrics are surreal (“I was part snake / Part television”) and nearly inscrutable, melted down into a sonic plane no more or less prominent than each layer of instrumentation; yet, even before it’s lucidly a love song (“Be my little baby,” Johnson drawls sweetly as the music fades out, spectral children’s harmonies echoing his invocation), it feels like one—Johnson’s smokey vocals, the muted strumming, pitter-patter drumbeat, and burbling keys envelop you in warmth, as would a lover’s arms on a lazy, sun-stroked morning. Elsewhere, there are these oblique, gorgeous one-line poems—like “I’m a hot breath seeker on a forgotten mountain” (“Rabbit Run”) and “What you don’t know is that I’m drawing out an old route to new fears” (“Diamond City”)—language that seems designed to meander across and nestle into such textured, collage-like soundscapes.
I tell Johnson I find it fascinating that he’s inspired by the aesthetic form of Faulkner’s writing, because it’s always affected me in a strikingly similar manner as music: Just as one can’t wholly explain why a series of strung-together letters and symbols invokes a quasi-physical response, one can’t entirely articulate how certain combinations of sounds relay, or unravel, pointed emotions. As a writer, I try to translate these apparently ineffable feelings into words—yet, I’ve found that even the most perfect simile or thesaurus-indebted word can’t always crack at them. “Isn’t that part of the fun of it?” Johnson suggests. “I mean, I think part of what keeps you engaged is the not knowing what’s going on, and trying to figure out why you like it, or why you’re drawn back to it.”
“Most of my favorite music gives me something new,” he continues. “I find something new on repeated listens that maybe wasn’t there before. It could be a sound in the background; it could just be a line; it could be reinterpreting a line within a song that I thought that I understood. ‘But wait, maybe it means this instead.’ I feel like, if a song or a record can continually kind of give you those little surprises, or those hidden Easter eggs, so to speak, then you’re looking at a lasting relationship with that piece of art. So, I don’t think we have to know. I think part of the fun is the not knowing.”
I think he’s right. Like so many of his opuses, there’s an ingrained unknowability to Diamond City—every listen casts each layer of sound and mystery-lined musing in a new light. I still can’t tell you exactly what Will Johnson means when he sings of an “azalea dawn,” nor can I offer an explanation as to why the electric guitar freakout capping “Rabbit Run” seems to spread and seep from the speakers, washing over me like an indomitable current—but there is something beautiful to that, indeed.
“Each record, I think, is its own document,” Johnson says. “And its own—” he pauses, reflecting: “—kind of its own little stitch in time, with regard to where the writer is, or where the band is.”
If any song on Diamond City seems like a window into Johnson’s world, it’s the wisping “Cairo”—a song featuring just Johnson’s sandpapery whisper, lacy acoustic melodies, and a buzzy organ against a soft wash of feedback that hisses like ocean waves echoing out of a seashell. The sparse atmosphere crackles with intimacy, heightening the vulnerability of Johnson’s cutting address: “How dare you interrupt this heinous clutter in my mind? All this busted racket I call mine? Or the endless effort that I commit to the high art of wasting time? How dare you be so kind?”
I tell Johnson it seems only natural to me that his mind would feel cluttered, having some awareness of his almost chronically crammed schedule. “It’s just part of trying to be a good parent, and do good work, and the inevitable element of daily interruptions,” he replies, after I ask about the opening lyric’s inspiration. “I say this all out of love—I mean, it’s just part of what you sign up for. But the inevitable element of interruption constantly leads you back to, ‘Alright, where the fuck was I? What the fuck was I doing that meant so much to me nine minutes ago, and what was the line that I was thinking of for that song? Do I still have it, or did I lose it?’ And I think that’s where the ‘clutter’ sometimes comes from.”
The songs on Diamond City can feel similarly chaotic—they’re rough-hewn and unvarnished, occasionally ricocheting off the rhythms established by the miscellaneous plinks and ploinks and careening into fits of sonic and lyrical disarray—but they’re all gems, unmistakably carved from the pleasure and the pandemonium of Johnson’s day-to-day existence. “Some of [my recordings] I do want to make more melodic, and more delicate and, frankly, pretty. And then there are others where I really just want to splatter the paint everywhere, and I don’t give a shit. I want it to be messy and gross, because that’s life. I mean, that’s every day,” Johnson explains. “The thing about Diamond City: The duality is that it is all the beauty and it’s all the ugliness all in one thing.”
As in Diamond City, Will Johnson finds breathtaking beauty amidst the commotion and confusion of life. This might make for a challenging balancing act, but he wouldn’t have things any other way—because, if his cup is overflowing with anything, it’s love. “It’s a bit of a sarcastic line, where I’m saying, ‘How dare you interrupt the clutter in my mind by being so kind to me?’ The line’s almost delivered in jest,” he elaborates, returning to “Cairo.” “Really, at the bottom of it, it’s because someone loves you, and they want your attention. And how lonely, and how much quieter and, in my estimation, empty would it be without all that around you? You just have to embrace the clutter and the chaos, and try to get the best work done that you can, hopefully without abandoning anybody or disappointing anybody. Of course, I would prefer the clutter and the chaos to not having these folks or this activity around to being a lonely, heart-broken soul.”
Anna Pichler is one of Paste’s music interns. When she’s not writing about music, she’s working towards an undergraduate degree in English Literature from The Ohio State University. You can find her on X @_Anna_pichler_ and Bluesky @annapichler.bsky.social, where she mainly shares her work and reposts her favorite Bob Dylan memes.
Watch Will Johnson’s full Paste Ruins concert at Newport Folk Festival in 2012 below.
