Photo by Garrett Cardoso
Elijah Johnston jokes that Stupid Soul is both his fourth album and his seventh album. As a recording artist in the digital music generation, Johnston started releasing music, on his own, to his Bandcamp page in 2014. As Johnston was getting his footing, learning and growing, his lo-fi, indie-rock recording experiments – which sometimes included covering his favorite tracks by artists like Mac Demarco, Panda Bear, Parquet Courts, and Fleet Foxes – wound up online. The evolution of Johnston’s music to what can be heard on his new release started somewhere around the release of 2018’s When You See Me Again, It Won’t Be Me. As skill and confidence grew, Johnston’s music became more personal with shades of Americana and power pop starting to find a place in the songs. Johnston describes his current genre as “record store music” and that makes total sense, it’s the kind you’d hear while flipping albums, wondering who you’re hearing and asking the people at the counter who, in turn, are excited to share something new with everyone in the store. It’s comfortable, it’s catchy, it’s the kind of music you’ll want to experience in your own home, with the vinyl spinning on your turntable.
Stupid Soul, recorded with producer – and bandmate – Tommy Trautwein in Athens, Georgia, is Johnston’s Strolling Bones debut. The label, an offshoot of New West Records, has a simple mission statement – to create an environment for artists to grow, which makes it a perfect fit for Johnston’s music. While the project is named after the singer-songwriter, Johnston will be the first to tell you that this is a band. On Stupid Soul, he’s joined by his brother Gideon on drums, Drew Beskin (also his manager) on guitar, and Trautwein on bass as well as welcoming a few other guests which we discussed on a recent Zoom call.
How did you wind up on Strolling Bones?
ELIJAH: They have two offices. One is in Nashville, and one is in Athens, and Athens is really where Strolling Bones happens. I lived in Athens for a long time. That’s where my music career got started, and they had a guy working with them, a producer named Drew Vandenberg. He produces Faye Webster and a lot of stuff like that, and I think he was helping curate and scout for Strolling Bones, because my understanding is that the label initially was doing a lot of reissue stuff when they started within New West.
I was finishing up a record that I wasn’t really sure what to do with, and my manager and I had thought about trying to find a label. Drew Vandenberg reached out to us and said, “Hey, I think you ought to look into Strolling Bones because they’re trying to build something that I think you guys would be interested in.” So I made a demo CD with all of the rough mixes on it, and I wrote a letter and just dropped it off in the mailbox one day. I had won a songwriting award in Athens a year before that, so I think I was on their radar a little bit.
One night I was working in this white tablecloth steakhouse in Athens, and I looked out and saw that the owner of Strolling Bones and one of the people that owns New West, him and his whole family were at the restaurant. They weren’t my table, but I told their server, “Hey, when their order of appetizers comes out, let me take them.” So I ran the onion rings and all the salads out, and I said, “Hey, George, I’m Elijah, you know I left you a CD. It’s great to meet you.” And he was like, “Oh, man, I really like that thing. Let’s talk, let’s chat soon.” It was off to the races. George is, in only a good way, a very old-fashioned kind of cat, so I think he really appreciated a letter and someone walking up to him in a restaurant and being bold with it.
Is album release day a big day for you?
ELIJAH: It’s definitely a big day. I live in Atlanta, but we’re playing a show in Athens next Friday, the day of the release. We have a big festival in Athens every year, and we’re playing the 40 Watt the night that the album comes out. I just got word that we’re having these big banners being put up in the two local record stores in Athens, which is really cool. They’ll have this 6’ x 6’ foot poster of the album cover in the front window with the QR code so people can listen on their phones.
As far as the actual importance of the release, I’ve been trying to remind myself in this release process that before I was with a label, I was self-releasing everything, and we had this very predictable pattern. We would make a record, pick 2 or 3 singles, put them out, try to get something going, then play a show. We’d play a record release show, might go out of town, play in Nashville, play in Savannah, play in Atlanta, and then that was it. It was sort of like the record was the end point.
Now, I’m in this situation where the label does all this work ahead of time to promote it, get it out there. It’s this interesting thing where for me, the work actually starts when it’s out. The baton gets passed and now it’s up to me to spend months promoting this hard and trying to get people listening and playing shows. It’s a fun challenge to get out there on the field a little more.
Right! I’ve known so many local bands in the past who played a bunch of shows to make money so that they could go record in a studio. They’d make a CD, have a CD release party, and that would be the end of the cycle. None of them were signed to a label. For artists on a label, it’s the reverse. Putting something out is the start of the process with promoting and touring coming after.
ELIJAH: I think the music industry is constantly morphing in real time. What is popular and what does well and what works is always shifting. You’re trying to balance how much of this you’re responding to and letting it shape you versus taking command of it yourself. It’s been nice to remind myself: don’t panic. I was looking at our singles that we put out, and I was like, I don’t listen to singles. I had someone be like, “Hey, man, I’m really sorry I haven’t listened to all the singles.” I’m like, dude, when a record’s coming out that I’m excited about, I don’t really listen to more than the first one, because I don’t want to watch the 3-minute trailer of a movie that gives everything away. Give me the poster, give me the cast, I’m there if I want to be there. I don’t need to know that much more.
Did you go into the recording of this record with everything planned out and finalized or was there any improvisation that was unplanned that took place?
ELIJAH: There’s definitely a lot of that. A lot of on the spot improvising. This time around I tried to allow for a lot more of that. I have a hard way of explaining the way I see songs in my head, but I almost think of them as little shapes or objects, and the record that I made a couple years ago, Hometown Vampire, the songs were a lot more like flat Lego pieces. I came in with a diorama, and I was like, we just need to build this. I’ve built it in my mind, and we just have to build it in the real world.
These songs, I think I just tried in writing them. They were so acoustic driven, and a lot slower and a little bit more room to breathe, and I was like, I just want to get in there and play them. Not totally live all the time, but have a lot more room for live takes.
I’ve been making music with my producer Tommy who has been making music with me since I started making music in public. He pulled me aside at my first show ever in Athens and said, “You need a band, and I’m going to be in it.” I said, “Okay,” because I was playing by myself. The drummer is my brother so I’ve been playing music with him since I knew how to play the guitar. Our guitar player is actually the manager of my band. We’ve got these 4 people that are very invested in this music, and they also are all brilliant songwriters, arrangers, producers in their own right. Obviously, Tommy is a professional producer. My brother Gideon is becoming this great songwriter and has this great arrangement mind. Drew is just this total sounding board – he knows everything about every band ever, he’s read every liner note of all time.
Going in there with those guys where they have sharp opinions that sometimes are at odds with each other, and sometimes at odds with me, this time around it was fun. There were a couple songs, “Ideas” was the one song where I was like, this is how it’s gonna be. “Ideas” and “Oxygen” were the ones where I was the most like, “this is the song.” But there were moments, especially on some of the songs where I wasn’t really sure where to go, where they would start doing something. We would get basic tracks, and they would start doing something, and I would not really love it.
There was one moment where on the song “Instant Replay,” there’s these really billowy electric guitar parts that are kind of emo, sort of Death Cab type guitar, and Tommy was playing them, and I was like, I’m not sure about that. And he was like, “Okay, well, I’m gonna keep doing it.” I was like, okay. So I literally told him, “You know what, I’m gonna go on a walk and I’m just gonna take 30 minutes and take a couple spins around the block and get a cup of coffee. I really can’t think about this right now.” I came back, and they had added so much stuff to the song, and it was awesome, but I knew that if I sat there and watched them do that I would have probably freaked out and been like, this isn’t my song anymore. It’s really helpful to have people that you can trust them to be like, I’m in good hands. I think you know what I really want in the end, and I’ve done my job of writing the song and getting it to the point that it needs to be at. But if it needs some extra elements that I can’t really see, or that I can’t really imagine, I’m willing to just let people take it there.
I had a college roommate who believed that the third song on an album was always the one that should be a single. The law of averages based on all the music he listened to. And many times, especially during the ‘90s, he was right, the third song on a CD was often released as a single. “Keep it to Yourself” is the third song on your album. What can you tell me about the song? Why is it the third song on the album? Do you think if that’s the first song people listen to, it is reflective of the rest of the album?
ELIJAH: I actually think it’s the least indicative of the whole record to be honest, because it’s the acoustic ballad. Sequencing is definitely something I take really seriously. I’m very particular about it, and there’s a certain flow that I really like. I like a first song that draws you in. Usually song 2 is a single for me, but not always. I try to fight my urge to put ballads at the end, because I don’t want the album to get too slow as it goes along. That’s just my natural instinct, front-load it with all the fast ones and the poppy ones, and then put the ballads in the back end.
This time I was like, I think that song is pretty bright and will catch people’s attention putting it right after “Ideas,” which is this very busy-body song, and putting it right before “Baby Bands,” which is probably the strangest song on the album in terms of it’s the most out of left field genre experiment. So putting the straightforward ballad, the acoustic one, the love song that is also the maybe the funniest song—I try to have my songs have some humor—I was like, this is the sweetest, the funniest, and the simplest song on the album. Between “Ideas” and “Baby Bands” feels like the right lane for it. But yeah, definitely not indicative of anything else on the album.
What is the song about?
ELIJAH: I think it’s just about the little elements of a romantic relationship that are the inside joke, or the sort of inside thing that makes sense to you and me but maybe don’t make sense to everybody else. That song was—I literally had a Snoopy Christmas coffee mug, and I wrote that line because I had this funny memory of getting it, and I think the first thing I made, the first drink I put in it was not a cup of coffee, but it was a gin and tonic, and I was drinking gin and tonic out of a Snoopy coffee mug at Christmas. I thought, this is really silly that I’m sitting here.
Between that and doing the crossword, and all the lyrics in that song that are just about the little things. I also thought it would be funny—I didn’t notice this until I said it one time in a show. I was like, “Yeah, this is a love song about my girlfriend. It’s called ‘Keep It to Yourself.’” I thought, that sounds so dismissive, it sounds like such a rude thing to say, and people laughed. I think it’s mostly just about if you’ve got something funny in a relationship with someone, it’s kind of fun to have a secret.
I’m glad you mentioned “Baby Bands.” I think I’ve read that you’re a Brian Wilson fan, and that song definitely has that sort of Brian Wilson sound to it.
ELIJAH: That song actually really had a long, strained writing process. We almost didn’t record it. That was the one song that had the most pre-studio iterations of like, we talked about it constantly. Should it sound like this? I think we knew at a certain point that it was going to need to be a genre song. It was gonna have to be, because it didn’t really feel in the writing like it was much of anything.
At one point we talked about maybe it should sound like the Pixies, or like a Nirvana song, and that’s kind of where the guitar riffs stayed from that. But when we got to the studio, I said, “Okay, let’s just do Brian Wilson. We should just do Beach Boys.” I think that’s making the most sense. It’s got that old timey, you can kind of croon to it.
When we were recording one night, we were discussing all these different bands we thought it could sound like, sound-wise. Drew looked at us and was like, “You guys are referencing bands that sound like the thing you’re trying to do, but you’re not referencing the thing you’re trying to do. We don’t need to do the 21st century updated version of this thing. We should do this thing.” So that was why we decided to pan the drums, have the really crunchy sound effects and all this stuff.
The night before we finished recording it, I went to this bar in Athens, right down the street from the studio, and they were playing exclusively fifties and sixties doo-wop. So much of that music is just one guitar, bass and a killer drummer. That’s the thing. Put the Beach Boys vocals on it, move on. Let’s just not worry too much about it.
We’ve talked about songs on the first half of the album. What’s a song on the back half that you particularly like?
ELIJAH: Probably “Double Fault,” which is the second to last song on the record. It was the one that was almost gonna be a single. When we were discussing singles, that was the fourth option floating around. That one just became such a strong moment. That was actually an example of a song that I was like, we’ve got to do it this way. It’s the only time I’ve ever—and my brother is such an incredible drummer—it’s the only time in our entire time of working together that I’ve ever sat there and into the talkback mic sang a drum part and was like, “No, you gotta do it like this.” The outro part, it’s got that skipping, stuttering snare pattern. He was doing different things that were okay, and I was like, “No, you gotta do like this.” And he started doing it. We were like, there you go, that’s it. I was really happy with how that one turned out, how it pivots so sharply in the last minute.
Sequencing is important, especially when you think about vinyl. As you were sequencing, did you think about having to put something strong to start side B? Sometimes, that might be the first song people hear if they don’t pay attention to the label on the album and don’t start with side A.
ELIJAH: I didn’t necessarily think about that, but I will say I like whatever song starts side B to feel like a second starting point. The song that starts side B is “Instant Replay.” I want records to start with a song that has an element of it’s a little bit of a bloomer. It has kind of a welcome to the world sort of element to it, and I think both that song and “Leonard,” the first song on the record, have something in them that to me feels like it’s pulling you in, but sort of gently.
I definitely think about the vinyl aspect of sequencing. I used to work in a vinyl factory, so I was already into that kind of thing, and then working there and seeing the nitty-gritty and the art of it, on a production level, I was like, this is a really interesting—obviously popular music is a 100-year-old art form that is basically defined by production constraints. It’s not this eternal, limitless thing that’s always existed. When I started to think about it in a more materialist sense, I was like, yeah, I want to work within that constraint and do that well.
The early stuff that you posted on Bandcamp has more of a lo-fi, indie rock feel to it. The new album is difficult to pigeonhole but it’s got a bit of an Americana feel. Was there a particular moment where you changed lanes or was it a gradual thing?
ELIJAH: I think the way I think of the evolution aspect is I look at the stuff you were listening to, the Bandcamp stuff and the lo-fi stuff—I would record all of it with a phone, voice memos mixed in a computer. I kind of look at the difference between that and now as it’d be like if I was a professional photographer, it’d be like looking and being like, here’s his professional photos and here’s his selfies from when he was 16. I don’t think of it necessarily as the same thing. I know a lot of people that have made a lot of music like that that they’ve deleted, or they’ve archived all of it, and they’ve hidden it from people. I certainly probably could, or maybe I should, but I don’t really feel particularly strongly about doing that.
I think the reason that my music sounded like that at that point was just constraints. I didn’t know how to do anything else. I didn’t have anything besides an acoustic guitar or GarageBand. Just really, really limited constraints. When I was 16, 17, I just really liked Elliott Smith and Sufjan, and thought, that’s all I really want to do, that’s all I really care about. I always knew I wanted to have more of a sound, or a band, or this kind of thing, but I think the current kind of feel that we go for mostly started to cohere in the preparation for Hometown Vampire. Before that, I think we treated every song like it was just its own island, and it’s sort of like, well, I wrote this song this way, so let’s just do it like this. It was very rare that we had any conversations about what’s the genre, what’s the thought process behind this.
People would ask me how I described my music and I would just make stuff up, or I would just say stuff that was wrong. I used to tell people we were emo and all this stuff that just wasn’t true. Making Vampire, I was like, I think what I’m interested in is the sort of what I call “record store music.” Power pop, and sort of the type of songwriter lineage that I think New West contributes to and this kind of melding of power pop and Americana and all this stuff. But also that record was very hopscotching in genre.
So I think for this one we definitely had a lot more of the thought of we wanted to try and channel a little bit more of the late nineties, early 2000s, what we call “teen movie soundtrack” music. I showed Jordan from Rose Hotel that sings on “Everything We Hold Dear”—I hadn’t shown her the whole record until it was finished, and she was like, “I need you to just be making the music video of ‘Yellow’ walking down the beach in black and white, slow-mo.” I played a festival a couple months ago where it was me and Switchfoot and The Calling. It was one of those kinds of festivals, and I remember just being like, I’m actually not that out of place with all of these kinds of bands in a way that I like. That kind of stuff is fun to me.
I saw Jordan (Rose Hotel) open for Susto recently and she performed with them as well.
ELIJAH: Yes, and we’re label mates, and we both live in Atlanta. That was actually the last song that I wrote for the record. It was a lot later than all the other ones, and it got added very last minute. I was like this has to be a duet, and she was the natural choice for it, which was really cool.
I don’t think your music sounds like Ruston Kelly or The Damnwells, but I think fans of those two artists would like your stuff. I can’t really figure out what genre any of you are.
ELIJAH: I just tell people that I’m a singer-songwriter, and I play with a rock band. That’s the best way I know. Especially live, the songs congeal a little bit more together because we don’t really get too much into strict studio recreations when we play live. We’re pretty much 2 electric guitars, drums and bass. We’re all singing. It’s pretty simple. I like it that way. I like that they’re different but they’re the same. It’s just a different kind of experience.
Do the people that play on the record also play in your live band?
ELIJAH: Depends on the situation. We have multiple versions of the band. Generally speaking, we play one-offs, or locally, we will play with the people that played on the record. When we’re touring, it’s me and my brother who’s the drummer, and then our bass player will be this guy named Aidan Hill. He played the bass on “Valentine’s Day,” the Bruce Springsteen cover. He tours with us primarily, and we’ve cycled between different people. But Drew is a little older than us. He’s got a kid and a job and a whole thing. And Tom is becoming a very high level producer, it’s getting pretty intense. So it’s not always super easy to have people like that touring, but they like to do it whenever we’re in town.
Can you tell me about a song, album, or artist that, when you listen, it takes you back to a very specific time and place in your life?
ELIJAH: I’m a huge Vampire Weekend fan, kind of one of the bands of my life sort of thing. I very vividly remember when the album Modern Vampires of the City came out and I was a freshman in high school, and I was riding to school listening to it. It’s 6 in the morning, so early. The first song on that record is called “Obvious Bicycle,” and it’s got this hand drums, percussion, piano, but it’s so gentle, and the percussion is very obviously sampled and sort of mechanized. The first line is like “Morning comes, you watch the red sunrise, LED still flickers in your eyes.” It was so gentle but arresting at the same time.
I just remember being like this is a real before and after moment, because I had heard that band before that record came out. I think I knew the 2 singles from the first couple records. But I was dating a girl at the time in high school who had cool older siblings, and they were like, you guys should check this out. It was just really shocking at the moment. So that’s a song that I always go back to of a real pivotal moment for me.
I saw them last fall when they came to Atlanta. It’s a funny scene now, because I saw them in 2014, when that Modern Vampires record was out, and it was at the Fox Theater. Everybody’s dressed preppy, but so suave. The theater looks like you’re inside of Aladdin. It is made to look like maybe ’50s imagination of the Middle East, and magic, and all this stuff. It was so unreal and then nowadays—and I love the band still, I love the new music—but it was odd being outside and being like “This is jam band people. This is really weird. This is a bunch of deadheads. These songs are too focused for you people.”
What are your realistic dreams for the record and what are your fantasy dreams?
ELIJAH: I think the realistic dream is, we’ve got a tour in August, and we would like to sell enough tickets to make it worth our time and sell a lot of records and sell merch and have nice places to stay and pay the boys well, and come home fed and happy, and feeling like we accomplished something, and hopefully opening for some people and doing some support tours. That would be cool. We want to treat this record like it really means something: get out, promote it, tour it, and live in it for a while. A realistic goal I had for this album was to sell enough vinyl that the label has to reprint it. I want them to tell me, “We’ve got to make more.” That’s a very tactile, achievable sort of goal.
As for pipe-dream, crazy stuff—when we were mixing the record, my manager Drew would randomly text me “’Ideas’ on Fallon” in the middle of the night, with no context. It became this funny, abstract way of expressing our belief in the album. We had to explain to the label that we’re not expecting magic, but we do believe that anyone who hears this album is going to really like it. We think the ceiling is really high, and we’re going to do our best to make that happen. If everyone’s doing their best, then good things—things we can’t even wrap our heads around—feel possible.
This record, I think, is different. With Vampire, it felt like you needed a syllabus or a reading list to go with it. This one feels like whatever you bring to it, it gives something back.
I used to think accessible music was stupid, but now I think the opposite. It’s incredibly hard to make something that everybody likes—it’s a real skill. We tried really hard to make it seem effortless. And it feels like every time people hear it, they pick up on something. I’m really excited to have it out there, to be able to say, “Let me show you what I made,” and have it all click together. Hopefully, it finds an audience that’s even bigger than I know about right now.
