Audio By Carbonatix
On September 11, Will Johnson will release Scorpion, his first solo full-length record since 2005. It comes after a four-year stretch in which Johnson has seen his profile heightened by collaborations with Monsters of Folk (Jim James, M.Ward, Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis), New Multitudes (Jay Farrar, Anders Parker, Jim James) and Jason Molina. He says he’s just keeping his head down and doing what he knows to do: cranking out music. With that in mind, he also relates that Scorpion was recorded over the course of five days. Johnson shares the rules he created for making the record, the pros of his high-profile pairings and the status of a new Centro-matic record.
On first listen, Scorpion is a difficult record, but the third or fourth time it started to click. It’s very rewarding if you give it the right amount of time. Did you set out to do it that way? Kind of. Even just after we tracked the first couple of songs, I knew it wouldn’t be the type of record that just grabbed the listener in a pop or rock kind of way, or even in the way we constructed Candidate Waltz. The solo records are just kind of different animals from the band records. It started to take that direction right off the bat, but it doesn’t mean it has to be distant or cold. There’s such a thing as a grower record that can be engaging after a couple of listens, hopefully. It’s just a matter of the listener taking the time or having the patience to let it unfurl, because these really aren’t pop songs. It’s not that kind of thing. It’s got its certain subdued nature and I would even say its time and place to be experienced.
