One of my most cherished possessions is a coffee-stained T-shirt that reads “Hi, How Are You” on the chest. Below the words is a drawing of a frog-like alien, which stares pensively out at everyone who walks by.
This shirt’s illustration, which comes from Daniel Johnston’s 1983 album “Hi, How Are You,” has become a bit of a cult item since Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was photographed wearing it across the world in the early ’90s. Many who have seen the shirt, however, have never heard of the tortured singer who the album belongs to, much less listened to his songs of misery and gilded happiness that pack such riddled beauty.
Johnston’s music is not always pretty, or even in tune. And it’s definitely not always sane. But it’s honest, beautiful and above all else, real.
The 2005 Sundance award-winning documentary, “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” directed by Jeff Feuerzeig, beautifully chronicles Johnston’s life with emotional interviews from Johnston’s parents, friends and the artist himself. Johnston’s music, which has been critically adored for the last two decades and perpetuated by the success of the documentary, is still generally unknown to the American public.
The singer-songwriter first received notice for his music in the early ’80s when he was living in Austin, Texas. Johnston, who had been fascinated with the piano from a young age, recorded a slew of cassettes in basements with a tape recorder, a keyboard and his scratchy and shoddy voice.
Johnston’s first album, “Songs of Pain,” which he released in 1981, showcases just this. The opening track, “Grievances,” features the identifiably static Johnston banging away an upbeat melody on his piano while singing about an art school crush that wouldn’t reciprocate his misplaced feelings.
“I saw you at the funeral/ You were standing there like a temple,” Johnston sings. “I said, ‘Hi, how are you, hello’/ And I pulled up a casket and crawled in.”
By 1985, Johnston was relatively well-known in the Austin music scene, partly because he would hand his homemade tapes out to anyone who was willing to listen. Without a label or anyone to reproduce his cassettes, Johnston would oftentimes make numerous recordings of the same album to ensure his music would reach a growing audience.
A brief moment of fame occurred that year when MTV’s “The Cutting Edge” came to Austin, and Johnston performed with his rattled guitar and splintered vocals on television.
“The wildest summer that I ever knew/ I had a flat tire down memory lane,” Johnston sings into the camera for his song “I Live My Broken Dreams.” “And now I’m here/ And here I stand/ With a sweet angel holding my hand/ I live my broken dreams.”
Johnston’s genius is often disputed. The singer doesn’t hold a tune very well, nor are his songs melodiously complex. Johnston’s music is brilliant not for its musical quality, but for the painful emotion and heartbreak of a man battling schizophrenia and manic depression. His greatest and most recognizable songs, “True Love Will Find You In The End” and “Some Things Last a Long Time,” are pure portrayals of a shattered soul reaching out from the speaker to grab a loving hand.
The tremendous ability of Johnston to overcome the demons of his mental life to continually put out new music, 17 studio albums and counting, is empowering to any listener who can find an honest friend in Johnston’s begging voice.
In the last two decades, Johnston’s music has been adored and covered by artists from Beck and Pearl Jam to Tom Waits and Sonic Youth. Through all the mental breakdowns, through all the criticism, Daniel Johnston’s three-chord melodies touch a deeper heartstring that only few artists can claim to reach.
Daniel Johnston Playlist