This Perfect World: Freedy Johnston's Masterpiece Turns 30
Johnston’s stories are believable because of the singer’s voice, and because of the stark lyrics that communicate a profound sadness.
I once met Freedy Johnston in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, sometime in the early 2000s. Freedy couldn’t have known how much I admired his work as we smoked cigarettes on the sidewalk outside of the Steel City Coffeehouse, or that I’d spent countless hours studying the mysteries embedded in 1992’s Can You Fly, and on his major label debut, 1994’s This Perfect World. I did talk to Freedy about the lyrics on those two discs that night, how I thought they were powerful and magnificent, about how much they meant to me. I can’t say that he accepted the compliment graciously. I mentioned the imagery and the stories that so perfectly built worlds into three or four minute songs on two albums that were now more than ten years old. He said, “I still try to do that,” and I guessed he was disappointed that I wasn’t so affected by his more recent records. We crushed our respective smokes on the Phoenixville sidewalk, or threw them into the street, and Freedy walked inside to perform. I followed and took my seat at a table just a few feet from the stage.
My memory isn’t perfect, but I think Freedy Johnston played “Rain On the City” that night, a song that wouldn’t be released until 2010. The Phoenixville performance was just Freedy and his Gibson, and his unique approach to the instrument serves the mood of “Rain On the City” perfectly where he sings about a couple on a less than perfect path: “We’ll go walk the streets, you and me. Follow me in the gutter. We are going down to the river.” Mr. Johnston seems to have an instinctive grasp of life’s inherent sadness, and of the mistakes and bad choices that might put people in a metaphorical gutter. What seems important about “Rain On the City,” and about many of Freedy’s characters, is that they choose their destiny.
I know he’d probably hate to hear it, but Freedy’s grasp of very human foibles was most mystical and focused on those early records, which might not be entirely surprising—and my fascination with them doesn’t diminish his later efforts. Life hands us just a few opportunities to capture lightning in a bottle, though. I recently read an article about artists reaching a creative peak in their early 30s, and maybe there’s something accurate about that theory. Freedy Johnston entered the world in 1961, a little more than thirty years before he wrote “Mortician’s Daughter” and “Lucky One,” songs with first person narrators who reflect on loss and regret in a way that is nothing short of poetic. “I grieve tonight over this letter, my tears dissolve an image in the careful ink,” Johnston sings in “Mortician’s Daughter.”
Can You Fly is filled with masterful stories about the daughters of funeral directors, and about Las Vegas losers who sweat and reel through broken moments and somehow remain hopeful. Without a major league recording budget, Can You Fly is certainly grittier than the Butch Vig produced This Perfect World, which turns thirty this month. It’s that album’s approaching birthday that prompted me to write about Freedy Johnston, and I go back and forth about which album I like more—the low budget independent release from Bar None Records, or the souped up Elektra Records debut that glimmers and shines and transcends the grunge of that era. I can only call it a draw and say that, except for The Beatles, I’ve listened to Can You Fly and This Perfect World more than any other records, more than any other artist over the last three decades.
I was introduced to Freedy Johnston’s music by Vin Scelsa on WNEW in New York in the summer of ’94 via late night FM radio in my light blue Chevy Malibu. Again, memory is not perfect, but I think Scelsa spun “This Perfect World” around 2AM on what still felt like Sunday night to me—those early morning hours before I went to bed—that was the norm back then. That single song, the title track, led me to hunt down the CD at Jack’s Music Shoppe in Red Bank, New Jersey the next day. I drove home to Bradley Beach, fired up the CD player in my second floor apartment, and turned the volume to loud. I listened to all twelve songs and then hit the play button again because I didn’t have a choice. It was immediately apparent that I needed This Perfect World and all the delicious ingredients it contained. It was literary and melodic, and the guitar sounds were, well, something perfect in the world. Freedy had his own way of working an acoustic guitar. I didn’t know, at least not yet, that Freedy Johnston’s two year old independent gem existed, or that I needed it, too.
This Perfect World begins with Johnston’s voice and acoustic guitar, fifteen seconds or so of a coffeehouse performer waiting for the full band to join him for four minutes of soaring melodies and ringing guitars on “Bad Reputation.” That song has a strange structure where there’s not a clear chorus—it seems to be built around brief, hooky verses and a bridge that repeats. The narrator is a less than savory character who admits that he’s bubbling over with shortcomings, and that he sometimes tells lies. He easily sets the tone for the album in an opening track that got a lot of attention and airplay in the summer of 1994. The main character in “Bad Reputation” won’t blame his losses on anyone else and wanders the streets of New York City, fully aware of why he’s lonely: “I know I’ve got a bad reputation, and it isn’t just talk, talk, talk. If I could only give you everything you know I haven’t got.” It strikes me that someone decides that they lack the tools for a successful relationship, and I have to believe that Freedy Johnston knew that when he wrote the song, that maybe he couldn’t have written “Bad Reputation” unless he knew it.
The brilliance in Johnston’s opening salvo is that despite its negative focus, just about anyone can relate to the song’s self-deprecating tone. Beyond that, the timbre of Freedy’s voice seems to have been bathed in waters that carry the failures of the self. The storyteller in “Bad Reputation” has soaked and floated in that twisted, murky river. As Richard Cromelin wrote for the LA Times in 1994, “A recurring motif reflects Johnston’s own path, depicting a character moving to the city from the countryside and losing his bearings.” Johnston’s stories are believable because of the singer’s voice, and because of the stark lyrics that communicate a profound sadness—every character on This Perfect World has lost his or her bearings, somehow.
The opening track of Freedy Johnston’s national debut revisits the type of indignities that introduced Can You Fly in 1992 with a song called “Trying To Tell You I Don’t Know.” In that song, Johnston fights a losing battle against the music business and willingly suffers for his art; he chooses a life that’s less than dignified, first by selling the family farm to promote his record, and then by detouring through lost (or stolen) guitars, borrowed vans, and poor directions to the club. He’ll suffer anything for the chance to get in front of a microphone, “Trying to sing what I can’t say, trying to cry with the red light on, trying to tell you I don’t know.” There’s no magical path to making it as a musician, and Freedy Johnston knows it. Still, the foggy path is his, and all he can do is immerse himself in the work (and in the obstacles) and cross his fingers.
It’s fitting that This Perfect World opens with just Johnston and the guitar because that’s how he worked: dim apartments and four-track recorders. Freedy Johnston didn’t start a band in his home state of Kansas, and not when he moved to New York; instead, he sat down and wrote song after song and sang them into microphones with no audience beyond the magnetic tape of a spinning cassette, work that paid off and made him a true craftsman. When he delivered a demo to Bar None Records, they snatched him up.
Like Hemingway’s old man who’s trying to bring in the biggest marlin, Freedy Johnston is not defeated by setbacks. In ’94, he told Richard Cromelin, “You know, I’ve spent all my money, all my time, I’ve given up the hope or the chance of having a relationship or kids, or even a real home with carpets on the floor, sold everything I’ve had, spent 15 years of my life staying in a room writing little songs. Man, I’m not goin’ away.”
This theme that might be called tenacity hits home in the third track on This Perfect World, “Can’t Sink This Town.” The song starts with a “barefoot whore walking by a famous clock.” What we hear is a young lady who is not defeated by circumstance. She’s lonely and maybe afraid, but there has to be more to life. “Is a broken promise cheap enough?” Johnston asks. This lady of the streets accepts that her questionable choices have put her there—there’s no one to blame. But she refuses to accept loneliness as a permanent condition: “I’d gladly drown than let you leave me lonely.” This is a plea to a nameless companion, but I’ve puzzled over this line and where the song finally leaves her. I tend to think Johnston is purposely oblique here, especially since the line shifts at the end of the song when he sings, “I thought you said you were lonely.” At any rate, the girl is looking back across the sea in every chorus, perhaps to a safe port that lives in her memory. Her life is a shitstorm, but it doesn’t have to stay that way—she can get back to the harbor. With all of Johnston’s characters, we can assume that they accept the consequences of their choices and realize that they can change course, but only when they’re ready, and only in their own stubborn time.
My favorite song on This Perfect World might be “Disappointed Man,” and it’s the song with the least clarity. We only know the images evoked by the speaker, which are accusatory and direct: “Did you sell your father’s ring so you could stay one more night?” sings Johnston. The questions are never answered. The accused has hidden himself in the city, and maybe he’s grateful for the anonymity that New York can offer. The final verse evokes, to my ears, a heated argument in a funeral home, a broken family. The first person narrator says, “Did you fill this hired room with guilty words? Your white piano hands flutter like poisoned birds.” What’s most interesting is that the accused is still willing to fight for a space in the world—a space that will feel right to him when he’s finally ready. Johnston sings, “Why’d you call me? Must be bad. Disappointed man, where’ve you been?” We’re convinced that his very specific problems can be wiped away—with the right answers, and with the right choices.
Johnston’s genius as a storyteller is to illuminate these characters during moments of crisis, and to leave us hanging without clear resolution. We’ll never know why the disappointed man called, or what he’ll say to bridge the emotional chasm he’s constructed as a matter of choice. His disappointment is his own doing. Freedy Johnston seems to say that the world can’t be perfect, and it won’t be because we’re human. We’re all imperfect, and we all have to live with our choices, even as we hope for something better. That’s as perfect as the world’s going to get, but it’s just enough to keep us striving for more.
This Perfect World was released on June 28, 1994. Richard Cromelin’s article appeared in the Los Angeles Times on October 29, 1994.
My take from 15 years ago:
https://everybodysdummy.blogspot.com/2009/03/freedy-johnston-this-perfect-world.html?m=1
I enjoyed reading your thoughts on this amazing album and its predecessor. Like you, I've listened to them countless times over the years. One of those listens, 5 or 10 years ago, I think it was a line in Disappointed Man that set me off on a new way (new to me, anyway) of listening to this record: "They say you disappeared, just like water down the drain" -- ah, so this must be the same character as the one from "Gone like the Water" (where he took other things from his parents and set out to "disappear" in the city) -- and now he seems to have changed his name, too, taking his mother's maiden name. Why is he doing this? Connections to other songs? "Bad Reputation": he's suddenly back in the city--"seven years disappear below my feet"--and seemingly obsessed with someone ("Do you want me now? Do you want me now?"). So where has he been those seven years, and what is the nature of this obsession? If these connections make any sense at all, it's kind of laid out in "This Perfect World," when the character returns to the scene of something that seems to have been pretty awful:
You ought to see your face
You ought to hear your voice
Last time I was here
I wouldn't turn around
You ought to lock that door
Somebody might get in
Didn't I teach you like that?
He goes on to mention his "going away" while trying to justify his presence here now:
I know I never should have gone away
But I still deserve to say goodbye
No matter what I've done
I see her in your face
I hear her in your voice
Last time I was here
They found her in the lake
Pretty ominous, not to mention the character seeming to have been a teenager at the time. Seven years later, "suddenly" he's "on the street," "24 and going pale," living under a new identity and "disappearing in the city."