TJ Arist Profile: Jack Evan Johnson

TJ ARTIST PROFILE: Jack Evan Johnson

HOME BASE: East Nashville, Tennessee

PROFESSION: I was a professional journalist once, but it was too easy to make money doing that, so I moved to Nashville to be an unprofessional musician.

HOBBIES: Professional journalist.

LAST ALBUM PURCHASED: Black Camaro – Protocol of Dreams. They’re friends from my hometown, Las Vegas, who are one of the best and most prolific rock bands in America, but nobody’s heard of them outside of Vegas because they don’t give a shit about anything except making great records (unfortunately, nobody cares about great records anymore).

LAST ACCOMPLISHMENT: I drank for twenty-four hours this weekend.

QUOTE: “It’s never too late to fuck up.” – my dad

CRAZIEST ROAD MEMORY: We played a show during a blizzard in a small mountain town outside of Boulder, Colorado once. We ended up staying with the sound guy, who also was a big time drug dealer, which could have been cool, but he was also a psychopath who blacked out and did a bunch of scary shit that we couldn’t get away from, because we were snowed in with no cell coverage. Not a good night.

FAVORITE BEER: Free

WHO’S THE ULTIMATE COUNTRY PIMP: Hank Topless out in Tucson. He’s a real deal desert rat ex-con with a double-necked guitar he built called the “fuckercaster,” album titles better than most people’s songs, and his shows mostly consist of drinking and letting the guitar feed back.

FAVORITE ROOTS MUSIC PUBLICATION: TJ, as long as Courtney keeps sending me cool Townes buttons… 😉 I also run a zine in Nashville called Honkytonk Badonkadonk Zine and we do some shit.

PROFILE:  Nashville, Tennessee-based singer-songwriter, Jack Evan Johnson’s new album American Pink is a rollicking collection of songs that touch on the complex human side of living and working in this country as Johnson assembles a cast of characters based on real life encounters. Recorded in one day at Ardent Studios in Memphis with engineer Eddie Spear (Brandi Carlile, Chris Stapleton) and mastered by Pete Lyman (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson), American Pink is garage rock at its finest, as Johnson delivers an album of tunes that hearken back to the proto-punk and experimental rock of the Velvet Underground, along with the early days of the Clash. American Pink frames a strong social commentary that is timely with aggressive sonics that give the feeling of kid in a guitar shop abandon that follows the tradition of raw punk rock. TJ previously premiered Johnson’s song “The Force” which was written a few years ago in response to the flurry of  Las Vegas police shootings that dominated the news and his inbox while the Nevada-native was working at a newspaper back home. Take a listen to, “Mama Was Always Yellin’” a tune that transports the listener back to the hey days of the late sixties New York underground rock scene.

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