I first met Imaginary Johnny in the early '80s. He was wearing his sister's belt - the green and blue one with the spouting whales. He consumed a steady diet of Knight Rider and Greatest American Hero. He sang The Replacements' "Within Your Reach" [+]I first met Imaginary Johnny in the early '80s. He was wearing his sister's belt - the green and blue one with the spouting whales. He consumed a steady diet of Knight Rider and Greatest American Hero. He sang The Replacements' "Within Your Reach" the way French debutantes smoke cigarettes. Those were formative years.
It's hard to believe it's been twenty years now. We've experienced a lot together - we set fire to the men's room trash can in Vegas; got kicked out of the Voodoo Lounge in New Orleans; got stoned in some liberal arts dorm doom, listening plaintively to Leonard Cohen, sweated and reminisced on the tarmac that partly cloudy day in Oakland. Imaginary Johnny wrote those letters to the John Cusack fan club and signed them with my trademark smiley-face-exclamation-point. Imaginary Johnny stole the booze and put it in my backpack. I swear.
Imaginary Johnny also stole my first girlfriend. The loss was palpable; I swore I'd never love again. That night I tasted my first sip of tequila and consequently swore off that, too, from Imaginary Johnny's bathroom. That's the kind of friend he is. And that's why I gave up my girlfriend the way an aged chess champion bows to his successor. I knew Imaginary Johnny to be more worthy than I in every possible way.
Which somehow brings us to the present. Imaginary Johnny doesn't write songs, he breathes them. His life and music are interchangeable, and the poetry of his words introduces us all to the transcendent art present in the most trivial details. The instrumentation is deceptively intricate; the rhythm tracks commingle and intersperse without losing identity - a marriage of the organic and the synthetic that is a natural outcome of latter day living. His music is not for him, it's for us - it's of us. The more we listen, the more we realize that Imaginary Johnny is our Imaginary Johnny, singing the songs of our lives, turning the mundane into a masterpiece.
And that's a nice thing to realize.
REVIEWS:
-Ashlea Halpern, MAGNET, NOV/DEC 2003
"If the debut from Imaginary Johnny is any indication of what's to come, Belle and Sebastian best be watching its back. Muffled broadcasts and tweaked-out squiggles peg lyrics about instant coffee, tropical rain storms and purple-clad prost
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