Singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Will Johnson has long navigated beloved bands (Centro-matic, Monsters of Folk, the 400 Unit), singular collaborations (Molina & Johnson, New Multitudes, Overseas) and the many open roads a career musician travels. With his 10th solo album, however, the prolific journeyman tapped a creative well at home — in one room alone with his thoughts. In the Texas farmhouse where he lives, nestled among the hills of Hays County, Johnson dreamt up and chronicled a perfectly imperfect world. Diamond City surveys mythical places whose spirit dwells among barren Midwestern landscapes and stark Southern outlands, reflecting the hollows of Johnson’s childhood in southern Missouri and the spartan Texas expanse where he now lives. Like many towns that line America’s midsection, Diamond City’s fancy name belies its reality. As with albums such as John Prine’s “John Prine” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” Diamond City’s vast fortune is found in its gritty folk tales — of hovering ghosts, open wounds, tender hearts, little jokes, and the everyday people and scenery that compose a cracked iconography. Like Muhlenberg County, Kentucky or Mahwah, New Jersey, Diamond City is a place that people may leave but never truly escape. Written in the winter of 2023, just before he became a permanent member of Jason Isbell’s band the 400 Unit, the album is a collection of solo home recordings and also an implicit monument to his friends and family. The singer traces its minimalist format to his wife Jessie Johnson’s longtime enthusiasm for the rawer versions of his songs, and to a conversation he had more than a decade ago. “I’ve wanted to make a four-track record going back to when David Bazan (Pedro the Lion) would listen to my demos and say, ‘When are you going to make a record like this?’” the songwriter explains. “It was such a sweet thing to say.” Johnson adds that he spends a bit more time crafting his demos to ensure the sounds are satisfactory to his ear. “Why not make a recording that may be releasable at some point?” he posits. His working methods for Diamond City may be traced to his late friend Jason Molina. Like the Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. leader, Johnson treated the album’s songwriting process like a full-time job. For a couple of weeks, he awoke, readied himself, and then stowed away in the front room of his home for hours with guitars, a drum machine, and an old Tascam 424. He didn’t allow himself to leave until he’d written at least two songs, all of them lined with quiet introspection. “Those old work ethics that we applied to making the ‘Molina & Johnson’ record in 2008 weren’t that different here,” Johnson adds. “And like the Molina record, Diamond City really is a souvenir from a little patch of time.” The dedicated process yielded 15 songs total, each a poetic sonic morsel or tuneful geographic devotional, written free of traditional form but filled with thought and feeling; each is steered by Johnson’s raspy mid-south vocals, so open-hearted as to expose its pulses. For the album, Johnson whittled the tracklist down to 9 songs including “Floodway Fall,” which situates the listener in the wilds of Northeast Arkansas, in Johnson’s home region. The buoyant melody of “Sylvarena” engulfed the songwriter, like an obsession, until the song’s completion. “All Dragged Out,” a delectable low-fi pop song, is reflective of Johnson’s way with levity. It’s a lighthearted moment indicative of his emotional range. To complete Diamond City, the songwriter delivered his 4-track recordings to a home away from home: Ramble Creek Studio in Austin. There, his bandmate and longtime collaborator Britton Beisenherz bounced the songs to Pro Tools and added instrumentation, fleshing-out each song with bass, acoustic drums, piano, or synthesizer. “Every few days I’d get a little gift from him when I was out on the road,” Johnson recalls. “He would enhance them and really add his own talents. I remember listening to all the songs together and thinking, ‘This is the record.’” In the tradition of “Nebraska,” Neutral Milk Hotel’s “On Avery Island,” or PJ Harvey’s “4-Track Demos” album, Diamond City comes with an understanding that rock songs are sometimes more interesting, powerful, and dateless in their softest and most spartan forms. By stripping-back much of the noise, Johnson’s vision rang clear. The album’s quieter posture is a marked counterpoint to the glorious racket Johnson whips up as a multi-instrumentalist in the 400 Unit. This dichotomy is actually a pattern that stretches to the songwriter’s days in Centro-matic, when he’d make a quiet solo album or South San Gabriel album as his mind and ears needed a break from loud guitars. Jason Isbell, whose friendship with Johnson dates to 2001, when the former had just joined the Drive-By Truckers, and the latter was a rising bandleader in Centro-matic, also was an affirming voice for the homespun quality of Diamond City. On tour, the pair have discussed the transfiguration that occurs with deluxe reissues and bootlegs. “A joke I’ve heard him make a few times is, ‘Well, they released my demos so now they’re not demos anymore,’” Johnson says with a laugh. So what is a series of demos that have left home and taken shape in the broader world? With his newest, Will Johnson offers the only correct answer. Demos set free compose a blessedly imperfect and tender gift. They are, in a phrase, Diamond City.
