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 daniel johnston
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Songs of innocence and experience. It’s been a long, strange road for Daniel Johnston, frequently fêted as one of the world’s greatest living songwriters by a who’s who of rock luminaries including Tom Waits, Kurt Cobain and David Bowie, but kept from the limelight by horrendous problems with mental illness while more together artists indebted to his sound – Beck, Jeffrey Lewis, The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev to name just a few – have prospered.Despite his outsider status and troubled personal life, Johnston has created a deeply impressive body of work since he started distributing lo-fi cassette recordings of his songs around Austin in the early 1980s. New album Lost and Found is number thirtysomething, but one of relatively few releases to have been recorded with anything vaguely resembling polished production values – although it’s rough-edged sound is a deliberate step back from 2003’s Sparklehorse collaboration, Fear Yourself.  Artwork by Daniel Johnston. In actual fact slick production is the last thing that Johnston’s plaintive, funny and sometimes unbearably honest songs need. The seething tape hiss and background conversations of his earliest work are of a piece with his subject matter of the small victories, terrible fears and tender hopes of a life lived internally but fervently. The Beatles, a song that first appeared on 1983’s Yip/Jump Music and has been re-recorded for Lost and Found, illustrates the point: the new version’s heavy backbeat, thrumming bassline and horn stabs are adornments that songwriting of this quality just doesn’t need.  "Fêted by a who’s who of rock luminaries"; fans Flea and Kurt Cobain, a mugshot. But that’s not to say that Johnston should still be knocking out C-90s in an echoing basement. Lost and Found certainly isn’t his best album, but it’s far from the sound of an artist in decline. In the forthcoming documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston he speaks of a work of art being the greatest way to express a certain feeling, and anyone who witnessed his brief performance at last week’s tribute concert at London’s Barbican, featuring such devotees as Jason Pierce, Teenage Fanclub and Howe Gelb, could only conclude that no one communicates feelings quite as baldly or as boldly as Johnston does, and has done for the last twenty-five years.
Chris Power
Daniel Johnston – Lost and Found, released 24 April 06 on Sketchbook Records; The Devil and Daniel Johnston, on selected release from 05 May 06; Hi, How Are You? An Introduction to the Art of Daniel Johnston runs at London’s Aquarium Gallery from 28 April to 20 May 06.
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comment by Simon_Pieman
Apr 26, 2006
There was a little feature on him in this months Mojo magazine, and it was really insightfull. I'm going to have to get some of his music, if only for those fantastic album covers of his.
comment by Richey
Apr 24, 2006
I'm really looking forward to seeing this biopic at the cinema ... providing I can find a cinema showing it!
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