You might know Will Johnson from Centro-matic, South San Gabriel, or Marie/Lepanto. Or perhaps his collaboration with Jason Molina, Molina Johnson. When not working with these outfits, or co-producing albums like Austin Lucas’ Immortal Americans, or playing drums in Strand of Oaks, Johnson still finds the time to record under his own name.
His sixth album and first with our friends at Keeled Scales, Wire Mountain welcomes the talents of Jon Dee Graham (The Skunks, the True Believers) and Thor Harris (Swans, Shearwater, Xiu Xiu, to name a few), as well as folk-duo Little Mazarn, to shape its warm and striking folk rock sound. The result is richly authentic brand of Americana, woven from dust and dysfunction and delivered with a weathered sagacity—the old and the new not so much colliding but melding across the progression of time.
Lead single ‘Cornelius’ is uniquely pertinent in that respect, representing something of an old track in a new guise. “That damn song,” Johnson says. “I thought it was gonna go by the wayside. It’d been hanging around for about 10 years and I could never find the right collection of songs to tuck it into. It finally found a home.” Inspired by time spent in Bastrop, Texas, it presents a classically American existence, at once wily and loaded with hope, as though one’s luck could right itself even years after going bottoms up. There’s a resentment present, but a kind of awe too, as if something in the commitment to such a life can’t help but draw admiration.
Cornelius, you were banking on the changes
to bring this whole town’s dirty cartel on you
Cornelius, I was hoping with anticipation
now I ain’t got nothing left to do with you
