Easy Does It

Latest issue of Rolling Stone features a long over due cover story on singer / surfer Jack Johnson. A sample:

Johnson spends his days outdoors: fishing, surfing, kayaking, swimming or just doing yardwork and looking at the waves. At night, when his boys — ages four and two, whose names Johnson wishes to keep private — are sleeping and the house is quiet, he'll stay up late reading The New York Times online or digging into a book. He's a voracious reader and sometimes quotes passages and life lessons he's picked up from Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Campbell. The folk songs Johnson writes come to him easily — he doesn't force them. "A lot of artists fall into a thing where they're constantly trying to create art," he says. "But I think you can forget to take things in. You've got to fill up the mind. When I get home from a tour, I put away the guitar and surf a lot. After a while, the songs just start comin'. It's not like some torturous process that I go through."

I've enjoyed Jack's music for years. The newly released, "Sleep Through The Static", is a continuation of infectious, guitar-line melodies. The songs are as easy as a slow tide on a summer's day - never overstaying its welcome, out to sea and back again before you begin to miss it. Johnson is the perfect pop artist. Folksy in nature, yet deliverable to mass audiences - the Charles Warner's Bob Dylan if you will.