Back on the Road to You

Chronique

Primarily a writer of love songs, some indescribably joyful, others bitterly disappointed, Freedy Johnston briefly became a sudden star in 1992 when his second album Can You Fly, released on indie label Bar/None, became a surprise hit.  He subsequently signed with Elektra Records but was dropped in 2001, and nearly a decade of silence followed. After his return with 2010's Rain on the City and 2015's Neon Repairman, Johnston, who proved with Can You Fly and its 1994 follow-up, the Butch Vig produced This Perfect World, that he could write melodic hooks as well as rock out, has now assembled the crowd-funded, Back on the Road to You. Like all singer-songwriters, Johnston knows that hit songs make an album, and here he's surrounded a charming single with an album's worth of quality material.  "There Goes a Brooklyn Girl" is a perfectly constructed power pop jewel, the kind of hooky toe-tapper that got him noticed in the first place. Johnston calls it, "a never-ending love story. She's the hip girl in the office who lives with her musician boyfriend out in Williamsburg. He tends bar until 4. It can't last. But at least a song comes out of it." The rest of the album is filled with his usual light, well-crafted Americana. Another hook powers the verses of "Trick of the Light." In the chugging rocker "Tryin' To Move On," with an edgy Doug Pettibone solo, Johnston's experience shows his singing can make an unlikely rhyme work: "Then on the way over the airport fence/ Somehow I lose my new glasses." In "Somewhere Love," he makes an easy transition to the strings of bossa nova-flavored yacht rock. Later in "The Power of Love"—an original—he goes full band along with his old pal Susan Cowsill, who is the first of a trio of female guest singers, along with Aimee Mann and Susanna Hoffs.  The studio band of well-traveled pros is impressive: guitarist Doug Pettibone (Lucinda Williams), bassist Dusty Wakeman (Dwight Yoakam, Me'shell Ndegeocello) and drummer David Raven (everyone from Keith Richards to Jim James and the soundtrack of Brokeback Mountain).  Back On The Road To You was recorded and mixed by Eric Corne who accentuates Johnston's other great strength, his clear, sweet and limber voice which easily reaches high notes and never fails to communicate. Careful, tuneful songcraft and the wisdom of dues paid from one of America's most underrated singer-songwriters. © Robert Baird/Qobuz