Mike Johnson: What Would You Do

Mike Johnson is one of those inveterate scenesters who seems to know everybody without making much of a fuss about anybody knowing him. Play six degrees of separation with him, and you can cover just about the entire Amerindie world. The Oregon native has been active since at least 1985, when he and a group of friends formed the Eugene country-punk outfit Snakepit. Some of those friends went on to other bands like Bikini Kill and the Melvins. Johnson himself joined up with J. Mascis in the early ’90s, playing on Dinosaur Jr. albums like Where You Been and Hand It Over (he replaced departed bass player Lou Barlow), and also collaborated on Mark Lanegan’s moody solo work. He’s a sometime member of Boise’s Caustic Resin and was in one of the many line-ups of Queens of the Stone Age.

Starting with 1994’s Where Am I?, Johnson has also released a series of solo albums that have earned him a small but distinct place in the Northwestern US pantheon. That standing has been confirmed by this year’s What Would You Do, a sturdy collection that rewards close listening. As befits a man from the land of gray clouds, he makes brooding music full of thunderous rumbles and occasional lightning bolts. His well-bottom baritone and folky romanticism have earned him comparisons to Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen, but he reminds me more of Nick Cave or Peter Murphy. There’s a fatalism in his gothic grumble, a sense that everything — not only human relationships, but those in particular — eventually crumbles to dust.

That makes him sound like a very gloomy gus, and most of the time he is. But he also writes deceptively gentle melodies, laced with minor-key modal guitar runs and full of echoing reverb. He can be noisy — as on the new album’s “Come Back Again”, which builds to a feedback frenzy of Neil Youngian proportions — but he prefers quiet storms; he’d rather sit and murmur than twist and shout.

What Would You Do is a variation on Johnson’s perpetual theme of self-doubt and moral uncertainty. But the key to this particular collection is in the closing track’s recitation from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Sidestepping the familiar and ghastly Inferno (the only book in the trilogy that most of us have read), Johnson quotes from Canto XVII of the Purgatorio. In the background, he repeats over and over the song’s only lyrics: “I know you’re saying it’s all over”. But the passage attests to the fundamental power and presence of love, “the seed of every virtue”, and asserts that “no creature can hate itself”. The contrast suggests that no ending is final and every fall from grace can be redeemed.

The entire album is suffused with that sense of hope in the face of despair. It’s a product of mature and apparently hard-won insight. The CD is billed as Johnson’s “rehab” record (he recently quit drinking), and it comes on the heels of the deaths of some of his close friends. It would be stretching things to say that Johnson finds or is even seeking joy here, but he sounds reconciled to the world. He doesn’t belittle or belabor the pain and struggle of living, but he sounds like he suspects it might all be worth it. Some of the songs are literally funereal (one is called “Requiem”), but they are neither angry nor embittered.

The sole cover on the album is “Deliver Me from My Enemies”, originally recorded by Jamaican reggae artist Yabby You. Johnson transforms the song into a post-grunge spiritual, maintaining its prayerful soulfulness. Like Dante’s narrator, Johnson has been through some dark woods and made his share of fiery descents. Now he’s looking up. It makes for some surprisingly rich and affecting work.