On her debut album Water in a Whale in 2013, Jillette Johnson produced a collection of piano pop anthems that rivaled Regina Spektor’s vocal power and Vanessa Carlton’s impeccable hooks. Everything sounded big, and every line was delivered at a theatrical register. Songs like “Torpedo” and “Flood the Ocean” soared with melodramatic lifts, resonating with Johnson’s potential for arena status. The album propelled Johnson to become a supporting act for the likes of Delta Rae and Mary Lambert, although their tours didn’t quite make the arena circuit.
Soon after, the Nashville-based singer songwriter left the busyness of the road and the bluster of concert venues for the romanticized, if also cliché, experience of living in a cabin in a woods. That indelibly shaped Johnson’s follow-up record, All I Ever See in You Is Me. Without the surfeit of modern day enticements, Johnson stripped down her musical approach, opting to write songs that required little sonic accompaniment, rather than the resounding swells of instruments on Water in a Whale. In her own words, All I Ever See in You Is Me is the album she “always wanted to make”.
This minimalist approach was reinforced by Grammy award-winning producer Dave Cobb. Because Cobb’s recent work with Jason Isbell and Chris Stapleton features scaled back instrumentation to highlight each artist’s songwriting roots, spirited vocal command, and lyrical creativity, it makes sense that Johnson returns to classic piano songwriting on All I Ever See in You Is Me. Recorded at the historic RCA Studio A in Nashville, the album bares Johnson’s emotional depths within sonic simplicity, as she taps into self-possession and self-doubt without overburdening her classic sensibilities with the melodramatic.
Opening song “Bunny” maps the sonic territory that the album inscribes as a whole, firmly planting the stakes of piano that Johnson’s stunning vocals soar around throughout. Lyrically, however, the song projects a much different world. Akin to Sturgill Simpson’s hallucinatory lyrics, Johnson populates her strange world with a “robot army” equipped with “supersonic guns”, as well as with “Madonnas” and “anacondas” — not exactly the world you might expect to emerge from a solitary experience in the woods.
The following track, “Love Is Blind”, returns to the more familiar clime of train-tracks, which Johnson uses to represent self-possession in the face of an embittered past relationship. Embracing a Joni Mitchell-meets-Carole King swagger, the song revels in the interplay between its plasters of piano and sprees of guitar. The song’s climax is the closest the album gets to the more anthemic Water in a Whale, although it does so with a confident vintage feel.
On “Throw Out Your Mirror”, Johnson remains on this track of self-possession, despite the derailing threats of self-doubt. An empowering exploration of self-image written with a 6/8 bounce, Johnson opines about the self-inflicted nature of doubt and encourages her listeners and herself to “Throw out your mirror, and call up your friend / […] See yourself the way they see you / And all of your dreams will come true.” Her use of a mirror as a symbol carries added weight beyond simple self-reflection. As a social critique, it challenges the notion that people, especially women, only have value in the way they look. Johnson offers another feminist declaration on the later “Thumbelina”, in which she asserts “I’m no Thumbelina, I am not your ballerina / You are not going to make me dance for you anymore.”
Johnson takes up other social issues on the album as well. For example, “Flip a Coin”, was written in the aftermath of the mass shooting in San Bernardino in 2015. It explores not only how a culture of fear is engendered by such acts of violence, but also how someone’s snap decisions can forever alter the world. Johnson musically addresses this idea when the chorus unmoors the verses’ straight beat with torrents of chaotic syncopation, drum fills, and dramatic shifts in her vocal register.
A trio of songs on the album’s second half — “In Repair”, “Like You Raised Me”, and “All I Ever See In You Is Me” — all beautifully detail the complex dynamics of interpersonal relationships. With sweeps of piano and deft touches of drums, “In Repair” poignantly captures the pain of being in love with someone who struggles with personal demons.
“Like You Raised Me” paints a thoughtful portrait of Johnson’s parents with strokes of lilting piano and lyrics that seize on the pressures and complexities of her parents’ expectations: “Don’t you see the you in me? / Scares me half to death / I hope to be half that lady.”
On the title track, Johnson delivers a string-laced confessional about how she projects her own vision onto people around her, rather than allowing them to be fully-fledged individuals with their own autonomy.
Despite being alone while writing these songs, Johnson clearly remains invested in probing the complex psychological components of social and familial interaction.
In as much as the album offers evocative songwriting with spirited piano work, a few songs drift into the background. Although there is inherently nothing wrong with songs like “Holiday”, “Not Tonight”, and “I’m Sorry”, these three tracks fail to stand out among a collection of more refined work.
Altogether, Johnson’s All I Ever See in You Is Me moves her from the realm of piano pop stars who rely on larger-than-life hooks to the more refined realm of classic songwriters who capture the depths of human experience with sparse orchestration.