A track-by-track look at Jack Johnson’s new record, Sleep Through The Static, another mellow trip into capturing love and encapsulating life in the present TRACK 1: All At Once
The record opens with a warm, drizzling guitar that quickly dives into waves of vintage Jack Johnson pop balladry. Jack’s lyrics posit his heart’s frailty, his holistic beliefs and the interwoven horrific and hopeful possibilities of our time and place on Earth. This is the stamp on Jack’s newest time capsule.
Jack’s conflicted, is the thing. Jack sees many different opinions about global warming and the like. Jack sees flaws in our collective nature (“There’re so many things / that we got too proud of”); but Jack believes we have a great opportunity to prove ourselves (“There’s a world we’ve never seen / there’s still hope between the dreams”). And because he’s feeling his mortality a bit (and the fleetingness of our chance to fix our habitual nature), ultimately Jack is pretty overwhelmed, as he beautifully elucidates in the closest thing to a chorus from this sweet, humble and melancholic pipe dream of a song: “Sometimes it feels like a heart / is no place to be singing from at all.”
TRACK 2: Sleep Through The Static
A supple organ yawns in from the end of “All At Once,” dropped in on by a jaunty fleck of electric guitar bounding over a soft, strolling bass line. Jack’s latest soft-spoken anti-war rant is full of crafty, slo-mo zingers and probing wordplay, painting vivid observations about American wartime culture and, more specifically, the blind social bolstering that’s undoubtedly responsible for that sour taste in his mouth.
TRACK 3: Hope
A bouncy, sway-coaxing rundown of the lumps you take and the things you’re supposed to learn from living life as a hoper—which, being human, we can’t really help. (As the chorus warns: “You’d better hope you’re not alone.”) It’s the record’s first upbeat song (complete with easy-to-sing-a-long mmm hmm hmm’s), brandishing Zach Gill’s peppy keys and hints of what Jack refers to as “more electric” in the Brushfire Records-produced “Making of
Sleep Through The Static,” which you can watch here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBKuymi_Wkk
Watch a live (er, sorta) music video of “Hope,” recorded at Brushfire Records’ sustainable studio in Los Angeles:
