Somebody We Still Know

“It’s been a total whirlwind, a lot of stuff consolidated in a small space of time,” says the now 24-year-old singer. “I think after touring for close to two years non-stop really, and doing a whole lot of stuff with Gotye as well, I was pretty ready to just find one place to stay in for a bit, and I guess I chose that to be California.”

And so we arrive at Johnson’s second album, The Golden Echo, which comes out Friday. It’s an album of varied textures; a hodgepodge of influences, collaborators and ambitions; an album that says that Johnson has arrived, and she’ll be doing things her own way.

This time around, Johnson moved from Melbourne to LA, where she found herself a little sanctuary away from the distracting noise of the Hollywood high-life.

“I found a little place that was actually a farm with a bunch of chickens that all roam free-range and actually a lot of sheep that all hung out in a yard that I had access to and that’s where I wrote a bunch of the songs for this album. Then I met Rich Costey who co-produced the record with me. This is a snapshot of the last year-and-a-half that I’ve spent here in LA, and it obviously draws from some of the experiences that I had from being a part of that whole ride on the road, travelling around the world. It also explores some of the deeper sentiments that I’ve rediscovered in myself over the last year as well, the kind of undertone of a more spiritual context to this record as well and a connection to nature again and some references to the great mythology of Narcissus as well, which is where a lot of the imagery comes from. There’s a lot.”

"..in one sense, a lot of chaos in my life, going to the studio and collaborating with so many people and just working so hard on the technical aspects – I was very involved with production and engineering on this record"

Johnson is breathless when she finishes her explanation; the hurried pace with which she flings words through the phone seems to correlate perfectly with both the sound of the record, and the rate at which is her career is moving. She quickly goes on to explain that the process was not so far removed from when she was working on Vows.

“I was still working out of a bedroom when I was working here. It’s not really that far from Hollywood at all, it’s right in the heart of LA but it just happens to be this place hidden away from the world and I had this little sanctuary that I could come back to.

“I guess I had two extremes where there was, in one sense, a lot of chaos in my life, going to the studio and collaborating with so many people and just working so hard on the technical aspects – I was very involved with production and engineering on this record – and I would sort of be immersed in a canvas of ideas when I was in the studio, but when I came back to work at home it was a very still and contemplative space with animals around me.”

But the album is different, because this time around Johnson had so much more at her disposal, including high profile collaborators such as our own Daniel Johns, Muse’s Matt Bellamy and QOTSA’s Michael Shuman.

“I guess the difference working on this album was I got to work with some of best musicians in the world in terms of Jon Robinson – who worked with Michael Jackson – and some of my favourite musicians, and in some ways I had access to a level of instrumentation and technology that was really far along. I still use a lot of lo-fi instruments on this record, I still wrote a lot of it on iPad, eight-tracks and things like that, so in some ways it was still from the same place that Vows was written from. My approach, my process might have been different but the intention and the spirit that it came from was similar, y’know.”

Success has offered Johnson more than just an opportunity to muck about with better audio equipment though. 

“It’s definitely had an effect on elements of my personal life, mainly positive effects. I definitely feel like I’ve got to meet an incredible amount of people through [Somebody That I Used To Know]. I’ve got to travel to all the corners of the world and definitely had that platform to more direct access to some of the people that I’ve had dreams of working with.

“There’s changes to your lifestyle, obviously dealing with things like not being quite as anonymous as you might have felt before, but again that’s kind of been something – I lived on a farm in LA, do you know what I mean? I think that if you lock yourself away you get into an environment that’s very much about solitude and the work then you don’t get so wrapped up in any of the celebrity stuff that can go on in Hollywood. I think it’s just about the choices you make. I still feel that not all that much has changed for me in terms of the way I feel and go about making music and the kind of person that I am, it’s just that I have the blessing now of my music having reached more people.”

And The Golden Echo too presents an opportunity to reach even more people. Johnson says she wrote about love and moments of revelation, about the world outside of herself.

“Some of it is from a personal perspective, and some of it [is from] everything: experiences around me or maybe experiences that I hope to have one day or have at some point felt in the past.

“I’ve just always been seeking answers to my cosmic significance or my spiritual significance and I find that music is the language that I do a lot of that searching. I ask a lot of questions about what our purpose is here and whether or not there is non-conditional love out there and how do we access that and search within ourselves to find that, and in other people, or even in nature?”

Johnson says she pulls inspiration from the feminine and the masculine, and from artists like St Vincent and Kate Bush. She is reluctant to be boxed into the “girly” musical trope.

“I feel like I draw from feminine and masculine. What I really like about music is the way that you can fuse perspectives and fuse sounds from unassuming worlds. I think when I’m writing beats or I’m coming up with bass lines or elements that are a bit more aggressive, there’s a toughness that I bring, you evoke more of a masculine energy to do those things.

“And then what I enjoy is coming on top of that with some feminine melodies and dreamy and floaty elements that adhere more with a womanly perspective. There are artists to me that do that very well, like St Vincent for example, or even Kate Bush; I think these female artists add an amazing toughness to some of their work, didn’t feel like it was always really girly, it had a mix of both and I find that an interesting place.

When asked about the challenges of being a female singer-songwriter, especially one who is so young and so involved with the production side, Johnson acknowledges that obstacle exist, but admits she isn’t troubled by them.

“I think oftentimes female artists have been a minority, especially if you’re a producer, and I’m very ably involved in the technical elements of this record, the production, even partly in the engineering, [I’m] involved right up to the mixing process.

“I think that in those contexts you’re in the minority and that be sometimes a challenge because you’re not always seen to be maybe as skilled as men in the industry. I feel that that’s a misconception; there’s some amazing woman engineers that I’ve met and I really feel strongly about that being something I want to explore further... For the most part I feel that there’s actually an amazing surge of female artists at the moment that are rising up and having a lot of respect shown [to them], so it’s a really great time to be a woman in the music industry right now.”