Life has really turned upside down since my last post…
First off: Maddie and I are doing well and our families are both safe and healthy. Covid has been a strange time for us. The music industry here in LA has been severely clobbered, especially touring. But (outside of our creative projects) we work primarily in marketing and label services, which have been thriving. So we are doing well.
Back on February 28th, we played our album release show at The Resident in downtown LA. The room was packed and a lot of special people were in attendance! My sister even flew down from WA (garbed in her vintage Lucid-era JS hoodie) and I saw Skrillex hanging out in the back of the room. The band played amazingly and it was so much fun. Brad Dickert slayed the drums, Alan Sosa slayed the guitar, Maddie Elyse slapped the bass while she sang along, and my old pal Adal Wiley brought something special with his keys, samples, and dancing. We played a fun combo of new songs off Valkyrie and older, classic Johnny songs like “Escape”, “Stain”, and “The Devil has the Best Tunes”. It felt like a very special night… oh and I hit the high note at the end of ‘Cleopatra’, so I was happy about that. Haha.
I thought that our album release show was the start of something new… we planned on performing more around LA to promote. We were putting together tour plans for the west coast and the PNW. But then Covid hit…
At first, I think we were all caught unaware and unsure how long it would last. I took it as an opportunity to relax and sorta catch my breath. But before too long it became clear that the music world as we knew it had changed and wouldn’t be going back to normal for a long time. Maybe never.
I stopped posting on social media for a long time. It just felt inappropriate - what with everything that has occurred since - to post some sort of ‘look at me and my weird prog rock project’. Even writing this blog is a bit strange to me. But I wanted to let those who have reached out know: we’re doing great and there’s a lot of new music being prepared for 2021.
Like a lot of my musician friends, I’ve been making Covid Records haha. Johnny Stranger’s Album #6 is nearly done. I’d say it’s at the 80% mark. I have one more song to finish tracking all the guitars/keys and then I’ll be recording vocals for the entire thing. I’m very happy with how it’s all coming together. The majority of the songs on this next record were written back when I was living in Boston, long before my life in LA began. These songs are very special to me and contain some of my personal favorite songwriting that I’ve done. They’re also connected to a tumultuous time in my life. I was recently explaining some of the song themes and what was happening in my life at the time and my best friend/partner David remarked, “Damn. That’s dark.” I laughed.
Finishing the album is just the beginning though. Being an indie musician means releasing a massive amount of content. We’ve been planning out something that is - for us - a real step up from what we’ve been able to do before. Having this covid time has allowed us to slow down and really put some thought into what we’re doing. Personally, one of my greatest pleasures with JS is being hit up by fans about the music… Hopefully we’ll be seeing more and more opportunities for outreach.
I miss playing shows so much, but it looks like that’s off the table for a little while. But that’ll just give us more time to really share the story behind the next album online. So stay tuned. There’s a whole lot coming.
Oh, and one last thing. I get asked all the time about our old albums, especially ‘Lucid’. I will definitely be re-releasing those original 4 albums, I just haven’t decided exactly how to do that. One more outlandish idea was to do a 6-CD box set (the 4 albums, an album of B-Sides, and an album of live stuff), but I’m not sure it makes sense to get a CD box set made when so few people have CD players anymore. I can always just release them digitally but I still want to do something a bit special. If you have any ideas, let me know.
Stay safe,
Peter