The second single off Mechanical clouds is out and hot damn! The reception has been nothing short of astounding.
First off, major thanks to my distributor KMG and Ryan Vaughn for all their hard work! They’ve landed both these last singles on Spotify’s All New Rock and Apple Music’s New in Rock. Both are awesome places for the songs to be heard by a huge audience.
January Knives has also gotten some love in the press, thanks to Mikel from Purple Bite! Here are a couple of my favorite quotes…
“Relentlessly zealous Johnny Stranger’s latest single “January Knives” ignites a spirit of perseverance amidst its volatile riffs. Brandishing their electrifying rock with the kind of dazzling rancor they’ve become loved for, the band hammers out the song’s anthemic and blistering racket into something chaotically hopeful.”
“It’s a head banging good time complete with thrilling pitch-black basslines under punch-to-the gut vocals rising with fervor and warmth.”
Overall, I couldn’t be happier with the reception so far! Coming out of Covid, I wasn’t sure if we had lost too much momentum to really come out with a bang. But these releases have exceeded my wildest expectations.
So a bit about the song itself…
Most of the songs on ‘Mechanical Clouds’ were written when I was living in Boston. But I always like to add two or three new songs to every record I’m making, to shake things up and inject a little newness into the process. ‘January Knives’ was one of those songs.
I wrote it as a bit of a retrospective on my first month of moving to Boston. I’ve been talking about this other places, but I guess I should tell the story again.
It’s January 2008. Johnny Stranger just spent the last two years working out butts off in Washington State, our hometown. We had released two self-produced LPs and we were all very passionate. I decided I wanted to move out to Boston with the other members (they were attending music school out there), so I packed up my life and moved across the country.
Things went sour pretty quick, and the other members left the group for greener pastures. I was suddenly on my own in a new city. I had to start over.
‘January Knives’ is written about those early months of wandering around the city, dejected and lost. At the time, I was wrapped up in the negative emotions. But now - with the beauty of hindsight - I see the experience as extremely foundational for who I have become. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
There’s a lot of hope in ‘January Knives’. It was sort of raising the Johnny Stranger flag. I’m not quitting and I’m going to bring out all my knives. Slow.
We have a third single coming soon and a fourth after that. The full Mechanical Clouds LP is coming in November 2022. We are in the process of rehearsing for our LP release show (announcing soon) and preparing some really exciting merch.
In other news, I’m meeting weekly with Yan Perchuk and tracking vocals for album #7. The sessions have been super productive, except for the sessions where we’ve been so engrossed in our conversation that we don’t record anything. Haha. But the goal is to finish the vocals by the end of September, mix in the fall/winter, and have album #7 completed in January 2023. Then I’ll have a few months of sharing around with industry folks before we finally release it.
Looking ahead even further into the future… This last weekend, I got a terrific chunk of work done on the album #8 demos. We have 17 songs to work on before we shape it down to a sleeker record. Still lots more work to do, but everything is on schedule.
Keep your eyes peeled for show announcements, merch announcements, and more music. All coming soon! Oh, and the original 4 JS albums are all being released on Bandcamp starting early 2023. So it’s gonna be a wild year coming up.