Daniel Johnston: Hi, How Are You?

With only 335k monthly listeners on Spotify, Daniel Johnston is hardly a household name. However, there is a reason why Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain labelled him as ‘the best songwriter on Earth’ in 1992, and frequently sported a t-shirt featuring Johnston’s cover for his 1983 album ‘Hi, How Are You’. There’s also a reason why many artists today, including Lana Del Rey and Matt Groening, cite him as a major inspiration for their work.

Daniel Johnston was born on 22 January 1961 in California; the youngest 5 five children in a devout Christian family. He grew up in West Virginia and began playing music aged 9.

"I used to bang around on the piano, making up horror movie themes."

A self-taught pianist and guitarist, he was a very artistic child and studied Art at Kent State University. In the late 70s he began recording his songs, and by the time of his move to Austin, Texas in 1983, he had already recorded three-hour long albums (Songs of Pain, Don’t Be Scared, The What of Whom) on cassette using a $59 Sanoyo mono boom box which he designed and drew the covers for, as he did with the majority of his cassette albums.

Upon moving to Austin, he continued to record music on the same boom box and gained a small following by handing out cassettes on the street while working at McDonalds. In September 1983, while living on his sister’s floor, Johnston recorded the album ‘Hi, How Are You’, which he labelled as unfinished because it was not the same length as his other albums.

Despite the album containing one of his most successful songs, ‘Walking the Cow’, it is not just the music that makes this album the most recognisable of Johnston’s 34-year career. The alien frog-like character on the album’s cover, named ‘Jeremiah the Innocent’ by Johnston, would go on to become one of the images most associated with the musician. Johnston painted a mural depicting Jeremiah the Innocent in Austin, 1993, on the wall of Sound Exchange record store. The mural remains there today, despite the shop closing in 2003. Most recently, the building was home to a Thai restaurant called ‘Thai, How are You’, in homage.

Over the next 7 years, Johnston released four more albums and in 1985 was featured in an episode of the MTV program ‘The Cutting Edge’, which helped to increase his popularity beyond Texas. There is a childlike playfulness to a lot of his music, typified by his erratic strumming, rash banging of the piano, distinctive voice, and the occasional mistake adding a human element. This is heavily juxtaposed with the emotional intensity of his lyrics. Perhaps the most emotional of all his songs is ‘Story of an Artist’, (on his 1982 album ‘Don’t be Scared,’) which chronicles his struggles to fit in with society’s expectations while creating his art. It is a deeply autobiographical account of the way Johnston felt about himself and his decisions.

"Everyone and friends and family/ Saying, “Hey! Get a job!”/ “Why do you only do that only?”/ “Why are you so odd?"

This emotional intensity was somewhat influenced by the mental health problems that plagued Johnston throughout his life. He was diagnosed with both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, which hindered his career and sometimes put his life at risk. A 2005 documentary called ‘The Devil and Daniel Johnston’ illuminates his mental health struggles on the world stage.

In 1990, while flying back from a music festival to his childhood home in West Virginia, Johnston had a severe psychotic episode in which he believed he had become Casper the Friendly Ghost and then removed the key from the plane’s ignition, proceeding to throw it outside. His father, who was flying the plane, managed to crash land and miraculously, they both walked away with only minor injuries. As a result of this episode, Johnston was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

The same year, Johnston also released his most successful album ‘1990’ which included the songs ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’ and ‘Some Things Last a Long Time’, which was covered by Lana Del Rey in 2015 to accompany a documentary about his life. The release and success of this album is phenomenal, more so than the rest of his recordings due to the obvious mental turmoil he experienced when writing and recording it.

In 1992, Johnston, who never sought fame, gained the most public exposure of his career and became a cult sensation when Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain was pictured wearing a T-shirt featuring the cover of ‘Hi, How are You?’ This event, although it happened while Johnston was still in psychiatric hospital, sparked a bidding war between labels for the up-and-coming Johnston. He eventually signed with Atlantic Records, whom he recorded one album with. ‘Fun’ (1994) was a commercial failure. Despite the album containing some popular songs, (particularly ‘Life in Vain’) it distanced itself from Johnston’s earlier work; the professionally produced songs losing the ‘homemade’ aspect that made his previous records so unique. He was dropped by the label in 1996 and it wasn’t until 1999 that he released his next album.

Johnston continued to release music across the turn of the millennium. His popularity was waning but that didn’t matter to him. In 2005, ‘The Devil and Daniel Johnston’ documentary renewed attention on his career, leading to the release of ‘Welcome to My World’ in 2006, an album comprised of re-recordings of previous songs.

A short documentary was then released in 2015 titled ‘Hi, How Are You, Daniel Johnston?’ with Lana Del Rey and Mac Miller as executive producers. In 2017, with his health deteriorating, he announced that he would stop performing live and moved back into his parent’s house. At each stop of his five-show farewell tour, he was supported by a group or artist who had been influenced by his music.

On September 11, 2019, Daniel Johnston died of a suspected heart attack, aged 58. His death sparked an outpouring of responses, and heaps of flowers were left under his ‘Jeremiah the Innocent’ mural in Austin.

Daniel Johnston was the archetype of the tortured artist. A man with incredible, unique song-writing talent and a source of inspiration for many artists. However, with his career hindered by persistent mental health struggles, he never truly received the international acclaim his work deserved. Not that this bothered Johnston; he never sought the limelight.

As he writes in ‘Story of an Artist’:

"Some would try for fame and glory, others aren’t so bold."

By James Woodward

Image Credit: Phillip Kromer via Flickr and Paul Hudson