Heart-Tugging Loneliness Center Of Johnston’s Music

Most songwriters, Freedy Johnston included, love to hear an audience sing the words to their songs.

Yet when Johnston sang a ballad with the chorus “I can hear the laughs when they find I’ve fallen down again,” and a friendly New York audience joined in, he choked up and stopped.

The song dredged up too many personal memories. He couldn’t continue.

Johnston is not the only one who takes his music seriously. Rolling Stone critics named him songwriter of the year following his last album, “This Perfect World” (1994), recognizing the sturdiness of his concise, pop-rock songs. His new album, the just-released “Never Home,” shows even more growth.

Johnston is a Kansas native who moved to New York City a decade ago to pursue his craft, but the prairie never left his music.

Set to a plaintive lyric, his tenor is the very voice of heart-tugging loneliness. It’s a beautiful instrument that brings out the sadness of many of his songs and his frequently performed cover version of “Wichita Lineman.”

And it leads, inevitably, to the topic he seems to address most in interviews: Are you really that bummed out, Freedy? “I really don’t know how to answer that question and I get it a lot - ‘Why are you so sad?”’ he said.

“It’s a really hard question to answer because it’s not always clear to me why I write many of these songs and why they come out the way they do.”

His life doesn’t seem depressing - he politely interrupts an interview for a phone call to firm up a dinner date with a former girlfriend - but Johnston, who’s about to head out on tour with Shawn Colvin, said he seems to understand sadness a little more than happiness.

The songs on “Never Home” show a wide range of emotions, including the soaring love song “You Get Me Lost.” The narrator in another romantic song, “I’m Not Hypnotized,” is careful to keep both feet on the ground.

Johnston is able, through his songs, to tackle unusual topics with keen observations that leave just enough to the imagination.

In “Gone to See the Fire,” it slowly dawns on a woman, partly through observing him with a cigarette, that her boyfriend is an arsonist. “You’ve got to tell me why we’re the first to arrive,” the narrator sings at the scene of a fire.

The song “If it’s True” tells about a young man in a small town who feels his world closing in when his girlfriend suspects she’s pregnant. The singer wonders if he’s fit to be a father.

“If I don’t believe my own advice, I could never fool a child,” Johnston sings. “And they won’t forgive you once they see you’ve tried.”

Johnston described his new song, “He Wasn’t Murdered,” as modeled after a Raymond Carver short story, a jumble of lyrics he had to work to edit.

“It’s another lonely guy in a car, which is definitely a theme on this record,” he said. “I guess I’m from the Midwest and I really know what it’s like.”

The song “Hotel Seventeen” is yet another one inspired by the experience of Kurt Cobain, although that influence isn’t obvious. The lyrics build ominously, ending with: “Now you only call me when you know you can’t be seen. Underneath your blanket with a loaded magazine.”

Johnston struggled over that image before going with it, worried that it might be perceived as hack work.

Noted alternative rocker Butch Vig produced Johnston’s last album. This time, Johnston worked with producer Danny Kortchmar, associated with Carole King’s “Tapestry” and known for his membership in the 1970s California rock scene.

Kortchmar encouraged Johnston to work on his writing to make his songs clear to the listener.

“He stressed that he wanted to be able to understand the lyrics right away, which was a change for me because in the past I wouldn’t worry so much whether somebody else got it,” he said.

“The hardest thing to do is to make sense in a song,” he said. “The hardest thing to do is make sense in a poetic way.”

Like many writers, Johnston weaves personal experiences, observation and imagination into his songs. Rarely can a song be traced as directly to his life as “Trying to Tell You I Don’t Know,” which talked about his decision to sell some land he inherited in Kansas to subsidize his musical career.

Johnston has been described as reluctant to talk about the origins of his songs, but admits to enjoying it when songwriters he admires, such as Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, dissect their own material.

“I wonder sometimes why anybody would really care,” he said. “It seems so boring because I do it all the time. I don’t feel like it’s demystifying something that should be mysterious.”