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Check out this amazing cover from Lana Del Rey. It’s mostly two chiming notes played repeatedly, Johnston insisting that “ some things last a lifetime” – which could be his mantra when you consider his ongoing health battles and lifelong creativity he was reportedly working on an album before he died. Taken from the same album, this delicate number features piano but remains almost as slight and fragile as ‘Devil Town’.
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The track was reimagined as a jazz number on the 2010 compilation ‘Beam Me Up’, but nothing can beat the otherworldly original. “I was living in a devil town,” he sings, continuing, “ All friends were vampires / Didn’t know they were vampires / Turns out I was a vampire myself”. ‘Devil Town’ (1990)Ĭlocking in at one minute and four seconds, this a cappella track captures everything that was unique about Daniel Johnson. Here, though, are 13 great songs from this wonderful, gifted musician. So it can be daunting to parse his sprawling back-catalogue, which consists of 17 albums.
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The Devil and Daniel Johnston provided Johnston with another renaissance a late noughties blogosphere hungry for alternative sounds ate up the glossily produced (by his standards) 2009 album ‘Is And Always Was’, overseen by Jason Falkner. Johnston signed to Atlantic records, working with Butthole Surfers ‘ Paul Leary to produce ‘Fun’, the 1994 record that beefed up his minimalist sound, the result a collection of clattering garage punk. Kurt Cobain in his Daniel Johnston t-shirt Johnston became aligned with the ‘90s countercultural movement – epitomised by alternative bands such as Nirvana and Sonic Youth and filmmakers such as Harmony Korine, who included Johnston’s austere song ‘Casper The Friendly Ghost’ on the unflinching Kids – which signified that the weirdos had infiltrated the mainstream. When Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt depicting the artwork for one of Johnston’s tapes, ‘Hi, How are you’, that legend took off. He was the least likely person on Earth to get popular – and he did.” That was the only time I saw that happen where someone was like, ‘I’m gonna get famous’ and he just kind of made himself. Johnston’s friend Brian Beattie told the paper yesterday: “He was first a legend in his own mind, then he became a real legend. Indeed in the 1980s he became a local hero in his home town of Austin when he handed out homemade tapes of his lo-fi music, which he also dropped off at the offices of The Austin Chronicle, the newspaper that broke the news of his death. But that doesn’t mean that he lacked agency. His bipolar disorder and lifelong mental health battles saw to that.
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The artist, who has died of a heart attack, aged just 58, was vulnerable.