Daniel Johnston:
Discovered, Covered: The Late, Great Daniel Johnston [compilation and tribute]
[Gammon; 2004]The very existence of a combination career retrospective/tribute album to Daniel Johnston, one of the great underground successes in the annals of independent music, presents a paradox: The same universal acknowledgement of honesty in his music that so often leads to an intense personal association with Johnston’s oeuvre also invariably leads to an almost possessively purist attitude toward most of his work. It’s ironic that a man often described as "the most unpretentious artist of our generation" has, in displaying no discernible artifice in his music, inspired a type of deep-felt admiration amongst his devotees that approaches exclusive worship.
Johnston never wanted to be mythologized; he only wanted others to share and experience the music that he created so honestly and prolifically. His earliest career success resulted from handing out free cassettes of his home recordings (including the recently re-released Songs of Pain and More Songs of Pain) to anyone who wanted them, and whisperings of his mental instability, childish fetishes, and mysterious home life aided his rapid rise to local, and subsequently national, celebrity. But if a certain percentage of his following initially consisted of scenester rubberneckers intrigued by the possibility of an "outsider" peepshow, such sentiment has been gradually stamped out by the sheer quality and magnitude of Johnston’s career output. It’s no surprise that many contributors fervently praise his work in the album’s liners, and comparably safe interpretations of Johnston’s material would be a reasonable defense mechanism for most artists to embrace.
There is, of course, a nagging suspicion that, given uninhibited freedom of expression and access to high fidelity recording equipment, many popular artists might actually improve on some of Johnston’s originals, which were often recorded in embryonic stages of the songwriting process, and were sometimes melodically hindered by the same lo-fi recording techniques that simultaneously made the songs so endearing. It turns out, though, that most artists meet Johnston somewhere in the middle, extending and expanding his raw musical ideas while supplanting his inimitable delivery with their own established voices. The resulting covers, combined with a second disc of the originals, form a kaleidoscopic portrait of a challenging and beloved songwriter, constructed earnestly by the many artists touched and influenced by his music.
Teenage Fanclub & Jad Fair’s opener "My Life Is Starting Over Again" is a dead ringer for Johnston’s weary assertion of renewal, and establishes a pattern of tactful mimicry employed frequently on the album– particularly by low-profile artists. Prominent artists are inherently more recognizable, but are usually tasteful in their choices. Beck’s "True Love Will Find You in the End" translates the underlying sadness of Johnston’s naked optimism into home-fried Sea Change-style country. Guster racks up a few needed points of indie cred with a sunny cover of "The Sun Shines Down on Me", and The Flaming Lips & Sparklehorse predictably cut straight to the charming naivete of "Go", one of Johnston’s most endearing ballads.
The only tracks that substantially falter are either overly ambitious or fail to adequately recognize Johnston’s music on its own terms. In the former category, Death Cab for Cutie stumbles with an overlong version of "Dream Scream"– Ben Gibbard is situated too far to the "adorable" side of Johnston’s naive/disturbed dichotomy, and his sweet vocal interpretation unwisely eschews Johnston’s creepy heavy breathing for genuine boyish charm. Calvin Johnson simply approaches "Sorry Entertainer" from the wrong angle: His decision to remove the song’s crucial hook– a demonic jack-in-the-box "Peter Gunn" riff– robs it of its propulsive nervous energy. TV on the Radio take a major risk tackling the immortal "Walking the Cow", and unfortunately, fall flat. Tunde Adebimpe’s multi-tracked vocals and tepid falsetto interpretation of the song’s climax ("Really don’t know how I came here/ Really don’t know why I’m staying here"), along with a plodding piano approximation of Johnston’s furiously ham-fisted chord organ arrangement, pale in comparison to the original’s vivid starkness.
Several tracks, however, come close to surpassing the limited scope of their progenitors. Clem Snide turns "Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievience" into a breezy pop number without sacrificing the song’s complex fusion of Christian guilt and spiritual affirmation. Bright Eyes’ "Devil Town" captures the central despondency of Johnston’s paranoid vampire fantasy, while fleshing out the original a cappella arrangement with spacious alt-country flourishes. And Tom Waits adds his own blown-out ape shrieks and guttural blues delivery to Johnston’s sprawling film synopsis/personal analysis "King Kong", striking the perfect balance between the two artists’ distinctly separate but comparably mythological personas.
The album concludes with the previously unreleased "Rock This Town", from Johnston’s upcoming Lost & Found. The track is Johnston’s own telling assessment of his general worth as an artist: In the song, Johnston takes his guitar to the "heavy metal store," preaches the Golden Rule, and is promptly dubbed the "laugh of the human race." However, Discovered, Covered squarely refutes his emblematic self-deprecation. That Daniel Johnston’s music has sincerely moved so many notable artists is a stunning testament to the undeniable power of his life’s work, which, contrary to the compilation’s sardonic title, continues to inspire new generations of followers.
– David Moore, September 24, 2004