Not a lot actually occurs in Leah Grams Johnson’s masterful debut album State of Grace. Most of the her narratives are incomplete and dedicate only a few lines to events and background. Instead, we get internal monologues, probing questions from an omniscient narrator, and glimpses of natural disasters and characters who don’t quite seem of this time and place. It’s a fever dream of intense thoughts, compelling emotions, and fears and fantasies realised. Even by the standards of a Berkeley graduate, Johnson can write folk songs like fine art. The emotions and anxieties of her characters are so incredibly clear and, through her words and performances, transferable. The intensity on display is probably a good look inside the mind of an artist who seems serene.
“I can sometimes appear a bit stoic or quiet, and what’s beneath the surface is a whole lot more than what’s on the outside. I had a friend once refer to me as a little pressure cooker,” said Johnson, agreeing with the statement.“A lot of people are that way. I’m fortunate enough to have an outlet. In the privacy of writing a song, you can let it out.”
The way she breaks down a glance or a few seconds of action to their atomic components should give a listener a good sense of that pressure, as well as her atomic precision and eye for detail.
“I’ve always been motivated in my writing by trying to capture a really intense but simple moment in time,” said Johnson. “I think an example would be the moment of a car crash. The time that you’re losing control of the wheel before the car actually crashes, seconds, so much can occur in the mind and the body and the spirit. Putting those moments under a microscope and trying to understand them to the fullest is interesting to me. I think it reveals a lot about the human experience and psyche.”
Johnson may have revealed more about her own psyche than she originally realised.
“In writing fiction, I think it’s inevitable that we put a little piece of ourselves into every character, even if it’s just a strong sense of empathy,” said Johnson. “That is one of the things that drives me to create, how much emotion and movement and life is going on just beneath the veil. That’s an outlet to do something with that so it doesn’t sink you.”
The women on the album, whether they’re meant to resemble Johnson or not, yearn to be free. “From a long line of women who stayed/she’s dreaming of a long highway,” she sings in “Maria Weaves,” one of several tracks that features a woman escaping or dreaming of a life away from home. “Take me with you when you go,” a young woman sings in “Highwayman.” The thread was not intentional, but Johnson had an explanation.
“I had a mother who died when she was 52. I was 16. I know she loved being a mother and she was a beautiful person who also had a lot of intensity on the inside,” said Johnson. “As her daughter, as an equally perceptive, sensitive being, I took it all in, which included her struggles as a wife and a mother. What I believe she felt like were her sacrifices, what she lost in the process, and what she gained too. But as a kid, you can’t really decipher those things. You take all the blame on yourself. I think some of that comes out through these female characters in my songwriting. I think I’m always trying to liberate my mother, and maybe speak to parts of myself that fear a sense of entrapment.”
Johnson shows the sort of love for her characters fitting of the fact that they may stand in for people like her mother. Some of the songs are essentially a message from a guardian angel. As a character goes through something, Johnson talks them through it, addressing them directly. “What will you say when she asks why her daddy lives far away?” she enquires of the protagonist of “New Life,” essentially putting to voice the young woman’s worries. “He will never hurt you again,” she sings later, putting her at ease.
“I really care about my characters as if they’re real. I feel like I’m almost their guardian. It’s a service job to be a songwriter. You have to do your best to give a voiceless entity a voice,” said Johnson, citing “New Life” as an example of how seriously she takes her craft. “When I was recording the vocals for that song, I had this really ethereal out of body experience. My eyes were closed, I did a couple takes, by the second or third take I had this full sense that I was standing behind this young woman when she finally reached the coast. Maybe the sun was rising and it was dawn because she had driven all night, she was standing barefoot in the sand before this waves and the emotional release of her relief, she had mended, and she was free. I felt like when I was singing, I was right behind her and whispering into her ear.”
Some of the questions Johnson poses to her characters may ultimately be questions she’d like to answer. “You want to know God like you want to feel love/what if they’re one and the same? So below as above,” she sings in “Grace,” speaking to a the lone explicitly male protagonist on the album. Johnson grew up in the South, though felt more detached from spirituality than her neighbours. She currently describes herself as faithful, though not a part of organised religion.
“I was really struggling with faith. I always had a sense of faith beneath the surface and I felt like I lost it, and that was a really painful process,” said Johnson. “It makes sense that many of those songs reflect coming back to it, maybe in a different way.”
It’s also a rare song on State of Grace that goes beyond telling a story and has something more pointed to say.
“I know a lot of people who have faced similar struggles and attachments of shame when it comes to understanding love and the idea of God and how those two things might be presented as different or synonymous depending on who you’re talking to,” said Johnson, who clearly falls in the synonymous camp
“Ride” is the most mystical of her adventures, and describes a real chapter in her life.
“A couple years ago I was consistently riding this senior horse named Django on this beautiful property out in Tennessee where I normally live,” said Johnson. “I would ride bareback and we would go out into the Tennessee hills and woods and just ride for hours. There was this gorgeous stream somewhere on the property and that was always my destination. We would go there and it was always so hot in the summertime. He would be a little anxious at first, but eventually we would just stand in the stream and the sounds of the birds and the setting was so gorgeous and it felt like my sacred place.”
Or as the song puts it: “I left my horse and kneeled in a clearing in the woods/a great weight upon my back my body understood/to go find a place to pray away from onlooking eyes/to lay my burdens down/then get back on my horse and ride.” It’s not just that Johnson gets something out of her faith; she feels drawn to it in some way. It’s a more intimate connection with a higher power than most worship songs can achieve through their more conventional means.
Johnson doesn’t offer much closure to most of her stories. Making sure the woman in “New Life” knew she’d be okay is the exception to the rule. The songs like “Grace” and “Highwayman” that end with a desire but not an action are even relatively closed up. Songs like “Recede” and “Dustbowl” deal with natural disasters and have no neat conclusion. “Starpass” is a song in which anxiety turns into the return of a horse without its rider, but it stops there. The dread is captured and the resolution isn’t important.
“I think my preference is to give just clarity to tell the story without having to tie a bow on everything,” said Johnson.
“If we draw too much of an ending and a conclusion, we can limit that possibility of a listener getting to relate their own humanity with another person’s”
The constant unease about everything from being stuck to the world falling apart is perhaps what Johnson means when she said she’s a pressure cooker. Even on the concept of time and maturing, the anxiety takes hold: “Until today you’ve been sleeping/now it feels like years are running out.”
“Life is vulnerable, and I think that we’re living in really intense times more than ever,” said Johnson. “People feel perhaps especially vulnerable right now. If art isn’t being used as a means to put voice to that, then what good is art? I would hope that I’m brave enough as a writer to make myself vulnerable and lets others feel seen and known, have three and a half minutes of emotional catharsis.”
Somehow lost in all this discussion of lyrics is the fact that Johnson can perform her sorts of stories well. The quiet intensity, vulnerability, and even sadness that these songs require are well within her range. She excels lyrically when applying microanalysis to a moment, and vocally when falling to a near whisper. It would seem as though she’s the folk equivalent of a method actor.
“One of the ways is to remove the idea of performance. I was really nervous about the singing part of making this record,” said Johnson. “I didn’t want to be in a performative mindset. I felt like that would be a block from singing authentic. My requirement was that I wanted to feel my heart when I was singing.”
State of Grace is likely to hold up for a long time to come. Apart from a cross country drive, there’s little evidence the songs occur somewhere in the last century. The instrumentation is acoustic and firmly rooted in folk traditions. The emotions, anxieties, and quiet scenes documented in these songs are the sorts people a century from now could be feeling, perhaps minus the scene in “Starpass.” But in the intensity and recurring themes, I suspect there’s a self portrait done through mosaic. Hopefully, by laying it all out like this, it’s a portrait of a more liberated woman.
Above is the full episode as aired on WUSB’s Country Pocket, including both my interview with Leah Grams Johnson and the songs we discussed, starting with Maria Weaves, which begins an album full of stunning character studies. The interview begins with the second video in the playlist. You can hear the show live alternate Wednesdays at 8am on WUSB 90.1 FM or check the blog to watch it as a YouTube playlist. Visit http://www.WUSB.fm and https://www.leahgramsjohnson.com for more.
