Bethany Johnson - “Down by the Willows”

Bethany and Dallas Johnson made a record of my song “Down by the Willows” which I’m eager to share with you. I’ve known these people for over half my life. In fact, Dallas was running sound for the open mic I made my first performance at in the basement of the Purdue Student Union. Bethany played violin on an early recording of this very song which Wes DeBoy made for us in Muncie, Indiana.

Later, Dallas and Bethany were married and would invite me to their Music Sunday gatherings at the Greene’s where I would learn their songs. Sometimes Benjamin Ezra, The Sears Tower of Folk Music, would be there too. I have warm feelings associated with those memories.

Dallas mixed most of my first album In a Whelming Tide and engineered my second album Living Is Trying.

I heard Bethany and Dallas perform “Down by the Willows” in the side room at The Black Sparrow. It shone like a diamond in my mind. That was back before kids and careers.

Then I started this label Late Bloomer as a home for other people’s sound recordings of some of my compositions. Naturally, Bethany and Dallas were among the first people I thought of to ask to record. They shipped the kids off to Wolcott for a the weekend and invited Andy Dommer and Caleb Benner over to play bass and drums. Caleb played bass on Living Is Trying if you’ll remember.

This family has been interwoven in my life for years and I’m pleased and proud to present this recording to you. It’s a big part of the sound of my youth and now my new adulthood and it feels like home.

Hell yes. Please enjoy.

-John

Summer Nightwind (demo) exclusive for Bandcamp subscribers

I released a demo of my song “Summer Nightwind” to subscribers on bandcamp. If you’d like it, become a monthly supporter for $5, $10, or $25/mo to get access to back catalog material and exclusive demos.

"Left Arm" by Steffen Prentiss Yazvac

LISTEN / DOWNLOAD: bandcamp / iTunes / Spotify / Amazon / youtube

On January 26th, 2021 I released “Left Arm” again. This time it’s Steffen Prentiss Yazvac performing it (please follow him). It’s percussive and Steffen took surprising liberties with the phrasing. His singing, which has always been dynamic, hits a new level here. It’s satisfying to hear Steffen’s take on this song because of our collaboration on Living Is Trying. I presented the idea of that song being the opener on that album and described how I wanted it to sound. Steffen understood it and made it sound just like I had it in my head. That’s been our working relationship since we were kids.

A while ago I started thinking about what other forms I’d like to see some of my songs take. I had some memories from the road of playing songs my friends had written. A “friendship covers” album had always been in the back of my mind. I even started recording some with Steffen once. I decided it would be a good start to ask some of my friends to come up with a recording of one of my songs that resonated with them.

I’m proud of this song and how it’s grown. I feel proud of Steffen as my friend for taking something I made and making it his and making it better. The production is superb. Steffen used a new analog synthesizer and the tone reminds me of a trombone on some parts. His drumming and bass playing dance closely together. The guitar playing oscillates between rock strumming, staccato picking, and delicate grooving. All well placed. Dallas Johnson provides the breaths between on the electric piano.

I hope you enjoy this many times over like I have.

-John

Toss Your Javelin Vinyl Is Here!

Dilated Time Records has released Toss Your Javelin and it's very limited.

If you backed the Kickstarter to make this record, please hang tight! Your copy is priority #1 and it's on the way to you RIGHT NOW from Dilated Time Records along with some other stuff from here in Michigan! You'll remember Ethan's really nice and personalized notes from the last record we did together.

To everyone else, this one is limited to 300 copies. She's beautiful inside and out. The album was really made with vinyl in mind and I'm so proud of everyone involved that we've arrived at the point where I can present this to you for purchase. 

If you liked Living Is Trying on your turntable, you're going to love Toss Your Javelin. I've been listening to the test pressing with my baby girl Dorothy and hearing it on the stereo speakers really gets us both dancing around the apartment. 

You can order the record directly from Dilate Time's online shop or if you're a bandcamper, it's over here.

Toss Your Javelin

Toss Your Javelin has been germinating for years. The third long playing album by John Davey is a collection of maxims and self-injunctions set to memory evoking melodies.

A black and white photo taped to a wall in Kansas City, the spiny ridge along Chimney Tops in Eastern Tennessee, the train station platform in Lansing in the dreary rain, neck craned to see the parade down Washington Street on the 4th of July, mammoth Ore Boats chugging in and out of Upper Harbor from all over the Great Lakes. This collage is the running start which throws the weighted dart.

”Lower Tiers” is the centerpiece of the album. Its arrangement borrows pages from The Great American Songbook, seeking common ground with 20th century greats Irving Berlin, Paul Simon, and Randy Newman.
The bookends of the album are the newest compositions, “Q” and “Boreal Lullaby”, both fruits of a tree transplanted. “Q” is the disentanglement of overlaying personalities and the proper identification of a newly emerging self. “Boreal Lullaby” is both old and new. It’s the hymn we hummed in church. It’s the subject of a trial, a lamentation, a psalm.
”Hard Times, Strong Men” is the outlier. Pulsating and fuzzy and rhythmic. It’s Jules Vern, Robert Louis Stevenson and George Harrison at a game of craps. Harrison rolls snake eyes. A prophetic warning. A new archetype.

Toss Your Javelin was crowdfunded by 134 generous supporters.

Songs, guitars, and vocals by John Davey
Production, mixing, and arrangement of a variety of instruments performed by Shane Leonard in Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Mastered by TW Walsh in Boston, Massachusetts
Engineering by Evan Middlesworth at Pine Hollow Audio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Basses by Jeremy Boettcher
Piano and other keys by Joshua Gallagher

Video Teaser of "Kings, Gods, Fools" by Zachary Schneider Studio

After some discussions with a few trusted friends, I decided to self-release the album. The undertaking of this album from the beginning has been in that spirit, I think.

I reached out to a few creative, productive people I know to assist me in creating some promotional material for the album. A few ol’ reliables like Anthony Simpkins of GemsOnVHS (may God grant him wealth) and some fresh talent from where I live too. Namely, Sarah Reynolds (Couturra) and Zachary Schneider Studio.

I saw Zachary at someone’s birthday party and I remembered seeing some of his photography. It made me wonder if he did video work. I got in touch later and Zack responded with enthusiasm and a bunch of good questions and got to work right away on collecting some footage I described to him. I think what he captured and sequenced works perfectly for the feel of this song and the images are captivating. It’s a cool thing about where we live (Upper Michigan) that that imagery is around you all the time. I hear it come through the songs on this album.

Please go full screen and enjoy the look and sound and feel of the song and the visuals and hear “Kings, Gods, Fools” on your favorite streaming platform on April 28th.
Thanks for listening.

-John

The first single "Kings, Gods, Fools" releases April 28th!

On Tuesday, April 28th, the first single from Toss Your Javelin will be available for streaming and download everywhere. Click the pre-save button below to be the first to hear the full single when it goes live on Spotify.
”Kings, Gods, Fools” will be the first of three singles released before the album is available to the public.

Thank you for your support and I hope you enjoy the song loud in your headphones. It sounds very good.

-John

Little Ghost Notes

In the Spring of 2019 I started thinking of ways to try to get my songs in front of more people’s ears and into their heads. One of those ways was to get some other artists to start recording some of my compositions in their own style. I talked to a few people about doing some administrative work in exchange for those recordings.

One of the first people to really jump into the project and make it where the rubber meets the road was my old friend Dustin Sendejas. Dustin and I have known each other since I was a kid and was just starting to play shows. We’ve traveled all over the USA and even some in Canada together, me as a solo act, and Dustin in many different musical iterations from solo songwriter to member and sometimes leader of a big band. He was sort of a mentor to me and showed me new ways of looking at the world and introduced me to some important philosophical concepts that have shaped how I view and interact with the world. It always feels like we’re on an extended hangout when we get to see each other.

As a first label release, I thought it was very fitting that Dustin and I would do something collaboratively. We’ve both been on a long path of delineating where art and commerce merge and this is another building block for each of us in our individual body of work.

Dustin chose my song “Ghost Notes” and we renamed the track “Little Ghost Notes” as a way of cross pollinating his current main project Little Ghost and my song. I’m really happy with the result. I think Dustin did an outstanding job staying true to the composition while infusing his own particular qualities through a couple minor rearrangements. Listen to some other Little Ghost material to catch my drift (the song “The Dark” is a great place to start). Dustin played the acoustic guitar and the electric piano on the track and producer Eric Stanley added electric guitar and backing vocals. There’s a really nice flourish toward the end of the song that’s worth sticking around for. I’ve found myself returning to it frequently since I heard the initial recording.

I’m so pleased to present this to the world and I hope more similar collaborations continue to happen this year and onward!

”Little Ghost Notes” can be purchased and streamed through the player above. You can also stream or download the song on your preferred streaming and downloading platform.
You can listen to my version of the song where I’ve posted it below or, as always, on your preferred streaming or download platform.
Please consider sharing the song on your social media or just play it for your friend in your car while you drive around.

Thanks for the listens.
-John

Video for "Kings, Gods, Fools" from GemsOnVHS

A Zoetrope

A brief retelling of the moving pictures in my memory of “Moving Pictures” , a short story by Andrew Jones:

Is seeing your fate in advance a blessing or a curse? What would you do with the power to see your future if you had it?

A young man was given a secret embedded in a simple toy. Through the slots in a cylinder he could see the last day of his life as it wound down. The preliminaries and the final event of his passing. The man told no one and buried the toy in a watertight box in the bottom of a forest pond. Once a year he would visit the pond and retrieve the toy to watch his last day. He would then sink it again and return to his simple life.
In his old age, the man’s four grown children began noticing strange sequences in his behavior on their trips home. Many crates were delivered to his porch. A locked door shut off a wing of the house. Inscrutable noises emanated from behind the door. Correspondences.
At his deathbed he gave them all knowing winks and smiles and quickly drank a tincture when all but one person were out of the room.
In his wake, he left instructions to take his ashes and a sealed box to a large house on a hill several days’ journey away. All his children went, one reluctant.
Before the arrival to this shrouded mansion on a hill, a storm began to rise. The few had barely arrived at the gate when the wind swirled gustily and the rain pattered hard on the cobblestones leading up to the house. They hurried to the door and were welcomed into the grand old home and ushered into the study of a young man who looked old. Or was he an old man who looked young? There was something about his eyes.
The Old Man laughed and twinkled and regaled the young travelers with stories of their father. He easily opened the locked box and produced a stack of bendable slides. He swore siblings to secrecy before unceremoniously tossing the bundle of pictures overhead. They watched them fly into the air above them and noticed for the first time, to their surprise, a crystalline dome in the tower above them which captured the picture slides in something like an updraft and held them there, hovering and swirling. The light from the thunderstorm now blowing full bore around the safety of the warm study flashed through the crystal dome and fractured, conjoined, multiplied, and bent the light, showing sequences of pictures. Some images fully familiar, some partially obscure, some altogether untranslatable flashed and danced around the walls of the room. All were enraptured and silent until the storm and the display dissipated.
The Old Man produced small packages in paper and whispered parting words to each of the four before demanding they retire before their long journeys home.

—

So you planned and saved and stored
Was your body slave or lord?

You were utilizing tools
Are we Kings or Gods? Or Fools?

New Video From GemsOnVHS ("Lower Tiers")

Listen to and download the single version of “Lower Tiers”:
bandcamp, iTunes

Some context.
GemsOnVHS is the popular YouTube channel helmed by my old friend Anthony Simpkins. Anthony came up from Nashville, Tennessee to visit us in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan during the early part of September this year (2019) and we worked up some videos in advance of my new album Toss Your Javelin being released.

A little bit about the song.
I wrote this song in 2013 after my album Living Is Trying had been recorded, but before it had been released. I was listening to a lot of Paul Simon (top) and learning some renditions of a couple Irving Berlin (middle) compositions to make myself better at the guitar. You can hear the Tin Pan Alley hat tip in the bridge and the Simonized chorus where I take that diminished chord on a little walk downtown. I remember having the goal to use every note in the chromatic scale in the construction of the song. I made some adjustments to do so in the editing phase. That’s that off kilter, accidental sound you hear. The blues in it.
I had been having some conversations with my sister about attempting to make art pay the bills and was in the process of one of those bi-annual, zoomed-out life reassessments. The thing my murky unconscious kept spitting up was this crazy optimism that doing the same behaviors repeatedly would produce the changes I so desperately wanted in my life and my career. Does Living = Trying? Serious question. Either way, I knew I had to aim SOME direction and shoot for it. What I didn’t know then is that there was some serious living and growing up I had to do. That’s called gaining footing. I was telling myself to “sit straight up and cast off all your spells”.

I’m really proud of this song.

My brother Joe recently introduced me to this painting I had never seen before (bottom). It’s called Truth Coming Out Of Her Well. This painting says to me better than what I can say to myself.

Thanks for the kind support.
If you’d like to help keep the fire alive so’s the storyteller don’t go hungry, you can blow some ashy dollars in the direction of the top left corner of the website or become a monthly subscriber on bandcamp. If you’d like something in return like a cd, a funny shirt or digital downloads, please visit either the store on my website or iTunes, bandcamp, Amazon, etc. Tell your local promoter you want John Davey to come to your town and we’ll get something going.
If you’d just like to listen instead, no big deal. Go stream the songs on Spotify, Apple Music, Google, YouTube or wherever you usually listen to music. If you subscribe, follow or add the song to your library, it doesn’t cost you much extra than a click, but it makes a big difference on my end.

I’ll see you soon!

-John