JACK JOHNSON EXCLUSIVE

Jack Johnson Dreams On

by Jack Spilberg

photos by Thomas Campbell

For Jack Johnson, Surfing comes first. His career as a platinum selling recording artist with thousands of impassioned fans is something he takes surprisingly lightly.

According to Jack, "I grew up always wanting to be a pro surfer. That was my dream but then I just sort of fell out of the dream when I graduated high school. I always sort of thought that I was going to get into doing surf films. The music thing caught me so off that I had no expectations."

What Jack never would've imagined in his wildest dreams at the time he broke into the music world was that his first album Brushfire Fairytales would go platinum and his follow-up album On And On would sell over a million copies within a year of its release.

Jack got his start in music as a teenager. While surfing enormous waves near his home in surfing's Mecca, the North Shore of Oahu, Jack fell off a wave and split his head open on the shallow reef.

Jack describes how he spent his recovery time teaching himself guitar, "During those two months I definitely got a lot of books out of sympathy from my mom on how to play guitar-- like Jimi Hendrix books and Metallica and different bands I was into. I sat there with the tablature and focused on it for a while."

Soon after the injury and his recovery, Jack decided to leave Hawaii and head to the mainland to attend college where he studied filmmaking. After graduating with a degree in film, Jack produced two critically acclaimed documentary style surf films. Both films, Thicker Than Water and September Sessions were extraordinarily well received both inside and out of the surf community and went on to win various film awards.

While working on his surf films, Jack began recording songs for the soundtracks on a four-track. These recordings caught the attention of Ben Harper's producer who was a fan of Jack's surf films. Jack was soon given the opportunity to record his first full length album which featured an impressive collection of skillfully crafted reggae and funk influenced acoustic folk songs.

Jack's songwriting in his first two albums was inspired with cleverly phrased reflections on the sometimes sorry state of the world and subtle suggestions on what we can do to make it a better place.

Jack pronounces in "Wasting Time" off his sophomore record entitled On and On, "everybody thinks that everybody knows about everybody else but nobody knows anything about themselves, because they're all worried about everybody else."

His new album (coming out March 1, 2005), In Between Dreams, revisits similar themes from past albums but this time his intriguing word play and thoughtful lyrics are backed with more classic funk influenced beats and rhythms.

Jack comments on this new sort of direction he went with In Between Dreams, "I've always pictured that I'd just get mellower and mellower and then I'd eventually just kind of be doing straight forward acoustic folk stuff as I get older. It's funny how this album ended up. The songs just kind of ended up being more upbeat."

Jack Johnson's humility, intelligence, and songwriting skills are all apparent on the new album. Johnson shines with In Between Dreams; it is an album filled with inspired reflections and refreshingly creative melodies.

(In Between Dreams is due out March 1st on Brushfire Records, visit www.brushfirerecords.com or www.jackjohnsonmusic.com for more info)

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