by Gonzalo Riedel
BA Johnston tells me about a folk fest he recently played. “It was in a yurt in front of about 80 people. Everyone was insanely messed up and, like, 17 years old. One kid clearly didn’t know what was happening and I kept making jokes that he was going to murder everyone because he looked like what I assume a bath salt murderer would look like. He just kept stroking my beard. He turned out to be really nice, and later added me on Facebook.”
None of what he tells me is surprising. If you know who BA Johnston is, it’s likely through his live show; a surreal one-man spectacle where Johnston, shirtless and beer-bellied, wearing a naval officer’s hat and a neckerchief, swings around a scepter as he sings about anything from dirt malls to stealing cable. His songs are sometimes performed as acoustic stompers and other times accompanied by pre-recorded dance beats played off a Discman. If a carnival cruise gets stranded, and the entire crew loses its mind from drinking seawater, BA Johnston would be the entertainment. This is to say, his live shows are absolutely recommended. And though his shtick is surprisingly rehearsed, its off-the-cuff feel has been present for as long as Johnston’s been performing. “When I first started playing live, I didn’t even have songs,” he says. “I would ask the audience, ‘What do you want me to sing about,’ and they’d be, like, ‘Power Rangers.'”
When asked about the physical demands of his shows, he says, “I get cut up and messed up a lot on stage. I find that being on tour is like running a long, shitty race. At a certain point you just focus on it being done. You’re just sprinting toward the finish line.” Johnston is currently in the early-goings of an extensive Canadian tour. He doesn’t hack it through the States because he’s “too old for it to be crappy again,” preferring to play to audiences established over many years and nine albums.
It’s just as well he sticks to Canada, because even though absurdity is universal, his songs are ruthlessly Canadian. Sure, his new album, Mission Accomplished, has its share of pop culture references, as anyone familiar with his work might expect, with songs about wanting to join the Monster Squad or about how Luke Skywalker is a whiney baby, but it’s also rife with scumbag Canadiana. He has a song about blowing a GST cheque at Giant Tiger, and another one about sitting in Tim Hortons while hating Tim Hortons. His song, “Crushing Coke Cans, Counting Dead Raccoons,” about touring across Canada, name checks the Wawa Canada Goose and Pizza Hut Express in Schreiber, Ontario. Another song, “Straight Outta Cobden,” describes an experience of getting stranded from a flat tire in the Ottawa Valley.
In between all the jokes, the record starts to take on a nostalgic tone, where the stories are less jokey and more melancholic (but let’s not go crazy, this is a guy whose best song, in my opinion, is about getting McDonald’s coupons in the mail).
“I think the records are headed in that kind of direction,” he says. “At different points of your life, you’re writing different kinds of songs. I don’t write as many drunk poutine songs as I used to, but that’s probably because I don’t get drunk and eat poutine as much as I used to.”
This is most evident in “I Don’t Wanna Live in Windsor,” a song about starting over with a loved one in a shitty Canadian city (Oakville, Chilliwack, and Kenora are all mentioned). The song is reminiscent of an earlier Johnston number, “My Heart is a Blinking Nintendo,” which uses childhood pop culture references to discuss heartbreak in a disarming way. Like that song, “Windsor” uses Canada discuss romance in a disarming way.
The new album also eases off the sequenced beats a bit in favour of more acoustic numbers. “I try on each record to do three or four sequenced songs and the rest guitar stuff. I think it’d be a hard sell if the album was half beats and half guitar. The guy who does my beats keeps trying to convince me to do an album of all beats, but I’m not convinced that wouldn’t get annoying in, like, five seconds.”
It’s doubtful that any tonal change in the album will mellow his live show. To start off his tour, Johnston rearranged his set and subsequently bombed. “The audience wasn’t into it,” he says. “But it was in Toronto and Toronto is a hard town. The audiences are paying to see you but they don’t always seem like they want to be there. They look to see if it’s appropriate to applaud. People are very supportive afterward, but it’s, like, ‘That’s good, but where the fuck were you for those 45 minutes?'” His attitude toward the city might explain his decision to have the cover of Mission Accomplished feature a loincloth-clad Johnston riding a tiger out of a burning Toronto (“It’s my fantasy come true. I’ve burned it down and I’m on my way out, back on the QEW”).
When asked if he plans on sticking with the formula he’s established or if he’d like to experiment with something different, he confesses that what he’d like to expand on his production values. He’d like to record an album with as much gloss and polish as anything playing on the radio. “I want a record that sounds like Supertramp or Steely Dan. Crazy production. Strings and stuff. I mean, with the same stupid songs as always. But lots of strings.”
BA Johnston will bring his one-man sideshow to the Windsor on Friday September 20, alongside the Farrell Brothers and Smoki Tyger!