BONES

Hey Strangers,

It’s finally happening. Our 6th album has been delivered and songs will soon start dropping. First up is our song ‘Bones (Bury Me Deeply & Sweetly)’, which is available to pre-buy now on iTunes. The song is being released June 15th.  This is a really special song to me, but I’ll save that explanation for another time. 

We’ve been hunkering down and rehearsing our little booties off. The band is in good spirits and sounding great!  We’re very excited to play Los Angeles again, although we aren’t looking to actually perform till this fall. 

We’ve also been putting together merch, recording album 7, demoing album 8, and preparing to re-release the original 4 records on Bandcamp. 

So lots coming.  Thank you all who have reached out and kept in touch during these last 3 years of Covid. Things are feeling good and we’re grateful to have had the chance to get so ahead of ourselves. We’ve hit GO and there’s no stopping until we hit album 12. 

“All energy flows according to the whims of the great Magnet. What A fool I was to defy him.” - HST

Peter

June 27th update

Hi everyone. Just a bit of an update, since I’ve been quiet for a while.

First, thank you to all of you who have been reaching out and checking in. It’s amazing to be connected to so many of you who have been along for this JS journey, from fans of the old records to the new records!

Album #6 has been done for a couple months now and I’ve even (mostly) completed demos of album #7. I have single art for all of the album #6 songs (still not entirely sure what will be released as a single). As I’ve been putting artwork together, I’ve had a few ideas for how to diversify how I approach social media for JS. I’m not personally a big social media guy, so it’s a slow process, but I’ve got some fun ideas… including a podcast I’ll be doing with Adal Jamil called ‘Naked with Strangers’. That one will be more about being a musician in general and less about JS specifically.

Things are opening back up here in LA and the band is going to be getting back together to start rehearsing. Very excited to start playing with these guys again and hope to be playing shows again by Fall 2021. Music from album #6 will start coming out in 2022 (likely January for the first single).

Back to work. Thank you again to everyone who keeps reaching out! Lots of good times ahead.

Writing "Cleopatra"

You have a rotten soul. When I first moved to Boston, I got a job at a Blockbuster in Central Square. It was a 20 min walk away from the room I was renting. The job was terrible but I got 5 free rentals a week. So the first show I binged was HBO’s ROME. 

I’ve always been a fan of history and really loved ROME, especially the first season. The second season ends with the death of Cleopatra… and there was something about the scene that stuck with me. I wasn’t able to find a video of the scene, but I have HBO’s description…

Cleopatra then met with Octavian regarding his proposal that she be allowed to keep her kingdom, but soon realized that Octavian's true intent was to keep her as a trophy and to parade her around in chains in Rome. Cleopatra decided that she would not be Octavian's pawn and ordered that preparations be made for her suicide. Her method of death was via the bite of an asp to her breast. Tipped off that she was in the process of killing herself, Octavian rushed to Cleopatra's chambers in an attempt to prevent her death. The dying Cleopatra rose to meet Octavian and spoke into his ear, "You have a rotten soul." Those would be her final words as immediately speaking them, she collapsed onto her throne and died.

Cut forward a couple years. I had just moved across the country with Maddie and our little daschund Meatloaf. We had managed to rent an apartment in San Diego in the West Palm Beach.   There, sitting in an empty living room, I first stumbled across the song ‘Cleopatra’. 

I don’t recall exactly how everything came together. I’m pretty sure the intro and the main refrain (“let the Devil have his way”) came first.  I was particularly excited by the rhythmic idea for when the track really kicks in. That scene from ‘Rome’ swam to the surface of my subconscious and I based the lyrics on the moment when Cleopatra committed suicide, as the forces of Rome bore down on her family.

I think what really connected with me was the idea of someone standing up against insurmountable forces. Cleopatra was powerless to stop what was coming, but - rather than be used - she stood for the honor of her legacy. 

“Cleopatra” was written around the same time as “Pharaoh”, in that empty apartment.  “The Warlock” came soon after. Those songs were the first inklings of an album that would become “Valkyrie”. They’re foundational ideas.  They encourage other similar ideas to flesh out the story of the record. 

A couple other tidbits about the song… the rhythm when it all kicks in (at 1:29) was inspired by Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”.  The acoustic breakdown (at 2:27)  starts with a Dmaj7+6+9 with a minor melody on top… it creates a creepy vibe that reminds me of Sondheim.

In other news, I’ve been singing my little heart out.  My good friend Yan Perchuk (Vibrant Productions) has been helping me out.  I’ve been working with Yan for about 7 years.  He engineered the vocals for ‘Valkyrie’, as well as a nearly every recording for my other band, Polaris Rose.

Finishing the album is just the beginning.  The amount of artwork that I have to make is pretty tremendous.  Plus I’ve been collaborating with other artists for some fun merch designs.  There is gonna be a lot coming next year, so I appreciate everyone who has reached out looking for the new songs to drop!  You guys keep me going during these quarantine times.

More soon.

Peter

Makin’ Covid Records

Life has really turned upside down since my last post…

First off:  Maddie and I are doing well and our families are both safe and healthy.  Covid has been a strange time for us.  The music industry here in LA has been severely clobbered, especially touring.  But (outside of our creative projects) we work primarily in marketing and label services, which have been thriving.  So we are doing well.

Back on February 28th, we played our album release show at The Resident in downtown LA.  The room was packed and a lot of special people were in attendance!  My sister even flew down from WA (garbed in her vintage Lucid-era JS hoodie) and I saw Skrillex hanging out in the back of the room.  The band played amazingly and it was so much fun.  Brad Dickert slayed the drums, Alan Sosa slayed the guitar, Maddie Elyse slapped the bass while she sang along, and my old pal Adal Wiley brought something special with his keys, samples, and dancing.  We played a fun combo of new songs off Valkyrie and older, classic Johnny songs like “Escape”, “Stain”, and “The Devil has the Best Tunes”.  It felt like a very special night… oh and I hit the high note at the end of ‘Cleopatra’, so I was happy about that.  Haha.  

I thought that our album release show was the start of something new… we planned on performing more around LA to promote.  We were putting together tour plans for the west coast and the PNW.  But then Covid hit…

At first, I think we were all caught unaware and unsure how long it would last.  I took it as an opportunity to relax and sorta catch my breath.  But before too long it became clear that the music world as we knew it had changed and wouldn’t be going back to normal for a long time.  Maybe never. 

I stopped posting on social media for a long time.  It just felt inappropriate - what with everything that has occurred since - to post some sort of ‘look at me and my weird prog rock project’.  Even writing this blog is a bit strange to me.  But I wanted to let those who have reached out know: we’re doing great and there’s a lot of new music being prepared for 2021.

Like a lot of my musician friends, I’ve been making Covid Records haha.  Johnny Stranger’s Album #6 is nearly done.  I’d say it’s at the 80% mark.  I have one more song to finish tracking all the guitars/keys and then I’ll be recording vocals for the entire thing.  I’m very happy with how it’s all coming together.  The majority of the songs on this next record were written back when I was living in Boston, long before my life in LA began.  These songs are very special to me and contain some of my personal favorite songwriting that I’ve done.  They’re also connected to a tumultuous time in my life.  I was recently explaining some of the song themes and what was happening in my life at the time and my best friend/partner David remarked, “Damn. That’s dark.”  I laughed.

Finishing the album is just the beginning though.  Being an indie musician means releasing a massive amount of content.  We’ve been planning out something that is - for us - a real step up from what we’ve been able to do before.  Having this covid time has allowed us to slow down and really put some thought into what we’re doing.  Personally, one of my greatest pleasures with JS is being hit up by fans about the music… Hopefully we’ll be seeing more and more opportunities for outreach.

I miss playing shows so much, but it looks like that’s off the table for a little while.  But that’ll just give us more time to really share the story behind the next album online.  So stay tuned.  There’s a whole lot coming.

Oh, and one last thing.  I get asked all the time about our old albums, especially ‘Lucid’.  I will definitely be re-releasing those original 4 albums, I just haven’t decided exactly how to do that.  One more outlandish idea was to do a 6-CD box set (the 4 albums, an album of B-Sides, and an album of live stuff), but I’m not sure it makes sense to get a CD box set made when so few people have CD players anymore.  I can always just release them digitally but I still want to do something a bit special.  If you have any ideas, let me know.

Stay safe,

Peter

'Marche' Animated Video

Very excited to finally share this!

This video took a long, long time to make.

As I was wrapping up production on the entire Nutcracker EP (think I finished around June 2019), the idea came up that we needed videos to help promote. At first, I tried some more typical Johnny things… using old footage and messing around with it. Some of those videos are posted on our IGTV. But they never felt like anything special. We talked about some sort of animated video, but I was always hesitant… mostly because I knew anything like that would take a super long time.

Now, I’ve done some animation in the past. My old roomate and I animated a music video for an old project of mine back in the early days of Johnny. And these type of things take MONTHS of 16-hour days, all super zeroed in.

Funny enough, the solution that finally got me to decide to do it was Maddie’s. She suggested just having a white backdrop, rather than designed a background for every scene. I knew that would cut down on my workload substantially and I also liked the idea of how it would look. So I started to dream up the sequence and figure out how to best go about production.

I took the album cover by my old friend Stephanie Macleod and cut out the primary figures of the Nutcracker and Claire. I then created digital ‘puppies’ that I could keyframe animate in Adobe Premiere. The sequences that were more complicated I created frame by frame in Photoshop. For example, the shot where the nutcracker breakdances was something like 96 frames. Some of the other puppets I had to create myself, but I used elements of Stephanie’s album art to give them a similar texture.

I essentially disappeared into my computer for a few months, taking it one shot at a time. I have two monitors set up on my desk and I had The Office running most all the time. Definitely ran through the entire 9-season run and then some.

But thank God it’s finally out and everyone can see it.

One final thought… working on this video was really eye-opening in the way that I saw that animation can continue to be a big focus for JS, albeit in different ways. So, you can expect more. I already have plans for the first single off the next album and an idea for the follow record as well. So yeah. Lots more deep dives en route.