For the better part of 10 years, Dean Johnson was one of Seattle music’s best-kept secrets. I first heard him sing in 2016, during a time in my life when I’d make almost nightly outings to Ballard to sloppily two-step at Conor Byrne, grab a late-night snack from Sexy Alley Puffy Tacos (may it rest in peace), or catch a show at Tractor Tavern.
Known as a member of Davidson Hart Kingsbery and Sons of Rainier (and as the mustachioed bartender at the legendary Wallingford bar, Al’s Tavern), Johnson’s story-driven songs were fabled in Ballard’s close-knit and rootsy music community. He didn’t have any professional recordings of his material, but if you were lucky, you might catch him open for a friend’s set at Conor Byrne or play a few impromptu songs at a house party. Afterward, you were warned by those already in the know, you wouldn’t be the same. I wasn’t.
Now, a much wider audience is swooning for this troubadour’s poeticism and lonesome croon. Since he released his debut, Nothing for Me, Please, on his fiftieth birthday last year, Johnson has become a visible and celebrated new voice in Americana music.
The album, out on Mama Bird Records, has been featured on the influential live music video channel Western AF and received glowing write-ups in The Seattle Times, Paste, and No Depression. The first track, “Faraway Skies,” even appeared on Season 3 of the popular Hulu show, Reservation Dogs. With this reception, Johnson has toured and performed more this year than any other time in his life, and he’s not done yet—he’s playing Bumbershoot on Sunday, September 1.
Johnson sets you at ease with his kind, mild-mannered demeanor. He says he’s still processing what the album’s success means. “I feel like it is a pretty strange thing to have a first album come out when you're 50 years old, and just starting to tour at such a late age,” he says. “It's such an uncommon thing, I'm simultaneously embarrassed and happy about it. I'm curious to see what happens.”
Despite this late-in-life debut, music has been a part of Johnson’s life since his childhood in Camano Island. It all began when his older brother gave him a nylon string guitar when Johnson was 14. Straightaway, Johnson took to “tinkering”, he says. “Rather than playing other people's songs, I mostly just composed little things that sounded good to me.”
Offbeat, pre-grunge bands like the Young Fresh Fellows—and the full-fledged grunge that came a few years later—left an impression on Johnson, as did groups like Violent Femmes, with their “dark and aggressive folk leanings.” But Johnson’s the first to say that his early listening wasn’t all edgy and underground: “For how I've turned out musically, I have to give a lot of credit to the Beatles and Bob Dylan and Neil Young.”
Today, Johnson’s songwriting starts with his relationship to the guitar. Like meeting with a “friend,” he’ll sit down with it and find some fun patterns to play. “The momentum will happen once I get some chord progression that’s exciting, and then that'll usually get me through finishing a whole composition that feels satisfying,” he says.
Johnson wrote his first full song by his late twenties. Around that same time, in 2003, he moved in with his brother in Wallingford and discovered Al’s Tavern. The iconic bar quickly became his regular haunt and, eventually, his workplace.
The intimate little dive has played a pivotal role in Johnson’s musical rise. For one, most of the bittersweet songs on the debut poured out following Johnson’s “first big heartbreak,” a breakup he had at 36 with a woman he’d met at Al’s.
Al’s is also where Johnson met songwriter Chris Acker, after serving him drinks at the bar for his twenty-first birthday. Acker would eventually connect Johnson with the rest of the guys in Sons of Rainier—Devin Champlin, Sam Gelband, and Charlie Meyer—with whom Johnson continues to play today. (Gelband and Meyer also appear on Nothing for Me, Please.) And after the release of Nothing for Me, Please, Acker would do Johnson another solid by connecting him with Mike Vanata, the director and lead editor at Western AF, a channel that posts live acoustic sessions and field recordings of songwriters.
The channel has gained major momentum as a tastemaker in Americana music since its founding in 2007. Over the past two years, Johnson has recorded four videos with Western AF, which he credits with a large part of his success (it did lead directly to Johnson’s Paste Magazine review) and his traction with audiences outside of the US. All of Johnson’s Western AF videos have thousands of likes on YouTube.
“If I'd never been on Western AF, you know, I wouldn't have any video that had been seen more than 5,000 times.”
Today, Johnson’s no longer pouring shots at Al’s; he took the plunge into doing music full-time. He has toured as a supporting act for Jenny Lewis, Jeffrey Martin, and the indie-folk group the Cactus Blossoms, played a showcase at Nashville’s Americana Fest, performed sets at Pacific Northwest music festivals Timber! and Pickathon, and appeared at major national festivals Bonnaroo and Hopscotch. It’s all been incredible, he says, but his appearance at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark in early July stands out.
“We were playing at 12:30 pm on the last day of the festival—I was expecting a hundred people at the most. It turned out to be 1,200 people. It was like I was a major, more known, artist doing a headline show because the audience was dead silent during the songs, and they would applaud for so long that we'd be laughing.”
Johnson and his band might be laughing again come Labor Day weekend, when they play for largely local audiences at Bumbershoot. Johnson, who’s attended the festival since he was a teen, says this feels like a full-circle moment.
“I have pretty strong Bumbershoot memories, you know, tromping around there with your friends and trying to figure out who you're going to go watch,” he says. “I'm really excited.”
Dean Johnson plays Bumbershoot’s Mural Stage Sunday, September 1, at 5:15 pm.
