Jillette Johnson Booking Info
The hard-won optimism of Jillette Johnson's third studio album It's a Beautiful Day and I Love You couldn't have come without tremendous upheaval. "It would have been easy to lean into the melancholy," she says. "It was an act of rebellion to not indulge in the pain, to look beyond it and not wallow." It's a Beautiful Day and I Love You carries harmonic and emotional heft in the vein of Patty Griffin's Flaming Red or Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark. There's an open-heartedness in the Nashville-based Johnson's songs, the kind of deeply experienced inner peace that results from a journey through vulnerability, pain, and struggle to gratitude, forgiveness, and, ultimately, acceptance.
Johnson's a rare gem in Nashville, having written the entirety of It's a Beautiful Day and I Love You alone, running contrary to the common Music City practice of co-writing. She did, however, find herself drawn to the city's creative adage of "three chords and the truth" -- though in Johnson's case, it's more like a dozen chords, especially on the harmonically elegant title track.
Johnson started writing songs at age 8; by her teens, she was playing three-hour sets of original music at a restaurant near her suburban New York home. Soon, she was generating enough outside interest that she attended her public high school only one day a year while she developed and recorded her music. That dedication landed Johnson a record deal that resulted in two albums, 2013's Water in a Whale and 2017's All I Ever See in You Is Me, the latter of which was produced by fellow Nashvillian Dave Cobb. She began touring 200+ days each year, earning slots at major music festivals, TV appearances and press accolades from outlets ranging from Billboard, Rolling Stone Country, and Paste to Marie Claire, Elle, and Cosmopolitan.
In the four years since relocating to Nashville, Johnson has made friends easily in the new city and also met and married her husband. The new relationships, both personal and professional, brought with them a renewed creative confidence. "This chapter of my life has been about quiet, stillness, gratitude, deepening relationships, and not running away," she says. "And this record has a lot to do with learning how to be in one place and how to feel freedom in that."
FULL-LENGTH BIO
The hard-won optimism of Jillette Johnson's It's a Beautiful Day and I Love You couldn't have come without tremendous upheaval. "It would have been easy to lean into the melancholy," she says. "It was an act of rebellion to not indulge in the pain, to look beyond it and not wallow."
It's a Beautiful Day and I Love You carries harmonic and emotional heft in the vein of Patty Griffin's Flaming Red or Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark. There's an open-heartedness in the Nashville-based Johnson's songs, the kind of deeply experienced inner peace that results from a journey through vulnerability, pain, and struggle to gratitude, forgiveness, and, ultimately, acceptance. "I was in control," Johnson sings on the album's opening track, but "that was many moons ago."
"I've done a lot of healing" in the four years since relocating to Nashville after making her last album, All I Ever See in You Is Me, Johnson says. She made friends easily in the new city and also met and married her husband. The new relationships, both personal and professional, brought with them a renewed creative confidence. "My challenge to myself in making this record and starting to write in the last couple of years was, 'How can I genuinely be myself and reflect the contentment that is there?' That's not so easy. It's easier to dig into resentment and self pity."
Despite its cheery title, It's a Beautiful Day and I Love You does bear its share of heaviness: the woozy, self-destructiveness of "I Shouldn't Go Anywhere"; the encounter with the thief of joy in "Jealous"; the helpless feelings that surround an acquaintance's suicide in "Angelo." "Songs are painful, and suffering is inherent to life," Johnson acknowledges. "Part of my journey has been understanding and accepting that, then doing what I can to find joy."
That joy shines through in the rolling folk-pop guitar patterns of "Annie," a song of gratitude to the ex who taught her husband "to love with his whole heart." It's embedded in the mildly macabre humor of "Graveyard Boyfriend," the lyrics of which are offset with a buoyant '70s-style pop melody. It's even present in "What Would Jesus Do," where the irreverent hook -- "What would Jesus do? I don't know, but I know he wouldn't do it my way" -- masks a meditation on acceptance. That song's bite is balanced somewhat by "Forgive Her," which begins by paraphrasing Jesus and winds up doing exactly what he would do.
An impulsively romantic phone call from Johnson's husband inspired the album's title track, "It's a Beautiful Day and I Love You," which begins as an intimate triplet ballad before taking a radical detour. "Joe Pisapia, my producer, saw 'rock opera' from the minute he heard it," Johnson says. "He knew what I wanted before I did."
Johnson and Pisapia clicked immediately, finding their approaches to Johnson's songs complemented each other even when he surprised her with the directions he took. They made It's a Beautiful Day and I Love You in Nashville with a tight-knit group of musicians that included Pisapia and engineer Dan Knobler on guitars, bassist Owen Biddle, and drummer Jamie Dick.
"I haven't had much guitar on my other records because I write fairly intricate piano parts, and there's usually a lot of lyric happening. So the approach in the past has pretty much been to stay out of the way and let the piano and voice do all the talking," Johnson says. "But my vision for this album from the get-go was to make a guitar forward, full band album that allowed me to sonically step out from behind my piano." Pisapia's guitar work played off Johnson's piano-written songs with imaginative ingenuity, bringing that vision clearly to life.
Johnson started writing songs at age 8; by her teens, she was playing three-hour sets of original music at a restaurant near her suburban New York home. Soon, she was generating enough outside interest that she attended her public high school only one day a year while she developed and recorded her music. "I ended up commuting to Brooklyn every day," she says.
At 15, Johnson's best friends were her producer, her engineer, and her manager -- all men in their 40s. "I was going out drinking with 40-year-old men and coming home at 2 in the morning on a regular basis." Johnson soon learned first-hand about the prevalence of entertainment-industry predators and saw her parents nearly lose their house as her would-be manager skipped town with the money they had invested in her career.
Later, Johnson signed a deal that resulted in two albums, 2013's Water in a Whale and 2017's All I Ever See in You Is Me, the latter of which was produced by fellow Nashvillian Dave Cobb. She began touring 200+ days each year, earning slots at Bonnaroo, SXSW, and Firefly that helped lead to TV appearances on VH1 and Rachael Ray, along with accolades from outlets ranging from Billboard, Rolling Stone Country, and Paste to Marie Claire, Elle, and Cosmopolitan. Even as she built a promising foundation for her career, company acquisitions and executive shuffling left Johnson in a volatile, ever-changing environment.
"The lessons I learned from those early industry experiences are why I've held so tightly to making this album on my own with people I trust," Johnson says.
At the same time Johnson has regained control in her career, she's also learning the importance of knowing when to relinquish it. A daily meditation discipline helps her cope with the uncertainty that's a given in the music industry. That practice makes its way into the album's final song, "Letting Go," as she sings, "I like to think I understand everything, 'cause it calms me down when I feel like I'm out of control / But I stare at the sky and I look at my life, and I feel myself letting go."
"This chapter of my life has been about quiet, stillness, gratitude, deepening relationships, and not running away," she says. "And this record has a lot to do with learning how to be in one place and how to feel freedom in that."
Agent Duffy McSwiggin
Exclusive Booking Agency for Jillette Johnson: North America, Asia & Australia