![]() I spent the remainder of the lockdown gathering hours for that. So I immediately started working on a pilot’s license. I came home, and I read about 50 books in a few months, and got done with that and thought, man, evidently my brain wants something to challenge it. ![]() Maybe I’ll get in the studio and record.” No. When COVID took us off the road for a whole year, I thought: “Here’s an opportunity to not have to tour, maybe I’ll write some songs. So the main outlet for your creative energy is live performance.Ī. ![]() In a lot of ways, my concert has become my new medium for releasing new music. If it’s a song I like enough, I may put it in my show, too. If every now and then I’m able to get into a writing room and get a song written, I’m happy and thrilled about that, especially when it turns into a success for somebody else. I’m a touring artist and a songwriter, and that’s what pays my bills, so that’s what I focus on the most. The career pressure on an artist to keep duplicating the same kind of success, I don’t want to feel that pressure. Is that something that is in the cards?Ī. You have released a few singles and collaborative recordings in recent years, but it has been quite a while since you made an album. I love being a member of the Grand Ole Opry, and in a lot of ways it doesn’t feel like it’s sunk in yet. I’m so used to being excluded from everything. Is that song a nice distillation of how you view your relationship with mainstream country?Ī. You have a shirt on sale on your website with “Kicked Out of Country,” the title of a song you wrote with George Strait, printed on it. He’ll also be back in the area in November for a show at the Orpheum as part of the Last Waltz tour. We spoke to Johnson via Zoom ahead of his date at Indian Ranch in Webster Saturday. Instead, he’s become a torchbearer for traditional country music who carries that torch in live performance, providing every-show-is-different lessons in the music’s history - How does he construct his setlist? “When I get to the microphone,” he says - and adding his voice to it via his own songs. There’s been no album with his name on it since, and Johnson seems entirely OK with that. He followed those with a fine tribute to country songwriter Hank Cochran in 2012. Two of them - ”That Lonesome Song” and “The Guitar Song” - rank with the best country albums of the 2000s. ![]()
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