Freedy Johnston – Blue Days Black Nights

The naked city conceals a million stories. This year, Freedy Johnston tells ten of ’em. In albums gone by, the New York songwriter has congealed a brilliantly muddy stock of tragic characters into tales of love, woe and ragged glory. His last album, Never Home (1996), followed melodiously on the promise of his major-label debut, This Perfect World, and its 1992 indie predecessor Can You Fly.

This time around, Johnston has dimmed the spotlight and brought out his trio for the quiet set. As with previous efforts, Blue Days Black Nights is no paean to the high life. Rather, it’s a storyline populated by the numbed, those who, like the character in the album’s penultimate track, are “Depending on the night…waiting to come home and get blind.” His menagerie of beautiful losers includes sketches in noir of desperate searchers for lost civilizations (“Underwater Life”) and heavenly explorers who have lost the glow in the ones around them (“The Farthest Lights”).

Johnston has noted that when he recorded Blue Days, Frank Sinatra had just died, and the media event surrounding the passing ultimately led him to emulate the master’s penchant for memorializing the lonely and the sad. Indeed, the ghosts of Sinatra’s mythology are hanging in the air here, at that after-hours club crawling with tramps, deadbeats and lost loves, where the only things on fire are the cigarettes, rising up for the occasional drag, glowing like narcotic fireflies and releasing easy contrails of smoke slithering into the stale air.