“As I noted in my review of her previous album, Johnstone is better known as a songwriter than a performer in her own right, her work having been covered by many of Americana’s great and good. As such, Living Room, often stripped to basics with minimal arrangements (the sleeve is just a black and white photo of her and a piano), might be seen more as demos for potential covers by artists looking to add some extra class to their albums than a spotlight for Johnstone herself, but that would be to overlook the quality she brings to her own material.” – Mike Davies, Folking.com (Read the full review here.)
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0 Lonesome Highway Review of Rathfriland Show
“There is quite a lot of self-reflection and deep contemplation in Jude’s songs and the ability to go below the surface is something that has always provided her admirers with the solace that she acts as a lightning rod for many of the personal highs and hurts that they experience in their own lives. Some find her songs too couched in melancholy but that can be viewed as a positive in that it is an aesthetic emotion. It is not somehow debilitating, like sorrow, despair or depression, but includes wistful feelings of yearning and memories of the past, that can bring much pleasure and sweet nostalgia for what we have loved and lost. There is also a longing in her words and a hope for a better tomorrow so that a message of optimism is always there too.” – Paul McGee, Lonesome Highway
Read the full review here
0 Rootstime’s Review of Living Room
“The American singer Jude Johnstone was for a long time only known as a supplier of songs for other artists. For example, Trisha Yearwood, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Mary Black and Bette Midler recorded her songs. Only in 2002 did she decide to take her own chance as a solo artist by releasing her debut album “Coming Of Age”. That became a big windfall and soon a series of other solo albums followed, including “On A Good Day” in 2006, Blue Light” in 2007, Mr. Sun”, 2008, Quiet Girl” in 2011, “Shatter” in 2013 and “A Woman’s Work” in 2017.
This year, Jude Johnstone, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, released her eighth official solo album under the title “Living Room”. On that album are ten new, mostly fairly sober songs for which she has written almost all lyrics and music, but for which she has also invited some guest musicians for the instrumentation. We note the names of the regularly acclaimed Neilson Hubbard as co-composer of the song “My Heart Belongs To You” and Rob van Duuren also plays on pedal steel on three tracks: “That” s What You Don’t Know “, “All I Ever Do” and “One Good Reason” that you can listen to a live performance here.
Jude Johnstone herself plays the piano as an accompaniment instrument for her intimistic songs and she also has some songs sung by other vocalists living in Nashville. For example, Hunter Nelson sings the song “That’s What You Don’t Know”, singer-songwriter Ben Glover sings “Seasons Of Time” and Brandon Jesse takes care of the vocals for the beautiful song “Serenita”. With the song “So Easy To Forget” Jude Johnstone sings a duet with Tim Hockenberry who was only discovered at the age of 49 in the television show “America’s Got Talent”. He also provides great harmony vocals for the song “All I Ever Do”.
You can read in her biography that Jude Johnstone is actually a discovery of the late Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist of Bruce Springsteen’s “E-Street Band.” That this artist regularly compared to Norah Jones, Shawn Colvin and Rickie Lee Jones soon made her own way in the music world, she owes mainly to her great talent as a songwriter and to the beautiful solo albums she has recorded, including certainly also this new CD “Living Room”.
“Known as the songwriter for Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt and Mary Black, etc., the Nashville based Jude Johnstone convinces once again on her new solo record “Living Room”, referring to the place where these newly penned songs were recorded. She was assisted by four male singers that provided lead vocals on a few songs, but the typical trademark of her great songwriting has remained 100% intact throughout the whole album.” – www.rootstime.be
0 LonesomeHighway.com’s Review of Living Room
“Sometimes music reveals itself as a fragile thing that needs to be cherished and nurtured until it can be fully brought out into the light. The 10 songs included here were performed and recorded in Jude’s LIVING ROOM (the title) and could easily be retitled Songs From the Heart. The beauty in the melodies and words is matched by the honesty and wistful sorrow revealed by Jude Johnstone, an artist that has been producing music of the highest quality for many years, often sadly unrecognised by the greater media.” – Paul McGee, LonesomeHighway.com
Read the full review, here.
0 HVY Journalists’ Track-by-Track Review of Living Room
Now Playing: Jude Johnstone’s ‘Living Room’
“Living Room (Bojak Records) is a follow-up to her 2016 release, A Woman’s Work, in 2016. The album is thusly titled because it was (give or take an overdub or two) recorded in her own living room. It was inspired by Emmylou Harris who is quoted on the back cover of the CD.
“In the making of records, I think, over the years, we’ve all gotten a little too technical, a little too hung up on getting things perfect… and we’ve lost the living room…”
Taking the comment to heart, Johnstone peels away layers of potential production to get to the gist of her musical messages. Johnstone leads the way on piano, lead and harmony vocals. She is backed by an occasional assortment of other artists including Bob Liebman (cello), David Brewer (penny whistle), David Pomeroy (bass), Mike Meadows (percussion),Olivia Korkola (violin), Tim Hockenberry (trombone and vocals), David Keary (baritone guitar), Nick Scott (upright bass), Rob van Duuren and Tim Fleming (pedal steel) and Hunter Nelson, Ben Glover, Ray Duncan, Noah Colton, Brandon Jesse and Andi and Ren Renfree (additional vocals).” – Will Phoenix, HVY.com Read the entire review
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“Jude is the true embodiment of that great song crafting skill, sincerity and honesty, and she always bears a true homage to the classic songwriters yet always holds her own in that very pantheon.” – Dave Keary, (guitarist for Van Morrison)
0 PopMatters Review of Living Room: “Jude Johnstone’s Hymns of Heartache”
“Underrated American treasure Jude Johnstone presents refreshingly spare, uncluttered grownup ballads on her latest, Living Room.
Towards the end of their world-conquering run, as their marriages disintegrated and their sales began to taper off, ABBA issued a series of relationship-dissecting classics. The melodies sounded so right, so near-perfect, it was as if they’d always existed and been plucked out of the ether at just the right moment by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. “The Winner Takes It All”, “The Day Before You Came”, “One Of Us” and several others. Although Jude Johnstone doesn’t sound especially like ABBA, it is those melancholy Swedish songs that spring to mind upon the first listen of Living Room, her [eighth] album.
Some of the polished, carefully plotted melodic maneuvers of “Is There Nothing”, the heartrending marriage post-mortem that opens the set, are ABBA-esque. However, where the foursome might have treated the song with layer upon layer of production, Johnstone renders it with solo voice, piano, and cello. That’s because this is an album whose concept is the jettisoning of fuss and frippery. It’s about peeling off the lamination and gloss and getting to the heart of the song. All the necessary recording equipment was set up in Johnstone’s Nashville home, in, yes, the living room. A small sprinkle of overdubs was handled elsewhere. On the back cover is a quotation from Emmylou Harris: “In the making of records, I think, over the years, we’ve all gotten a little too technical, a little too hung up on getting things perfect… and we’ve lost the living room…”
Johnstone is one of America’s finest songwriters. She may not be person-in-the-street famous. But the songs she’s landed on albums by Stevie Nicks, Bette Midler, Trisha Yearwood, Jennifer Warners, Bonnie Raitt, and Johnny Cash are an indication of the regard in which she’s held. An early champion of her work was none other than Clarence Clemons. Doubt this woman’s talent at your peril. Had she gone the pop route, maybe dumbed down a little, she’d be spoken of in the same breath as Diane Warren and Linda Perry. Instead, she plows her own furrow. Her solo career began with 2001’s Coming of Age. Each subsequent album has come out on her Bojack Records label. Some of the front covers were let down by typographical choices that looked like afterthoughts.
Living Room, on the other hand, looks exactly as it should. It bears a black and white shot of Johnstone at her grand piano. She is captured from behind. The image, revealing just a sliver of her profile, is full of feeling. It’s a beautiful composition and conveys a great deal of understated emotion. And it’s exactly what these songs – clever, heartfelt songs of parting, anguish, loss and coming to terms – need. “It’s a lonely life I’m living / But I’m gonna wait and see / What this old, broken-down world / Has left for me,” she sings on “All I Ever Do”. These words characterize the album. Yes, there is crushing hurt and bone-deep pain, but also perseverance and a glimmer of hope. If all that weren’t enough, there’s Johnstone’s voice. It’s a rough-smooth instrument – glass stippled with rust and charcoal. It couldn’t be better suited to her material.
If Living Room could be said to have a concept besides its stated one, it would have to be the critical junctures of relationships and the endings. The imagery is nocturnal, autumnal, and wintry. It’s an album that is heavy of heart but also soothing and cathartic. The listener is left feeling lighter, almost cleansed. Throughout ten songs, Johnstone writes both alone and with a variety of collaborators. One is Blessing Offor, who came to public attention as a contestant in the seventh season of The Voice. The themes introduced on “Is There Nothing” are recurring, with “My Heart Belongs to You”, “One Good Reason”, “I Guess It’s Gonna Be That Way”, “Seasons of Time”, “So Easy to Forget” all picking up on them.
The album gives the lie to the received wisdom that ballads must be interspersed with up-tempo tracks. Johnstone has succeeded in putting together a running order of slow songs. She achieves variety by way of different time signatures (the waltz-time “Seasons of Time”), rhythm patterns (“Serenita”) and moods (“My Heart Belongs to You”). There’s also balance and contrast in the treatments given to each song. Some are piano-and-voice arrangements, while others enjoy a shifting array of additional vocalists (Hunter Nelson, Ben Glover, Brandon Jesse) and players (cellist Bob Liebman, penny whistler David Brewer, bassist David Pomeroy, percussionist Mike Meadows, violinist Olivia Korkola, trombonist Tim Hockenberry). These superb musicians move in and out of the foreground as the album travels its perfect 40-minute duration. I should add that ever since the days of “My Heart Will Go On” and any number of watery odes from Ronan Keating or the Corrs, I’ve found it hard to listen to penny-whistles with unprejudiced ears, a negative personal bias I’m happy to disclose.
As much as Johnstone draws from the singer-songwriter/Americana tradition, she also echoes the great songwriting teams of the pre-rock 20th century. For example, “So Easy to Forget”, with its smoky, nighttime textures could, in another lifetime, be a standard that everyone knows, sung alongside “Moon River”. As with fellow Nashville writer, Beth Nielsen Chapman, you can sometimes hear the influence of Anglican/Protestant hymns in the way Johnstone builds her stirring musical phrases. She has an unshakeable melodic gift and uses chord structures that would only occur to a pianist. These two qualities give Living Room a lot of its musical heft. Johnstone is a writer who understands how an inversion here, an augmentation there, can add emotional nuance to a piano part. She appreciates every color where some songwriters only use the primary ones. Johnstone is also a fine, very accessible lyricist and, on the evidence presented here, a good chooser of collaborators. And, at the end of all the pain, the ravaged nobility, the anguish, and the letting go, she gracefully weaves in a slender thread of hope in the closing track, “Paradise”. It’s a sad song about a better future.
In the 1970s, albums as good as this often had million-dollar publicity machines behind them. If there’s any justice, Living Room will be, at the very least, a word-of-mouth sleeper success. It’s the musical equivalent of a warming shot of brandy on an empty stomach; perfect for the onset of autumn and winter.” – Charles Donovan, PopMatters.com
Living Room Hero 2
0 MidwestRecord.com Review of Living Room
JUDE JOHNSTONE/Living Room: With Guy Clark gone, it looks like Johnstone is set to take his place as America’s best well known hidden treasure. Making records that may or may not be heard, like Clark, her records manage to get heard by the right people leading the right things happening. 40 years in, she fearlessly lets her work get more personal yet she keeps the universal touch close by. A fine set of stellar songs you’ll surely be hearing a lot of in the future, you can get the first taste now as it comes to you directly from her living room. Well done.
(Bojak)
Volume 43/Number 335
September 21, 2019
MIDWEST RECORD
830 W. Route 22 #144
Lake Zurich, IL., 60047
CHRIS SPECTOR, Editor and Publisher
Copyright 2019 Midwest Record
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