I Hope We Can Still Be Friends by Dean Johnson

For his 50th birthday in May, 2023, the angel-voiced alt.country singer/songwriter Dean Johnson released his debut album, the utterly fantastic (and sadly overlooked by the Bacon Review that year) Nothing for Me, Please. He felt it was finally time — he’d been working on (and working up the courage to let loose into the world) the album for the better part of two decades. Half a century into his time on this earth, and he was now ready.

Born on Camano Island in the San Juan Islands here in the PNW, the Seattle-via-Bellingham performer, who has the look of a starved Pacific Northwestern longshoreman in a mustachioed Sam Elliot costume, has been a known, much-loved entity around Seattle for a long while. He’s a regular at Al’s Tavern in Wallingford (an institutional dive bar that opened in 1940, and has therefore been around longer than other Wallingford institutions Dick’s Drive-in (1954) and Archie McPhee’s (1983)), where he spent much of the 2010s working in addition to hanging out and getting lost in the background while playing in other going-almost-nowhere country-esque bands.

It was while working at the bar that he mastered his own song craft, but remained hidden due to crippling self-doubt of his own abilities. He’d play a show of his own music here and there, but only because the people who knew him and what he was capable of would drag him out of hiding to do so. He put his debut album to tape in the late 10s, but committed it only to a private SoundCloud link that he’d share around to those he knew. There’s a YouTube video from 2016 of Johnson performing “Faraway Skies” for a submission to NPR’s Tiny Desk competition that didn’t result in anything.

The pandemic of the early 20s only solidified his hidden-in-plain-sight stance. Finally, in 2023, many years after he’d recorded it, he released that debut album. Nothing for Me, Please is a masterpiece in song-driven storytelling. I first heard Johnson sometime that year, possibly when his song “Faraway Skies” was featured on FX’s Reservation Dogs at the start of Season 3 (one of my favorite shows – highly recommend!). Or, even more likely, I heard Johnson for the first time on KEXP radio’s Sunday morning show “The Roadhouse” with DJ Greg Vandy, which is typically on in my house every weekend.

I still hadn’t heard that debut album in full before I saw him perform at Bumbershoot during Labor Day weekend of 2024, over a year after the debut had come out. What I do remember about that performance was learning that his delicate tenor voice was not built for the festival stage, unable to overpower the din of the crowd. I moved on to another stage. Shortly thereafter, I came across Johnson’s video recordings of some of his debut-album songs on a live performance video channel called Western AF¹, and that was the tipping point — I was finally hooked.

I eventually fell in love with the full album album, growing enamored with the singer’s quietly sarcastic delivery and darkly funny lyrics. Listen and watch the video for “Acting School,” a song about learning how to act in order to pretend that everything is a-ok after a harsh breakup. Or the title song, “Nothing for Me, Please,” which is about the potential of spending an eternity in Heaven sounding actually quite awful. Music to my ears, literally.

And now we’re finally caught up to his every-bit-as-good-as-the-debut sophomore album, I Hope We Can Still Be Friends. Everything about Johnson and his music is endearing. On “So Much Better,” he brings a new dimension to getting over a past love, the humor catches you off guard. “Well, I’m feelin’ so much better now / Since I had my mind erased / If I passed you on the street / I would not recognize your face.” There’s a beauty in how he drags out the “sooooo” with his gorgeously high vibrato.

“Before You Hit the Ground” (featured in the video above) is another song about a big heartbreak Johnson experienced, this time with a woman from Oklahoma in the late 00’s. Buddy Holly gets a prominent mention in the song, as a way for Johnson to eventually imagine his own demise in a way similar to Holly, via plane crash. The song ends with Johnson interpolating Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” with the final lyric “That’ll be the day, darling / that’ll be the day that I die.”

Johnson’s stage presence is best described as “unassuming.” He’s quiet, and his headlining shows (I’ve seen him twice more since that 2024 Bumbershoot performance, once at the Tractor and again that Showbox) are pin-drop quiet between songs, as that’s the only way to hear the inevitable sideways joke he throws out that will make you belly laugh. Watch his KEXP Performance from August this past year and you’ll get a good sense of his command of the stage (or lack thereof).

I Hope We Can Still Be Friends was produced by Seattle’s own Sera Cahoone, who has released many a solo album, and has played drums for Carissa’s Weird and Band of Horses (she does not appear on BoH’s Why Are You OK? that appeared at #16 in 2016). She plays drums, expertly and reserved, on Still Be Friends as well.

In a fantastic article / interview from Paste Magazine from June this past year, Johnson talks about the future. “I have so many compositions — from fresh ones to old ones — that are really dear to me and I really need to finalize words for them and commit to lyrics. I think my next three albums will be, by far, the most exciting things for me that I’ve ever done. I really want to get into a recording life as soon as I can. I’m fucking 52 and I am changing.” I’m right there with you, Dean (I turn 52 tomorrow). And I’m glad you’ll be right here with me for these next few years and maybe longer. The music world is a much better place with you in it.

^{1. I highly recommend you check out Western AF’s playlist of Johnson’s songs.↩}