Put simply, Freedy Johnston is one of our most gifted living songwriters.  We previously spilled a couple thousand words to that effect HERE.  In his songs, Johnston evokes whole worlds and stories with bare-necessity lines delivered in powerful melodies. Johnston’s albums Can You Fly and This Perfect World remain amongst the best albums ever delivered, and there have been gems ever since from Freedy.  Johnston has now announced his imminent new, Kickstarter-financed album Neon Repairman.   Based on the powerful title track alone, we can’t wait for its arrival.

Neon Repairman is an obvious tribute to Jimmy Webb’s winsome Wichita Lineman (which Johnston has previously covered well).  About the song, Johnston recently told The Journal News: “All that was done purposefully.  It was like, sorry Jimmy Webb, I needed to use your song as a template. I sort of traced over it.  We were outside The Saxon Pub … and I said [to a friend], man, there must be a lot of neon repairmen in this town, and [the friend] says ‘That’s cool, you ought to write a song about a neon repairman.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I gotta do that.’  But I didn’t know how to finish it. … Then I realized it was kind of Wichita Lineman-like.  So I wrote out Wichita Lineman on one side of a piece of paper, on a legal pad. … I put in the lines I had next to the corresponding lines of Wichita Lineman.  It was sort of a device to finish the song.  I emailed [Jimmy Webb about the song].  [Webb] was a total Oklahoma gentleman [and called it] ‘a great song.'”  You can the homage clearly in one of the new song’s lines lifted from Wichita Lineman: “And I need you more than want you, as the story goes.”

Check the song out below.  It’s an evocative beauty that bodes incredibly well for the impending album (the songlist of which is at bottom).  You can pre-order Neon Repairman HERE.  In addition, Johnston will play the Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara on August 15th.

Songlist:

1 “Neon Repairman”
2 “Baby, Baby Come Home”
3 “TV in My Arms”
4 “Summer Clothes”
5 “By the Broke Streetlight”
6 “The First to Leave the World, Is the First to See the World”
7 “Angeline”
8 “The Sentimental Heart”
9 “Her Hair Is Blowing in the Wind of Another Planet”
10 “A Little Bit of Somethin’ Wrong”