Daily Jam - True Love Will Find You in the End

If ever you find yourself doubting your own artistic endeavors, procrastinating, keeping yourself from creating because you feel you don’t have the adequate equipment or instruments with which to do so, listen to Daniel Johnston. Listen to the hell out of Daniel Johnston. Throughout the 1980’s he wrote and recorded 10 albums of raw and fractured pop using a cheap guitar and a tape recorder. He also drew his own cover art, made copies of his own cassettes for stores to sell, and in the process influenced a bevy of future artists and performers.

It doesn’t matter how you play it…just that you do.

As crackly and lo-fi as his recordings are, there is an innate beauty within all of them, vulnerable and tragic lyrics laid atop honest and real melodies. Closing out 1984’s Retired Boxer cassette, the simple and unembellished “True Love Will Find You in the End” somehow manages to be both encouraging and devastating, a big bleeding heart laid bare on a sleeve for the whole world to see. Johnston’s crudely crafted little pop nugget manages to sound enormous despite its rudimentary creation. It makes my heart swell. It makes my soul soar.

It doesn’t matter how you record it…just that you do.

I will be welcoming my second son into the world sometime in the next couple of weeks*, and there’s so much I need to write and record and draw and sing about. Time is not something I’m going to have an overflowing amount of, but you just make it work, you just make your art when you can, when you have a free five minutes in the middle of the night. You use a cheap guitar and tape recorder if that’s what it takes. And then you play it for your children…or your wife…or your girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, mom, dad, brother, sister, best friend…or whoever. It’s extraordinary to me that I’ve been able to grow my little family over these last few years, and it’s surreal and wonderful. I want to sing about it.

It doesn’t matter what you love…just that you do.

*This column was originally posted way back in January of 2016.

Listen below, our Daily Jam.