Wherever She Goes

My introduction to Brushfire Fairytales is nothing short of real spirit work.

Ever since I was 5 years old I’ve been hushed to sleep by the lullabies of Jack Johnson. The songwriting surfer man from the North Shore of Hawaii has consistently altered the way I think and feel. Casually guiding my decisions like the inviting glow of a lighthouse on the water and the land is dark.

On September 11th 2001, my father was taken from us. I was only five years old at the time and the terror of that day in the city that never sleeps decided to keep us all awake, night after night. Sleep or lack thereof became a huge concern in my fragmented home. In order to hush the tears of my family, friends, and myself, we turned to Brushfire Fairytales, a record my father had bought only days prior. We found it one night cleaning out his car on the passenger seat. It was and is the most valuable article to every been found in one of those miniature blue plastic bodega bags. My mom, half of what she once was, would pop the CD out of its cover. Stuck in a navy rain jacket under a torrential downpour with a five o’clock shadow hiding a half baked grin; Jack Johnson knew what we were going through and how we were going to get out. Every night for two years that album would sound and I could sleep.

At the age of 7 In between Dreams, Jack Johnson’s 2nd album, was given to me along with a CD player as a farewell gift from my family before my first time away from home. Off to summer camp for 4 weeks with only two CDs, I went. I was amid the pines of New Hampshire, and although I fell hard over what would later be an album of classics like, Better Together, Banana Pancakes, and Sitting, Waiting Wishing. At night, when the rain would fall on the tin roof, as it often does during New Hampshire summers, my mind would stray to towers, terror, and fear my 7-year-old self turned to Brushfire Fairytales, the album that could solace me to sleep

The Brushfire Fairy Tales hit, Bubble Toes, gave Johnson the support and push he needed to go onto writing two more albums and ultimately dubbed “The Worlds Mellowest Superstar” by Rolling Stones in 2008. The fans, like myself, who had been with him since 2001 rejoiced in his well-deserved seven years in the making recognition. Which resulted in an announcement of a world tour. Although I still have yet to see him live, (shocking I know) I can recall spending countless hours perusing youtube for live footage of this international “mellow superstars” world tour. To my surprise, his Parisian audience proved to be the most enthusiastic prompting one of his most-streamed tracks the mash-up to Belle and Banana Pancakes, on his live album En Concert. In this song you find a sexy Johnson singing intimately in french and Spanish, nothing short of swooning.

The Intimate simplistic melodies from Brushfire Fairytales laid the groundwork for the sex appeal and creativity he developed in later albums like En Concert. The News, for instance, is stripped down and escorted in by a simple fingerpicking pattern and melodic dreamy vocals still can come across my nightly mediation. I convince myself it was written for me and those affected by 9/11, as if he was calming us down from it all, months before it even happened. Foreshadowing, in its most tranquil form.

The weight of these lyrics is intentional and timelessly relevant.

Jack Johnson ended up in a coma for a few days and suffered severe injuries to his ribs and face. It was at that moment where he decided to quit his pursuit of surfing and follow his long-time passion for music and film making. Although he quit surfing, his “class” or group of friends he surfed with daily went on to become household names; Kelly Slater, Rob Machado & Pat O’Connell to name a few. In true Jack Johnson style, he took his suffering and pain and turned it into positive energy in the form of a song. Taking in the negative and pushing out the positive is Johnson’s M.O.

It only takes a few moments to alter your life, Johnson and I both know that. But perhaps for Johnson it’s more like three minutes. Nearly every song on this album (and throughout his whole discography) lives somewhere around the three-minute mark, leaving me to believe as a storyteller and songwriter there is a power in those three minutes. Nearly every three-minute article on Brushfire Fairytales can be pinned to one point in my life, like a footnote informing the reader of whatever Jack Johnson judgement applied and why.

The piano keys rocking back and forth from the left to right speaker on the final track of his album, It’s all Understood, guided me to make the decision to leave the east coast and everything I knew to come to Denver to pursue my two loves music and mountains.

Furthermore, it was Ben Harper’s guitar slides and Tommy Jordan’s steel drums featured on Flake, that I blared driving solo with all my belongings from New Jersey to Denver the summer before my Freshman year of college.

In an attempt to hush the cacophonies of coming of age, I sang the harmonizes to the breaks at the top of my lungs repeating his ambiguous lyrics without thinking. Tapping my steering wheel as the crescendos hit towards the end…

I am carefree with Brushfire Fairytales when its my side.

So if I was stranded on an island with only one album, it would need to be comforting, so I could contemplate. “What the hell am I doing here?” After contemplation, I would need this same album to dance, cry,  fall in love with and be able to pull my fear out. Because there’s no way fear isn’t following my sandy bum to this metaphorical island. 

Brushfire Fairytales is more than just an album, it’s a lens. I wear to see the world and all its circumstances more beautifully. They have never failed me so I have opted to never take them off.