“The question I’m asked most is, if I was on an island and I could only have a surfboard or guitar, which one would it be?” he muses. The answer, obviously, is both, right? “I mean, if you’re forcing me to choose – surfboard for sure,” he capitulates. “I love music, but music is what I do if the waves are flat. You can ask all my friends – if the waves are really good, I’m not picking up my guitar at all.”
It’s in the blood, too. He’s the son of professional surfer Jeff Johnson (alliteration also apparently runs in the family). Born and bred on Hawaii’s Oahu coast, Johnson Jr began surfing at age four, scored a sponsorship from Quiksilver at 14, and was competing professionally when, at age 17, an accident left him with a few less teeth and more than 100 stitches.
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“Hmm, let me look at myself!” announces the 48-year-old, leaning to examine his image on the screen. “It sounds conceited to say you wouldn’t change a thing, but I have a really Zen approach to it. I have a lot of scars on my face, I’ve gotten stitches a lot of times, but now they’re stories that I wouldn’t take away.
“You know – I think if I was too good looking, I wouldn’t have had the career I’ve had, that’s the thing. There’s like a fine line. If you’re too good looking, then the fellows don’t like it. You know they don’t trust you.”
While the history books will always remember Johnson as the youngest-ever competitor in Oahu’s Pipeline Masters – scars or not – his music fans might hold conflicted feelings about Johnson’s career-ending accident. But he’s adamant there’s no universe in which he would have ended up following in daddy’s footsteps: “No, no, never! I’m a pretty good surfer in Hawaii. I’m decent, and I could be in those kinds of contests. I could surf pretty big waves pretty well, but I was never gonna make the pro tour. Anything like that was never in my cards.”
Instead, Johnson moved to California to study film. He later wound up directing and starring in surf movies Thicker Than Water (2000) and The September Sessions (2002); he also recorded the soundtracks. In between, he released his low-key debut album Brushfire Fairytales (2001), which, as he tells it, gathered a dozen of the first 20-odd songs he ever wrote. The remainder wound up on 2003 follow-up On and On. Both records sold over a million copies in the US alone.
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The latter and its follow-up In Between Dreams (2005) were both recorded in the songwriter’s Hawaii studio, the Mango Tree studio. Johnson’s unhurried delivery and lackadaisical acoustic guitar strums are minimally backed by sparse bass and drums, with the scent of sun-kissed sweat and the salt of the sea almost palpable in the chilled beachfront grooves. Fuelled by radio hits like “Better Together”, “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing” and the adorable domestic hymn “Banana Pancakes”, Johnson’s music became the date-safe go-to for every cookout in the northern hemisphere. The genre of barbecue rock was officially born – and, today at least, Johnson is owning it.
“I mean, I write pretty goofy songs. I would have decided not to put out a song like ‘Banana Pancakes’ – that song took me five minutes to write, you know what I mean? Some of the songs, I stay up all night, and I focus, and I feel like they’re deep cuts,” he says.
“You get negative things said about you, but after 20 years, when you’ve run into enough people that have told you that your songs mean a lot to them in their life, that they helped them through things, it gives you a certain kind of confidence in those songs. But then I also decide to put out the silly ones that I write in five minutes that make my wife laugh. So I’m a pretty logical person – if somebody’s basing [their opinion] off of my three or four most popular songs – yeah, they’re pretty sappy. So I don’t mind.”
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One thing’s for sure, those sappy songs must have helped make a lot of babies. “I’ve been told about a couple,” he laughs. “Soft rock? Barbecue music? I don’t mind any of that stuff – like, I just feel pretty lucky I get to do this pretty fun thing for a living.”
That much is indisputable, although you might be surprised to learn that even after two-plus decades of fame, he still suffers from a low-level impostor syndrome. Johnson credits his wife Kim with keeping him grounded amid the tumult of the spotlight. “[Fame] is a mind-bending thing – you can see where it warps people, where all of a sudden, everything you say, everything you do, feels like it’s really interesting. But it’s really not.
“I was always aware I was really lucky to have somebody by my side, that knew me before I was up there, somebody who was with me and that liked me even before I was up on that stage.”
Still, amid the whirlwind of opportunity and permissiveness that fame allows, he was never even nearly led astray? “I know it sounds kind of cliché, but I was just never tempted,” he answers, a romantic twinkle in his eye. “She’s really pretty too. If you see her, I kinda scored.”
Puppy eyes aside, the secret to the couple’s stability may be that they’ve enjoyed and endured Johnson’s success together. More than once as we talk, he refers to “we” – not just himself – when it comes to the Jack Johnson machine.
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The pair met in their late teens at the University of California – he was impressed to find unfamiliar albums by Pixies and Radiohead in her CD collection – and got married in 2000, long before fame struck. From his first shows, Kim did merch and guest lists, and served as a de facto manager. Today, they share two charities and three grown-up children who are no longer content to be dragged around the world on tour.
“Right off the bat, she was a music fan, so I started bouncing these songs off of her. She had a good balance of giving me confidence, but being a real editor. I would play a song for her, and I either got her attention or she wouldn’t respond. My first batch of songs was just trying to impress her, trying to win her over,” Johnson recalls.
“So rather than being like ‘an artist and my wife’, it was always a partnership – I wouldn’t have ever done any of it without her. We’ve always travelled together. We’ve always done it all together.”
The only problem with such a long, happy relationship might be that, as any artsy, angsty high-schooler will claim, most serious art is born from suffering. And a 30-year monogamous relationship with the same woman doesn’t breed the kind of heartbreak that songwriters from Bob Dylan to Taylor Swift have mined and dined out on for material. Especially when you admit all your songs are drawn from personal experience.“I feel lucky that all my love songs are about the same girl,” Johnson says. “I always joke around that my love songs are for my wife, and my break-up songs are for my friends [and their relationships]. When you’re close enough to somebody, you can empathise and write from their perspective – especially when you see two people that you love, and they break up. Those are the times I’ve tended to write about [heartbreak]: because I wanted to let the song be one little piece of guidance for them.”
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After just a few minutes in Johnson’s world, it’s easy to feel envious. He has all the pros of fame – talent, success, fortune, notoriety, a healthy family and work life alike – but skipped on the typical addiction, adultery, burning out and fading away. I’m curious, then – what is the worst thing about being Jack Johnson?
“I mean, I don’t always love all the attention. Don’t get me wrong, I really feel lucky that I get to draw a crowd together and play music, but when I’m not making a record I don’t tend to want to be on people’s minds. So I would say, just the by-product of being recognised when I don’t want to be,” he muses. “But it’s not too bad. My kids always tell me: dad, you’re not that famous.”
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