JILLETTE JOHNSON

COMPETITIVE STRENGTHS

Jillette Johnson turned down The Voice to find one or her own

by Matt Ashare |  
Published June 26, 2013

Johnson admits that there are benefits to The Voice, just not for her.

Just a few short years ago, 24-year-old NYC-based singer/songwriter Jillette Johnson was offered what many young musical artists would consider the opportunity of a lifetime: sign on the dotted line and be whisked away to L.A. for the debut season of “The Voice,” NBC’s star-powered, Carson Daly-hosted answer to Fox’s hugely successful “American Idol” franchise. If she said yes, she’d have the honor of being coached and judged by a panel that included a multi-platinum pop diva (Christina Aguilera), a modern-rock dude (Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine), a Nashville star (Blake Shelton) and a hip-hop funkster (Cee Lo Green). If she said yes, she’d have a national platform from which to jumpstart her career. If she said yes, she’d be competing for a $100,000 and a record deal with Universal. She said no.
     “I really didn’t know what the show was,” Johnson admitted when I caught up with her on the phone last Friday. She was in the Boston area and heading to Charlottesville the next day on the final leg of a promotional tour for the release of “Water in a Whale,” her debut album on Wind-up Records. “I got dragged to ‘The Voice’ audition by someone who didn’t know me very well but who was excited about my voice,” she recalls. “And I kept being asked back for more auditions until suddenly there was this huge stack of paperwork in front of me basically asking me to sign away a lot of my freedom and rights for the next seven years. I would have had to drop everything else I was doing and, yes, overnight I’d be in front of millions and millions of people who’d know who I was.
     "Thankfully, my gut told me not to do it. It was a real test. It’s difficult when you’ve been playing shows for some people who care and others who really don’t for years, and you’re given an opportunity like that. So, it was tempting, because there are people who benefit from being on shows like that. But it’s not the person I am. I don’t want anybody to think of me as just some girl who rolled out of bed one day and started singing.”
     Indeed, Johnson wasn’t exactly an unschooled novice when “The Voice” got wind of her burgeoning talent. At the time, she’d already begun work on several of the tracks that would become “Water in a Whale” with a pair of prime-time producers — Peter Zizzo and Michael Mangini — whose combined resume includes names like Celine Dion, Avril Lavigne and Joss Stone. And, just to throw two more respectable names into the mix, the press release hyping the arrival of “Water in a Whale” opens with a quote from an online music marketing site called Baeble that likens Johnson’s voice to that of Adele and her songwriting to Fiona Apple’s. Which, frankly, is just the sort of thing one tends to expect when the industry gets its hands on a largely unknown young artist on the verge of a big breakthrough.
     “Look, those aren’t my words,” Johnson says, when I suggest that Adele and Apple set a fairly high bar, both artistically and commercially. “But I much prefer being compared to people that I respect and that I like to listen to over being compared to someone that I don’t feel that way about, which can also happen. It’s not intimidating for me because I’m a pretty ambitious person, and I don’t shy away from a challenge. So, I’m totally OK with that.”
     In fairness, associations with artists like Apple and, say, Tori Amos are something of an occupational hazard for just about any young songstress with a big voice who happens to play piano, particularly if audacious confessionals, stark psychological dramas and mustering strength through vulnerability are also part of the mix. To a large degree, that’s exactly what Johnson projects on “Water in a Whale,” especially on the disc’s more intimately produced chamber-pop tracks.
    The song “Pauvre Couer” — French for “poor heart,” and likely a not-so-thinly veiled reference to “Seguidilla” from the Georges Bizet opera “Carmen” — is a soul-searching examination of a dysfunctional romance that spotlights aching vocals and insistent piano arpeggios. “I was trying to make you see me, like the way you did before,” Johnson sings to a distracted lover who’s watching one of those televised poker competitions. “So I took off my clothes and I opened a bottle/And I told you I’d do whatever you wanted/Naked on the floor, crying I’m so beautiful.”
     Not only does the lyric bring to mind the imagery employed by Fiona Apple in the somewhat notorious video for a her first big single, the 1997 alt-rock hit “Criminal,” but the Vevo video for “Pauvre Couer” actually goes so far as to feature candid glimpses of Johnson in various stages of very “Criminal”-like undress. Johnson is the first to admit that Apple was a formative influence. She remembers hearing “Criminal” when she was only 8 or 9. “Tori Amos came later to me,” she admits, “but I was listening to Fiona Apple when she first debuted.”
     And yet, Johnson doesn’t confine herself to the narrow role of torched singer-with-piano on “Water in a Whale.” The disc opens boldly on a defiant note with the muscular thump of “Torpedo,” an empowered pop song with big-budget gloss. A hammering club beat buoys a pounding piano riff and stacked harmonies surround the lead vocal, as Johnson takes on a stance that recalls early Alanis or, reaching back another generation, Pat Benatar doing classic-rock battle. “I will not lay down in the road,” Johnson declaims, “I will not make it easy/I ain’t got no saints or saviors/This is guerilla and I will fight this war...”
     More striking is “Cameron,” a song that first showed up on Johnson’s 2012 EP “Whiskey & Frosting” as a spare and slightly quirky piano ballad, and that’s reprised here in more rousingly anthemic fashion, with a full complement of strings and a hard-hitting backbeat. A thoughtful meditation on the travails of a transgendered friend — the “Cameron” of the title, who “makes his father mad” because “since he was a little boy he always felt more comfortable in lipstick” — the song plays to Johnson’s strengths as an empathetic songstress with a penchant for finding the universal in the deeply personal, as she also does to good effect in “Peter Pan,” the perkiest of the disc’s pop numbers, and a tune that perhaps fittingly brings to mind the tween dreams of “American Idol” sensation Kelly Clarkson in the very best possible sense. “We don’t get drunk on Tuesday nights anymore,” Johnson ruefully reveals, as she confronts the workday realities of adulthood before pledging her allegiance to the freedom of “Never Land,” artfully splitting the difference between the edgy revelations of the confessional singer/songwriter and the simple joys of a pop princess.
     In a sense, having forsaken “The Voice” in order to find her own voice, Johnson remains determined to be more than just one thing — to subvert the arbitrary lines we tend to draw between the art of the singer/songwriter and the artifice of the pop star. “That’s a really good point and no one has ever put to it me that way,” she reflects. “And, I get frustrated sometimes because, right now I’m on the road playing piano by myself, so when people see me they’re seeing that stripped-down, female singer/songwriter who plays piano. And that’s me in my natural state — that’s how I write, and it’s what I’m most comfortable doing.
But, I write songs that I want to elaborate on. I want to explore that in the studio and see how far I can take things. And, I think a lot of times people have a hard time understanding that those two things live in the same world.”