Daniel Dale Johnston

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Daniel Johnston, Cult Singer-Songwriter, Dead at 58 Outsider music hero had been hospitalized with a kidney malfunction before his death of natural causes

By KORY GROW

Daniel Johnston, the outsider folk artist whose childlike pleas for love captivated the likes of Kurt Cobain, Matt Groening and Tom Waits, died Wednesday of natural causes, his family confirmed in a statement. He was 58.

“The Johnston family is deeply saddened to announce the death of their brother, Daniel Johnston,” his family said in a statement. “He passed away from natural causes this morning at his home outside of Houston, Texas.

“Daniel was a singer, songwriter, an artist, and a friend to all. Although he struggled with mental health issues for much of his adult life, Daniel triumphed over his illness through his prolific output of art and songs. He inspired countless fans, artists, and songwriters with his message that no matter how dark the day, ‘the sun shines down on me’ and ‘true love will find you in the end.'”

For years, Johnson had contended with both physical and mental health issues. Although he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, his physical wellbeing suffered after he took a fall and was hospitalized; he also had to grapple with changes in his medication routine.

“Keeping him healthy has been the struggle and when he’s not well, you deal with a different person,” Johnston’s brother Dick said in an interview Wednesday. Johnston had been hospitalized last week with a kidney malfunction, his brother said, and returned home on Tuesday. “He was lucid and in good spirits,” Dick said. “As good as I’ve seen him in years. The [ankle] swelling was down and the problem looked good. He was happy to be home.”

On Tuesday night at approximately 8:30 p.m., a caretaker went to check on Johnston, but the musician declined to see them. His body was discovered in his room on Wednesday morning, according to his brother. No autopsy will be conducted.

The singer will best be remembered for his warbly, high tenor and simplistic ruminations on love and life on songs like “Life in Vain,” “True Love Will Find You in the End,” and “Walking the Cow.” On his best songs, his voice ached with earnestness and longing, features that attracted a number of high-profile fans. Cobain (who stated in interviews that Johnston was among the “greatest” songwriters) notably wore a T-shirt repping Johnston’s Hi, How Are You album to the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, and artists including Flaming Lips, Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, and Beck have all covered his songs.

“There are not enough words I can say about the important and vitality of Daniel Johnston’s musical spirit,” Zola Jesus wrote on Twitter. “He was a huge inspiration to me, to follow my creative impulses no matter how messy or simple.”

“Some people really liked me, and other people were making fun of me they thought I was a freak show,” Johnston told Rolling Stone in 1994. “I was just all wrapped up in the middle of it like a total psychopath. Not like a killer or anything. More like a way-out teddy bear. … And if people were making fun of me, if they have a good time making fun of me, then that’s just as good, really. I’m entertaining them. Maybe I’m more of a comedian than they know.”

The 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston brought his music and story, including a sequence about how Johnston shockingly threw the key to a two-seat plane he was in out the window, to a wider audience.

“Well, it sure was embarrassing,” Johnston told the Chronicle of the film in 2005. “Every terrible dilemma, every fabled mistake. Nothing I can do about it now, though. I wish they’d added a laugh track to it, because it sure is funny.”

Dave Grohl, Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic of Nirvana (Photo by Kevin Mazur Archive/WireImage) Kurt Cobain wears ‘Hi, How Are You?’ shirt at 1992 MTV Video Music Awards.

Johnston was born the youngest of five children on January 22nd, 1961 in Sacramento, California. His family relocated to New Cumberland, West Virginia, where Daniel fell in love with the Beatles and other rock musicians. He made his first album, Songs of Pain, in 1980, and got his commercial breakthrough three years later with Hi, How Are You, which came out on the indie label Homestead.

“When I was growing up, after church, everybody shook hands and would say, ‘Hi. How are you?'” Johnston told The Chronicle last year. “I always heard it, even at the funeral home when there was some dead person who died of old age. The undertaker said to me, and I was just a little boy, ‘Hi. How are you?’ That’s how that started.”

Around this time, Johnston moved to Texas and lived with family. He would hand out tapes of his music for free around Austin and eventually got enough buzz that MTV made a feature on him. The exposure brought him to the attention of artists on the college-rock circuit like the Dead Milkmen, Mike Watt, Sonic Youth, and the Butthole Surfers. The Lyon Opera Ballet staged a 25-minute piece set to songs from his Yip/Jump Music album in 1992, and galleries around the world sought out his artwork to display.

Johnston signed to major label Atlantic in 1994 and issued Fun, which found him collaborating with the Butthole Surfers’ Paul Leary. It sold around 12,000 copies, which wasn’t enough to keep him in the majors. Over the years, he also collaborated with Half Japanese’s Jad Fair, Yo La Tengo, Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and Okkervil River, among others; many of those artists, plus Flaming Lips, Beck, Waits and more, contributed to a tribute album to Johnston in 2004.

His last album, Space Ducks, came out in 2010. In 2015, Lana Del Rey covered Johnston’s “Some Things Last a Long Time” for a 15-minute short film about the indie legend; Del Rey and Mac Miller both donated $10,000 to a Kickstarter campaign for the film’s production. “I guess the one thing I hoped is that he understood that while he’s home alone doing his art still — he says he writes every day — that he knows that he really did make a difference in people’s lives,” Del Rey said of Johnston. “He made a difference in mine.”

Johnston announced in the summer of 2017 that he would be embarking on a final tour, with members of Wilco, Built to Spill, and Fugazi serving as his backing band. “I owe Daniel a lot as an inspiration to me,” Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy told The New York Times that year. “Daniel has managed to create in spite of his mental illness, not because of it. He’s been honest in his portrayal of what he’s been struggling with without overtly drawing attention to it.”

In the same Times article, Johnston was surprised to hear that he was going on a final tour and said that he could not stop writing music. “If I did stop, there could be nothing,” he said. “Maybe everything would stop. So I won’t stop. I’ve got to keep it going.”

Johnston’s brother said in the past two years since the death of their father Bill, a massive trove of unreleased recordings and documents that were left in their father’s home have been found, including letters Johnston’s father wrote that shed new light on the singer’s mental illnesses. “His struggle was always more serious than I was sensitive to,” Dick said.

“There are as many unpublished songs as there are published,” he added. “We’ll be spending a long time sorting out what he’s left behind. We have lots more to share.”

Additional reporting by Jason Newman

Daniel Dale Johnston, musician and artist, was born on January 22, 1961, in Sacramento, California. He was the youngest of William and Mabel Johnston’s five children and grew up in New Cumberland, West Virginia. Johnston first started drawing comics when he was in junior high school. He claimed that he had always wanted to be an artist but started to take it more seriously because it helped him deal with depression. Johnston was raised in the Church of Christ, and his parents felt that his interest in art conflicted with his religious upbringing, but he pursued art and music throughout his childhood. During high school, Johnston started to write songs in the family’s basement, where he recorded piano, vocals, and chord organ on a boombox. After graduating from Oak Glen High School in New Cumberland in 1979, Johnston briefly studied art at Abilene Christian University in Texas but dropped out within the first few weeks. His ambition to be an artist persisted, and he soon enrolled at Kent State University at East Liverpool in Ohio. Johnston also had musical aspirations.
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During his time at Kent State, Johnston lived nearby with his parents in New Cumberland and made music on the piano in their basement. In 1980 he recorded Songs of Pain—the first of many self-released albums that he recorded on cassette tape using a boombox in his basement in the early 1980s. His early cassette recordings were defined by their low fidelity production, childlike simplicity, and anguished vocals.

Johnston dropped out of Kent State in 1982 and moved to Houston, Texas, the following year to live with his brother Dick. Without immediate access to his parents’ piano, he recorded a toy chord organ and a Smurf-branded ukulele on a boombox in Dick’s garage and released Yip/Jump Music (1983). Following numerous disputes with his sister-in-law, Johnston went to live with his sister Margy in San Marcos, Texas, where he worked as a pizza delivery driver. During his time in San Marcos, he recorded Hi, How Are You in 1983. Johnston drew the artwork, as he did for all of his albums. The cover art featured a distinctive frog that Johnston named Jeremiah the Innocent. By this time Johnston was starting to experience regular episodes of manic-depressive illness, and when he came across a letter from his mother to his sister suggesting he be put in a mental institution, he bought a moped, joined a traveling carnival, and fled San Marcos. For several months, he sold corn dogs and traveled across the Southwest.

Daniel Johnston at his first Austin gig at the former Beach Cabaret north of the UT campus. Image available on the Internet and included in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.
When the carnival made a stop at Austin, Texas, Johnston convinced a church near the University of Texas at Austin to let him stay in their backroom after he had been assaulted at the carnival. In 1984 he found employment, rented an apartment, and spent most of his time on Guadalupe Street, the campus drag, and handed out his homemade tapes for free. His approach often included the greeting, “Hi, how are you? I’m Daniel Johnston and I’m gonna be famous.” He also claimed that he was the “songwriter of the year.” When he visited Louis Black, editor of the Austin Chronicle, Black initially thought he was requesting an album review, but Johnston wanted Black to listen to the songs and then asked him to be his manager. At Johnston’s first Austin gig, supporting Glass Eye at the Beach Cabaret, he played guitar rather than piano to better fit in with Austin’s rock musicians. Producer and musician Brian Beattie described the show: “He played three songs and it was absolutely electric not because of the performance, but because it was just astonishing to see him up on stage looking like he was about to have a nervous breakdown.”

Johnston quickly rose to prominence with Austin audiences, and in 1985 he gained national attention when the MTV show The Cutting Edge ran a feature on Austin’s music scene. Johnston was not initially billed to be on the show, but he endeared himself to MTV staff and gained a prominent spot on the broadcast. “My name is Daniel Johnston,” he announced directly to the camera, “and this is the name of my tape. It’s Hi, How Are You and I was having a nervous breakdown when I recorded it.” For 1985–1986 he won Songwriter of the Year and Best Folk Act at the Austin Music Awards. As his local and national profile rose, Johnston’s mental health issues intensified. He started having delusions about Satan and became increasingly violent during his manic episodes. On one occasion, after taking LSD during a Butthole Surfers show, Johnston attacked Randy Kemper, his friend and manager, and hit him with a lead pipe. After the incident Johnston was admitted to Austin State Hospital. Once he was released, he moved back to West Virginia to live with his parents and spent most of 1987 on medication for his mental illness.

In the late 1980s Johnston was often admitted to Weston Mental Hospital in Weston, West Virginia. However, in 1988 he visited New York City to work with producer Mark Kramer at Noise New York studio. Johnston experienced numerous manic episodes during the recording sessions and frequently went missing after long walks in New York City. At one point he was arrested. Johnston, who once again experienced delusions regarding Satan, decided to paint the Ichthys symbol repeatedly on the stairwell of the Statue of Liberty. Even though the sessions were fraught with difficulties behind the scenes, the result was Johnston’s album 1990 (1990).

In 1990 Johnston played the Austin Music Awards show as well as South by Southwest. Unbeknownst to his family, friends, and manager, he avoided taking medication for his manic depression before playing live. Immediately after his South by Southwest set, he and his father left on a two-seater private jet where Johnston had a psychotic episode and removed the key from the plane’s ignition and threw it out of the window. His father, a former U. S. Air Force pilot, managed to crash-land the plane, and both men escaped with only minor injuries. After the incident, the Johnston family moved to Waller, Texas, where Johnston resided when he was not admitted to psychiatric hospitals.

The early 1990s saw Johnston’s profile rise further in alternative rock circles. By 1993 his songs had been covered by numerous artists, and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana regularly wore a shirt bearing Johnston’s Hi, How Are You artwork on the front, most famously at the MTV Awards in 1992. In 1993 the Sound Exchange record store in Austin commissioned Johnston to paint a mural of the frog, Jeremiah the Innocent, on the side of their store. As a result of his growing fame, Johnston found himself in the midst of a bidding war between major record labels Atlantic and Elektra. During the bidding war, Johnston believed Elektra was satanic because of their affiliation with the metal band Metallica. Fun (1994), his first release under a major label, was the result of a lengthy and difficult recording process. Yves Beauvais, an A&R executive at Atlantic, believed that in spite of Johnston’s mental illness the album could be completed in a timely fashion with the appropriate producer and recording conditions. Beauvais enlisted Paul Leary of Butthole Surfers to produce the album. Because Johnston suffered from lithium tremors related to his medication, much of the instrumentation was played by Leary. Leary recorded the guitar tracks at Willie Nelson’s studio and recruited his band mate King Coffey on drums and Willie Nelson’s sister Bobbie on piano. Leary then had Johnston record his vocals on the instrumental tracks. Atlantic Records lost money on the album in spite of an advertising campaign that included a music video starring Matthew McConaughey for “Life in Vain.” Atlantic consequently dropped Johnston in 1996. Pitchfork later reviewed the album more favorably and described it as “some of the most emotionally resonant music of Johnston’s career.”

Johnston did not resume touring until the 2000s. In 2004 he released The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered. The first disc included cover versions of Johnston’s songs by famous alternative artists such as Tom Waits, Beck, and the Flaming Lips, and the second disc featured Johnston’s original versions of the songs. In 2005 he was the subject of the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. A cover of his song “Speeding Motorcycle,” about his moped, was featured in a commercial for the Target store chain in the early 2000s. Johnston continued making art and music throughout the 2000s. His former manager, Jeff Tartakov bought several of Johnston’s drawings and sold them to art museums around the world. Many of his pieces were included in the Whitney Biennial 2006 exhibition titled Day for Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Tartakov also distributed Johnston’s early tapes through Stress Records, even though he had been fired during the bidding war between Atlantic and Elektra. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons and Futurama television series, was a longtime fan of his art and music, and he invited Johnston to perform for All Tomorrow’s Parties, a London-based arts festival, in 2005 and 2010.

In 2017 Johnston embarked on an official retirement tour that also featured various regional backing bands, including Jeff Tweedy & Friends, Built to Spill, Preservation All-Stars, The Districts, and Modern Baseball. Each night began with a showing of the 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and the backing band decided on the setlist. On January 22, 2018, Tom Gimbel (Johnston’s manager) and wife Courtney Blanton were inspired by Johnston and his art to establish in Austin the first ever “Hi, How Are You Day.” The pair subsequently founded the Hi, How Are You Project to promote education regarding mental health and remove the stigma surrounding mental illness.

On September 11, 2019, Daniel Johnston died of a suspected heart attack at his family home in Waller, Texas. Shortly after his death was announced, fans presented flowers and taped his song lyrics to the Hi, How Are You mural in Austin. Austin mayor Steve Adler tweeted, “Not only was Daniel Johnston a legendary musician and artist who so authentically embodied Austin's soul and spirit, he also inspired many in our community to fight stigma associated with #mentalhealth issues.” Johnston’s songs have been covered by more than 150 artists worldwide, including Tom Waits, Pearl Jam, Beck, Wilco, Yo La Tengo, Teenage Fanclub, TV on the Radio, Death Cab for Cutie, Mercury Rev, and the Flaming Lips. In 2020 Built to Spill, one of the bands featured on Johnston’s 2017 retirement tour, released an album with cover versions of Johnston’s songs. In 2021 Johnston’s song “True Love Will Find You in the End” was adopted by Austin FC’s fanbase for their inaugural season in Major League Soccer with the help of the Hi, How Are You Project. Johnston was a hugely influential figure in DIY music, and the Austin Chronicle dubbed him a “songwriting genius” in their obituary.