As a music blogger who writes about a lot of independent and unsigned artists, I’m continually impressed by the number of creative and talented people who are making some truly innovative music. One such artist is Johnny Ritchie, an intelligent, personable and wildly imaginative young singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who grew up in Indiana and is now living in Spokane, Washington. I’ve featured him several times on this blog (you can read some of my reviews by clicking on the ‘Related’ links at the end of this post), but will reiterate a bit of his background.

With a lifelong love for music, he began learning to play piano and drums as a child, then went on to study Contemporary, Urban, and Popular Music at Columbia College Chicago, ultimately earning a B.A. degree in Music at Western Michigan University in 2020. He now has his own business teaching others to play piano, keyboards and drums, as well as giving lessons in music theory, songwriting and improvisation. He also writes and records music in which he fuses alternative and experimental rock with neo-psychedelia and contemporary jazz to create incredibly fascinating and sophisticated soundscapes for his often provocative lyrics addressing relevant and timely topics like political corruption, intolerance and our troubled and conflicted relationship with social media.

Johnny released his debut single “Social Robots” in March 2021, a song exploring people’s behavior and social media consumption in response to the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL in 2018. He’s since followed with 11 more singles, and in keeping with his penchant for continual experimentation and pushing his musical boundaries, each sounds totally different and distinctive from the rest. His most recent, “walking anomaly”, was released on July 14th in advance of his debut EP JAWKNEE, which drops today. With a title that’s an endearing phonetic spelling of his first name, JAWKNEE is a work of self-exploration and discovery for Johnny, which he says is “a way of reclaiming who I am, what I am, what I believe and what I want to believe.”

Unlike most debut EPs and albums put out by a lot of musicians and bands, where they include some or all of their previously-released singles, Johnny has instead written all new material for JAWKNEE. The EP features eight tracks, three of which are instrumentals lasting a minute or less. Johnny graciously explained the background and/or meaning for several, beginning with opening track “twelve tone jawknee“, which “started as an experiment beat on a video call with my best friend Charlie Petralia. We wanted to create a lick that used all 12 tones in the chromatic scale in western music. I became obsessed with this lick and ran with it. Some of the speaking parts you hear were provided by Bill Davies, a friend of my uncle’s. He sent me audio recordings of poetry for another project we’re working on. I decided to splice some of his testing phrases, and this helped set the tone for the rest of the EP.” The result is a trippy fantasia of skittering spacey synths, layered over a deep, pulsating bass groove and accompanied by Johnny’s clipped, otherworldly vocal repeating the words “Jawknee” and “what’s going on inside of your head?” This track is followed by “majik“, a 47-second long instrumental that sounds like a fractured and twisted reimagining of the melody in “twelve tone jawknee”.

The song that resonates most with me is “bologna“, where Johnny focuses his anger on leaders and those in society who scapegoat others they don’t like, degrade the environment for their own personal gain, and refuse to pass legislation to protect us from real dangers, not invented ones. He elaborated on his sentiments: “the song hits on a lot of themes typical in my other songs, however it has a heavy emphasis on protecting our young people and empowering and emboldening them to have agency and to be conscious of their actions unlike the generations before them. I feel a heavy burden personally and socially to make a better world for our young people. They are too often used as political pawns for the ruling class’s money games all while being the ones who suffer the most. The ugly truth is that the USA is a country that has politicians trying to ban books about LGBTQ+ lifestyles because of this preposterous myth that transgender people are pedophiles and groomers, yet actively refuse to pass safer gun legislation to prevent more school shootings even going so far as to suggest putting MORE guns in schools- all so they can get a bigger paycheck from the NRA and gun-lobbying corporations. It’s absolutely disgusting to me and I’m tired of our government’s inability to lead due to their own selfish and greedy desires.” I couldn’t agree more!

Musically, the song has a languid hip hop vibe, with a deep, undulating bass groove and gentle airy synths, over which Johnny, in electronically-altered vocals, rap/sings his biting lyrics. I love them all, but will quote just a few: “I wanna see some change, I wanna see some action./ Want the kids to grow old, maybe they’ll help save us. What the hell do we know, been gluttonous for ages./ Focus on your money, convinced we can’t do better, but that’s just straight boloney.”

With its hypnotic, almost menacing beat, spacey industrial synths and eerie, otherworldly voices, “mandible patella” would be great for a sci-fi movie soundtrack. Johnny explained “this song is actually a sample from the first song “twelve town jawknee”; I did some splicing and editing, threw some FX on the track, and that’s how the beat was born. The speaking parts are my grandpa, taken from an audio interview I did of my grandparents back in 2018, in which he was describing his thoughts on death. I spliced up and rearranged the words to reflect what I wanted in the message. After that I just needed to added a cool hook melody that wrapped it all together.”

Johnny wrote “deestrukt” and “walking anomaly” in February/March of 2022, when he was still living in Great Falls, Montana, “during a period in which my family and I were the victims of abuse from church officials, congregation members, and wealthy small-town-Montana politics. During this time of injustice I felt very ostracized, manipulated, exploited, traumatized. I’ve been working through these issues, but these two songs were my initial reactions and expression of what was happening in my world. I was angry, but I used it as a catalyst to become a better version of myself. I’m proud of who I am now, I wouldn’t be this person without that chapter in my life. I don’t hate boomers responsible for it, however I feel immense sadness for their stunted worldview and vast ignorance, it is a waste of the human consciousness.”

“deestrukt” is a super grungy, mostly instrumental track, with harsh, rather menacing psychedelic synths and sharp percussive sounds painting a macabre nightmarish scene. Johnny’s vocals convey a visceral anger as he shouts “Who am I to challenge reality?” The track ends with a staccato of what sounds like gunfire, bathed in discordant reverb. On the other hand, “walking anomaly” is more languid and melodic, featuring watery chiming guitars, a throbbing bassline, swirling synths and very crisp percussion, all of which give the track a distinctively sharp sound. Johnny sings of embracing his true self, not giving a fuck what others may think: “Grew my hair down to my waist. Some people called me a hippie. Really I am just depressed. Some called me a Jesus. Really I am just super pissed. Some called me a hooligan. You’re damn straight I am one of them, so stop trying to ignore who I really am. I’m damn glad to be out of my mind. I would sure hate to be in it. Walking anomaly.“

Dividing the two aforementioned tracks is “ponchi“, a quirky and fun little minute-long instrumental piece Johnny says is an homage to Chopin’s “Nocturne in Eb”. The delightfully spacey 46-second-long closing instrumental piece “nif” brings the EP full circle, with Johnny’s otherworldly-sounding voice repeatedly chanting “Jawknee”.

While JAWNEE is an unusual and unorthodox work that probably won’t appeal to everyone, I think it’s artistically brilliant, lyrically compelling, and thoroughly unique. I love that Johnny continues to expand his musical horizons through fearless experimentation and willingness to speak his mind on important issues of the day.

Connect with Johnny:  Facebook / Instagram / TikTok

Fnd his music on Spotify / Apple Music / Bandcamp / YouTube