I Heard That Noise, Graham Jonson's new album as quickly, quickly, sounds like the basement in which it was made. Every nook and cranny is strewn with synths and speakers, and an old upright piano molders in a corner. A tiny ground-level window looks out onto the rainy North Portland streetscape outside, while a set of "dumb gamer lights" left over from the producer's teenage years provide one of the few sources of illumination in a room whose blood-red carpet makes it look like a place you'd expect to see the evil spirits from Twin Peaks congregate.
According to Jonson, there is a ghost down there, but he's harmless. "He's a chill guy," says the 25-year-old musician, "but he doesn't really come into the room. It's mostly a joke, but sometimes I'll see him out of the corner of my eye. He usually just runs past the doorway."
A lot of things go bump on Jonson's second album for Ghostly International. Though no fan of horror movies (he's voiced his disdain for the new Nosferatu on X), Jonson loves what he calls "musical jumpscares," and many of these songs switch direction rapidly or allow themselves to be subsumed by walls of dub delay. It's part of a tradition of Northwest studio wizardry that encompasses the rough-hewn animism of the early Microphones, the most Beatlesque caprices of mid-period Elliott Smith, and the ambient sound paintings of Grouper and Loscil. "You're a harp inside a basement," Jonson sings on the epic closing track "You Are," and he could be describing his own bric-a-brac aesthetic.
It's a big stride from 2021's The Long And Short Of It, let alone from his early excursions into the world of lo-fi hip hop beats, for which he first garnered attention as a teenager. Jazzy doodles like "Getsomerest/Sleepwell" paid his rent for a while, thanks to millions of streams that no doubt played idly in the background as students and white-collar workers sipped coffee and deleted emails. Yet his current work in a more traditional mold as a touring musician and bandleader hasn't been quite as lucrative, and he was forced to cancel his most recent tour halfway through due to financial concerns. In the wake of this aborted tour and on the heels of his upcoming second album, we sat with Jonson at his Portland studio for an interview.
I Heard That Noise is out today, so stream it below and read our conversation.
Can you tell us a little about why your tour fell apart?
GRAHAM JONSON: It was definitely the most fun tour that we've done. It was 19 cities in 31 days. I had this opportunity for a headline tour so I took it. I funded the whole thing, but because I hadn't released any music in a year and a half, the ticket sales just weren't there. Some shows were great. New York was great. LA was great. But then we were playing in these weird fucking places like Vernon, British Columbia, so a lot of the ticket sales just weren't there, and I had to make the decision to cut it short because I lost thousands of dollars on that tour.
I was hoping I could make money. I was told that the longer you tour the more money you could make, and it just wasn't the case. I was like, yeah, four more Airbnbs or four more hotels or whatever, plus gas and driving back home because we were out in like Toronto — it's not even worth it. So I cut it short. But it was fun.
How did you end up playing all these weird places?
JONSON: My buddy Lionel started a booking company, and it was pretty much just places that he has played before. Some of the weird places were cool, like Vernon actually was pretty cool, but I think he was just trying to squeeze in a bunch of dates. We played four shows in Texas when we probably only needed to play one, and I was saying yes to everything because touring is the dream, but it fell apart.
Do your lo-fi beats still contribute significantly to your income?
JONSON: That niche has definitely slowed down for everybody who still does it. It's like chillwave or any sort of momentary genre where it can last for so long. I'm sure that people still make money from it, but since pivoting to singer-songwriter music, that shit doesn't pay nearly as well. I was definitely making way more money when I was 17 than I am now, but any royalties are good royalties.
I just can't do lo-fi or hip hop beats anymore. I make a lot of melodies for people. I'll make little eight-bar loops of synth stuff and send them to my friends who have connections with rappers, and then they'll make the beat around that. I guess I still make beats, but they've changed. I forgot how to swing my drums like Dilla, I just don't remember how to do it anymore.
Do you think that's because what you listen to has changed?
JONSON: I think that's mostly what it is. I used to listen to only beats. I think getting a Spotify account changed everything because I had all the music at my disposal rather than just SoundCloud or whatever.
When did you do that?
JONSON: I was kind of late to the game. It was 2017, 2018, because before that, I was just on SoundCloud, you know? I think I made a Spotify account when there were all the rumors that SoundCloud was gonna shut down.
What kind of music were you discovering?
JONSON: It's the most cliché thing ever, but I was wanting to sing and write songs, so I listened to a lot of the Beatles because I was like, "What's a good starting spot? Where does everyone start?" So I just listened to a bunch of the Beatles, and from there I got really into psychedelic music and had this mission to find the earliest psychedelic music that I could find. It just spiraled from there, kind of like digging for samples, but instead of wanting to sample them, I just wanted to listen to the songs.
I'm jealous. I wish I could hear the Beatles for the first time again.
JONSON: I knew the super duper hits, like "Yellow Submarine." My mom had a greatest hits CD or something. She was really into Peter, Paul & Mary and John Denver and this sort of '60s, '70s soft rock stuff, so that's what I grew up on. The wilder Beatles I didn't know about at all, but I spent a long time digging through, because there's so much music there. I always think about "Strawberry Fields Forever." The fact that it's one of the most famous songs ever makes it easy to overlook how crazy of a song it actually is. A lot of their stuff is like that.
That was some of the earliest rock music to explore the possibilities of the studio as an instrument. Did hearing this music motivate you to do the same thing?
JONSON: Totally. I started thinking about microphones, which I had never thought about before. After I listened to a bunch of the Beatles, I got really into D'Angelo and was like, "How did they get the drums to sound like that?" Then it's like, "Oh shit, I need to buy a drum kit and I need to get some good mics and figure out how to mic the kick so I can have my drums sound like that." And then it just spiraled into gear obsession, honestly.
I was really picking up on that on the new album. At the end of "You Are" there's this extended coda of ambient studio sound. It feels like the studio is kind of talking for a while.
JONSON: Yeah, totally. This studio has a sound. Like all the cobwebs, it's all in the music. It's a weird-ass room. If you look at the piano, it's crooked, the whole room is slanted. I don't even know what they use this for before. I think it was probably an office space or something. But there's definitely a level of cursedness in this room that I think shows up in the music.
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You mentioned when you booked the tour you hadn't put out any music in some time. What were you doing during that time?
JONSON: By the time we went on tour, the album was done and turned in and everything. I pretty much do two things, I hang out with my girlfriend and I make music. That's kind of all I do. I'm not with her, I'm down here.
A lot of the album came together over the course of a couple of years. I'm so familiar with this space at this point that my workflow is pretty fast. During the album I had an ethos that I knew I wanted to keep it in, I wanted have acoustic guitar on them, but a lot of times that can get kind of old for me, so I'll make three songs for the album and then for the next couple months, I'll just make trap beats.
This music seems to be about a very specific period of your life. Can you tell me a little bit about what was going on in your mind when you were writing these songs?
JONSON: I've been telling people to not frame it as a breakup album, even though it kind of is. A lot of the songs are about this proverbial other person, which definitely is real life. I was in a terrible relationship for a year that just totally threw me off everything, so definitely a lot of the songs are about that, but I tried to keep it vague enough so that people could relate to it if they were so inclined.
I struggled with keeping to one theme on the album. I don't know if I'm capable of writing a fully conceptual album. When I started making the album, I had a bunch of songs that all got scrapped where I was trying to make an album about dreams. I was having all these insane dreams that I would write down, and then like at a certain point, I just stopped having crazy dreams and so I ran out of material for that, and that was the last time I attempted to actually make an album that was about like one thing.
I feel like there's a narrative that came together accidentally, starting out with "I Heard That Noise" as the first song. It's kind of the prologue to the whole thing. It starts with I love you so much, and then throughout it, it kind of goes through this period of anger and sadness, then by the end, "You Are" is looping back to the top with love whether it's self-love or love for this person or whatever. It could be a song about a person, but it could be a self-love thing or something.
It reminded me a little bit of "My Canopy" from Mount Eerie's Night Palace, which Phil Elverum sings to his daughter.
JONSON: Yeah, totally. He's like my favorite musician ever, so I try not to steal from him too much, but I feel like "You Are" is pretty Mount Eerie-coded. Also, I like that song on the Mount Eerie album by the Microphones, the first song ["Sun"] that starts with 10 minutes of drumming. I took one of his songwriting classes, it was like a million people in the Zoom call, and I don't even know if I learned anything. I think the only thing I learned was that if you wanna write like Mount Eerie, you have to be Phil Elverum. He just talks the way he sings, it's kind of absurd.
I remember I got to ask him about ["Sun"] in a little Q&A thing, and he drew the whole thing out. Do you remember in school making timelines of the universe or of the world? He made a full timeline on this massive piece of paper and drew out every part of the song, I thought that was the coolest idea. You can see in the drawing, it's like foghorn, drums fade out here, and then they come back with the blaring of trumpets and he's drawing the trumpets and shit. I tried to do that and it was a total disaster. It didn't work at all, but it was definitely very inspiring.
Do you think you'll try touring again now that you have an album to tour behind?
JONSON: I want to. We were gonna do a smaller run of shows and just hit the major markets, but I called it off. I think we're all gonna move out of this house at some point, probably this summer, and we were supposed to tour in June. Money's always a factor, and I was thinking if I lose money again on this tour, I won't be able to move in with my girlfriend. I think we'll probably do a release show in Portland, and then I'm just keeping my eye out for friends of mine that are more popular than me that might be touring. I don't know about a headline tour unless the album goes fucking insane, which I have no idea, but we'll see.
You said you had a period where you mentioned having crazy dreams. You also talked a lot about smoking weed on the last album. Did you quit, and is that why you were dreaming so much?
JONSON: The whole time I was in that terrible relationship, I quit 'cause I was like, "If I smoke weed, I'm gonna kill myself right now." I definitely still smoke, but not nearly as much as I smoked on the last album. I think it's just getting older and not wanting to feel like I'm floating through life anymore. My girlfriend doesn't smoke or anything, so a lot of the time I only smoke when I'm in here. It's definitely still part of my process, but not like on the last album when I was feeling like "Holy shit, I need to get it together."
I still have crazy dreams. I don't really write them down as much, but I had a dream the other night that I was in my aunt's house with Playboi Carti while he was making his album Music. I think it was because I stayed up late to see if it was released.
I Heard That Noise is out now via Ghostly.
