In 2019, Sydney-based singer-songwriter Johnny released his debut single Shake It, in conjunction with X-Ray Records (a sub-label of international rock label Golden Robot Records).
The song received generous airplay across Australia, Europe, and the USA, introducing Johnny to a potentially huge audience. After a short hiatus, Johnny rediscovered his love for creating music and began writing with one resolve in his mind: to revitalise the art of the catchy pop-rock song. As Johnny says about his motivation, ‘You wonder what motivates a person in today’s vastly different musical landscape.
One where you hear things like ‘the art of writing catchy pop-rock songs is dead, guitar music is dead…well, maybe, it is, but nobody told me!’ Guitar based music might be an outmoded method of getting onto radio now; however, Johnny’s tune sounds like it comes straight out of the golden days of FM radio, a hybrid track that utilises some near-contemporary elements—the loops, the acoustic flourishes on the verses—and fixes them to a bunch of melodies that sound a little like George Harrison’s What Is Life revisited by a vaguely countrified Rick Springfield. Excuse my ignorance if those names mean nothing to you.
But I’m pretty sure they mean something to Johnny. He has dug into the treasure trove of mountainous pop-rock sugar and created a palatable facsimile, and that makes for a pleasing diversion from some of the less considered over-streamed dross that passes for contemporary pop these days.
As Johnny says about the story behind the song, ‘The song is semi-autobiographical in the sense that my now wife who was my girlfriend at the time when I wrote the song many years ago, was some of the inspiration, as she was the girl of my dreams and then I role-played the situation of What if she didn’t want me?’
