Johnny Coley - Mister Sweet Whisper
LP
Order
Transcendental poetry meets Southern Nightmare Jazz on the third album by Alabama-based poet & artist Johnny Coley, collaborating here with Worst Spills.
Tapping into French surrealism and transgressive American poets such as John Ashbery, the songs in Mister Sweet Whisper evolve, cinema-like, with Coley as an uninhibited, almost mystical, narrator. Textural, noirish playing complements Coley’s decadent landscapes, which glide by like cigarette smoke invocations. Echoing, and at times, dissonant notes of saxophone, crystalline tones of vibraphone, and jagged guitar arrangements punctuate Coley’s dreamlike visions, populated by ballet dancers, haunting nightclubs, and ghostly car drivers.
Wistful and expansive, the songs in Mister Sweet Whisper speak of Coley’s talent and natural ability to channel his poetic world into songs. A remarkable follow-up to Coley’s first two albums—Antique Sadness, from 2021, and Landscape Man, from 2022—which were praised as “exquisitely haunting, sublime, hilarious” and falling “somewhere between Robert Ashley, David Wojnarowicz, and Intersystems,” Mister Sweet Whisper arrives in full form: unpredictable and brilliant.
On this Mississippi Records/Sweet Wreath co-release, Coley takes a completely improvised and semi-hallucinatory journey down decrepit southern trucking routes, gaslit Victorian alleys, past “a small frame house / transparent with fire,” and by women arguing on the cobblestones outside a dark club in Rome (“you could only see their lips”). It’s a world of flesh vehicles, supernatural waiters, and a poet trying to hitch a ride from a Chattanooga Dunkin’ at 2 am, headed south.
There’s humor and sadness in Johnny’s thick drawling voice and laconic style - warped front porch yarns made up on the spot, whispered close to the mic. Always on the outside, even when he’s the one telling the story, Coley melds the hyper-specifics of a life lived on the road with a deep, dark pool of American collective imagery. These are dreams within dreams, waves of darkness, wisdom, and plain spoken Southern humor from a brilliant, overlooked artist. “When the God of Fire / comes looking for fire / that’s a bad sign.”
It’s even more remarkable that these dense, continually unfolding stories are improvised from within Johnny’s apartment in Highland Towers, Birmingham, where health issues have kept him mostly homebound. There, a crew of young musicians around the Sweat Wreath label have lifted him up as their poet laureate, visiting him regularly and putting his poems to music. On Mister Sweet Whisper, they back him on guitar, upright bass, vibraphone, and wobbly saxes and organs. But Johnny is the star of this multi-generational cosmic lounge act, building entire universes within a song.
LP comes with a 4-page booklet featuring artwork and writing by Johnny, and full liner notes.
Co-released by Mississippi Records & Sweet Wreath
“It’s a vision of an America turned inside out, but against all odds, Coley’s world is not unpleasant or pessimistic: there is a vibrancy and a joie de vivre which belies his world-weary delivery....We often talk about songwriters being ‘the poet of this’ or ‘the laureate of that’, but Coley is a genuine poet, someone with things to say that haven’t been said before. With Mister Sweet Whisper, he has created a document of a crazy, frayed civilization and has made it sound beautiful.“
-KLOF Magazine, November 2024
“No one ever finishes that jigsaw puzzle sky. There’s always a piece missing,” says Johnny Coley, midway through ‘Wrong Dollar’, the opening track on Landscape Man. Spoken over a fabric of wilted, morphing country, plucked mandolins and bouzouki melting into swirls of slide guitar, his snaking narratives sit in the middle ground between weighty existentialism and vulnerable perplexity. His lines have a rambling quality, but that penchant for digression is a strength. A radical move in a world which over values simple answers, Coley invites us to search out questions with him rather than prescribe narratives to us. While the trippy soundscape from his musical collaborators is surreal, Coley’s words are not hallucinatory, they’re deeply personal incites, anecdotes effortlessly slipping from the mundane into the philosophical. It’s clearest in the awkward romance on ‘Soundbodies,’ the album’s closing track. “I forget about crumbling, rotting infrastructure because my baby taste’s so good.” Coley’s words are laden with doubt, they’re written from a position of admitting perplexity rather than claiming authority. Embracing mystery and sharing the act of thinking through it.
-Quietus review of Landscape Man, November 2022
LP
Order
Transcendental poetry meets Southern Nightmare Jazz on the third album by Alabama-based poet & artist Johnny Coley, collaborating here with Worst Spills.
Tapping into French surrealism and transgressive American poets such as John Ashbery, the songs in Mister Sweet Whisper evolve, cinema-like, with Coley as an uninhibited, almost mystical, narrator. Textural, noirish playing complements Coley’s decadent landscapes, which glide by like cigarette smoke invocations. Echoing, and at times, dissonant notes of saxophone, crystalline tones of vibraphone, and jagged guitar arrangements punctuate Coley’s dreamlike visions, populated by ballet dancers, haunting nightclubs, and ghostly car drivers.
Wistful and expansive, the songs in Mister Sweet Whisper speak of Coley’s talent and natural ability to channel his poetic world into songs. A remarkable follow-up to Coley’s first two albums—Antique Sadness, from 2021, and Landscape Man, from 2022—which were praised as “exquisitely haunting, sublime, hilarious” and falling “somewhere between Robert Ashley, David Wojnarowicz, and Intersystems,” Mister Sweet Whisper arrives in full form: unpredictable and brilliant.
On this Mississippi Records/Sweet Wreath co-release, Coley takes a completely improvised and semi-hallucinatory journey down decrepit southern trucking routes, gaslit Victorian alleys, past “a small frame house / transparent with fire,” and by women arguing on the cobblestones outside a dark club in Rome (“you could only see their lips”). It’s a world of flesh vehicles, supernatural waiters, and a poet trying to hitch a ride from a Chattanooga Dunkin’ at 2 am, headed south.
There’s humor and sadness in Johnny’s thick drawling voice and laconic style - warped front porch yarns made up on the spot, whispered close to the mic. Always on the outside, even when he’s the one telling the story, Coley melds the hyper-specifics of a life lived on the road with a deep, dark pool of American collective imagery. These are dreams within dreams, waves of darkness, wisdom, and plain spoken Southern humor from a brilliant, overlooked artist. “When the God of Fire / comes looking for fire / that’s a bad sign.”
It’s even more remarkable that these dense, continually unfolding stories are improvised from within Johnny’s apartment in Highland Towers, Birmingham, where health issues have kept him mostly homebound. There, a crew of young musicians around the Sweat Wreath label have lifted him up as their poet laureate, visiting him regularly and putting his poems to music. On Mister Sweet Whisper, they back him on guitar, upright bass, vibraphone, and wobbly saxes and organs. But Johnny is the star of this multi-generational cosmic lounge act, building entire universes within a song.
LP comes with a 4-page booklet featuring artwork and writing by Johnny, and full liner notes.
Co-released by Mississippi Records & Sweet Wreath
“It’s a vision of an America turned inside out, but against all odds, Coley’s world is not unpleasant or pessimistic: there is a vibrancy and a joie de vivre which belies his world-weary delivery....We often talk about songwriters being ‘the poet of this’ or ‘the laureate of that’, but Coley is a genuine poet, someone with things to say that haven’t been said before. With Mister Sweet Whisper, he has created a document of a crazy, frayed civilization and has made it sound beautiful.“
-KLOF Magazine, November 2024
“No one ever finishes that jigsaw puzzle sky. There’s always a piece missing,” says Johnny Coley, midway through ‘Wrong Dollar’, the opening track on Landscape Man. Spoken over a fabric of wilted, morphing country, plucked mandolins and bouzouki melting into swirls of slide guitar, his snaking narratives sit in the middle ground between weighty existentialism and vulnerable perplexity. His lines have a rambling quality, but that penchant for digression is a strength. A radical move in a world which over values simple answers, Coley invites us to search out questions with him rather than prescribe narratives to us. While the trippy soundscape from his musical collaborators is surreal, Coley’s words are not hallucinatory, they’re deeply personal incites, anecdotes effortlessly slipping from the mundane into the philosophical. It’s clearest in the awkward romance on ‘Soundbodies,’ the album’s closing track. “I forget about crumbling, rotting infrastructure because my baby taste’s so good.” Coley’s words are laden with doubt, they’re written from a position of admitting perplexity rather than claiming authority. Embracing mystery and sharing the act of thinking through it.
-Quietus review of Landscape Man, November 2022