“Art is not a hobby, it’s a necessity,” says Johnny Jewel. “I have an unquenchable thirst for sound and tone.”
Jewel has been thirsty for two decades. He has produced shimmering and dreamy synth-pop, slick noir disco and infectious dance-rock via his bands Glass Candy, Chromatics and Desire. He was personally asked to remix the Weeknd’s multibillion-streamed megahit Blinding Lights, and his compositions have been sampled by everyone from 21 Savage to Jarvis Cocker. On top of releasing several solo albums, he runs a staggeringly prolific record label, Italians Do It Better, for which he also produces, writes and contributes to all the acts. He has also scored multiple films, including Drive, Bronson and Lost River, and several of his tracks were used in the TV show Twin Peaks: the Return.
If you want to find a root for Jewel’s insatiable work rate, you can trace some of it back to a traumatic ordeal as a teenager. At 17 years old he was randomly kidnapped and held at gunpoint for 36 hours – the reasons and motivations still unclear. “That’s something that stays with you,” he says. “I was always driven and determined, even as a young child, but that really kicked it into overdrive and it hasn’t stopped. And that’s a gift; a lot of people don’t have a chance to appreciate things in life until later when they’re around more loss.”
This week he will perform his first ever live solo show at Christine and the Queens’ Meltdown festival, creating an audiovisual experience blending the worlds of film and fantasy. “Simply playing through a scene that I scored doesn’t appeal,” he says. “There will be a massive element of improvisation. I have to have something uncertain and dangerous for it to be interesting. Otherwise I’m like a puppet or mannequin.” The show will feature music from his film work and solo records, along with unreleased tracks, often edited to film sequences in new or abstract ways. “It’s familiar but new,” he says. “It’s nostalgic but unseen.”
Mysterious, dreamy, nostalgia-meets-futurism, wrapped up in glistening neon synths – often sung by talented women such as Ida No and Ruth Radelet, who glide between sultry and ice-cold vocal deliveries – has long been Jewel’s calling card. It was what led to him originally being asked to score Drive – its star Ryan Gosling and director Nicolas Winding Refn are big fans. However, while Jewel’s music remained on the soundtrack, he was replaced as composer at the last minute by Cliff Martinez, as the film became a bigger production. Jewel has since described his score as superior. “That wasn’t any disrespect to Cliff,” he says, “but my music set the tone, and that was the anchor that the entire sound was built on.”
It also set the tone for a wave of retro-heavy synth scores in film and television in the ensuing decade, evident in everything from Refn’s subsequent films to horror flicks such as It Follows or the nostalgia behemoth Stranger Things. “The thing that’s different about Drive is it’s not specifically retro,” Jewel says. “It’s not a homage to the past. There’s a toolset being used in [Drive’s] electronic music with zero intention of going backwards. I think the subtlety of that is what’s lost on the fourth, fifth, sixth wave of this stuff.”
While Jewel may have missed out on being fully credited on one of the most influential film scores of the 2010s, Gosling brought him back to score his Lynchian directorial debut Lost River and David Lynch came knocking for his Twin Peaks reboot. This time, Jewel latched on hard and left his fingerprints all over it. As well as his score, Chromatics have two on-screen performances, plus an appearance as the backing band to the late Julee Cruise. “I wanted to be a chess piece for him to use,” Jewel says of working with Lynch. “I delivered a massive amount of music and there was zero limitation [on what he could do with that music] from me.”
Jewel took four months off from all work just to prepare for the scene his band had to shoot. He bought a 1963 drum kit from Washington State “specifically for the voodoo vibes of having something from the Twin Peaks area”. He meticulously planned the colour of the clothing, hair and instruments of the band to work with lighting and shadows and even brought in instruments for other bands to use in their scenes that would be more fitting for the aesthetic and era.
Chromatics were so prepared that they killed it in one take and were asked if they wanted to do another track. Jewel had already planned for this eventuality and swiftly pulled out the lipstick red guitar required to deliver the second instrumental track they had rehearsed. “I knew this was a once in a lifetime situation,” he says. “I had been marked by [Twin Peaks] when I was 16. The seed was planted and it became full circle 25 years later. I wanted to respect what David’s work had given to me and placed in me, my dreams and imagination. It was a dream come true.”
It’s this level of focus and attention to detail that has gained Jewel a reputation as an obsessive workaholic with an unbreakable need to do things on his own terms. Jewel has been re-recording and finishing the Chromatics album Dear Tommy since it was first announced back in 2014 but never materialised. Perfectionist comes to mind, but he counters. “Perfectionism is like sterilisation,” he says. “I like it messy. But I won’t let it go until it has the right feeling. I’ll hold on to it and peel back the layers to allow the pure idea through. I don’t consider that to be perfectionism. It’s the opposite. It’s like trying to find the primitive and letting that exist in its raw state as much as possible. Like uncovering it, as opposed to polishing it.”
Another traumatic life event, a near-drowning in 2015, was the catalyst for re-making Dear Tommy, with reports that tens of thousands of finished CDs and vinyl were destroyed after Jewel’s existential epiphany when fighting the sea. “The water wasn’t violent,” he recalls. “It was completely impartial to my existence as I was running out of time.”
New Chromatics albums landed in 2017, 2019 and 2020 but in 2021 the band put out a statement, without Jewel, promptly ending things. Subsequently, Pitchfork ran an investigative article on the band and the myth around the purported destruction of Dear Tommy, with various sources claiming the album had never been pressed. “Those statements about it being destroyed were made by an ex-manager who was promptly fired,” Jewel says. “These are things the band never said. But the music is real.” And as for the reason behind Chromatics’ vague yet sudden demise? “That is a conversation for another day,” he replies. “But endings are always sad. I have so much love for the project but it needed to end and that’s a good thing.”
Jewel remains genuinely giddy about what the future may hold. “I never have to motivate myself to work,” he says. “I never get tired of it. It’s therapy, it’s meditation, it’s trance, it’s inner space, it’s the greatest feeling. The possibilities are infinite and it’s impossible to be satiated.”
• Johnny Jewel plays the Southbank Centre as part of Christine and the Queens’ Meltdown festival on Wednesday 14 June.
