PRE-ORDER - EXPECTED EARLY JULY
"We are honored to present the final two LPs from the late Birmingham, AL-based queer poet and artist Johnny Coley, who passed away in 2025 at the age of 76. Tender, lucid, and slippery poems unspool in Johnny’s signature drawl, charting oblique journeys through the sidereal and mundane. He composes painterly landscapes of his beloved Alabama and imagines waking up in the crowded streets of London. This is Southern Surreal story-telling where each new word opens a door to the familiar unexpected. Both albums feature intimate collaborations with his small cohort of Birmingham-affiliated composers and improvisers that have helped usher Johnny's work to wider audiences with past releases on Sweet Wreath, Mississippi Records, and Astral Editions. On Where the Smoke Goes, Turner Williams Jr. assembles dilating tapestries of fractured Americana with assists from Old Saw’s Henry Birdsey while on As I Slip Into the Sky, Joel Nelson boldly illuminates Johnny’s final improvisations with shimmering analog electronics. All told, these two LPs work in tandem, highlighting the unique terrain Johnny occupied, and capturing the magical twilight peak of a true poetic voice of our strange late American era.
As I Slip Into the Sky reflects a particularly small sliver of time compared to Where the Smoke Goes, with recordings taking place in early 2025, while Johnny was bed-bound in an assisted living facility with multiple sclerosis. Alabama born, Portland based artist Joel Nelson helms the nearly entirely electronic backdrop, posing a new canvas for Johnny, with Buchla music easel bubbling up between Johnny’s lines. This album captures Johnny in a remarkably tender and emotive form. Love and all its permutations. The tangled, but caring nature of familial love, (“But you and me, we can talk on the phone every day. I would never leave you behind”), to the anguish and euphoria of romantic connection. Johnny has a remarkable ability to pose questions, ("What is real love like?), and provide answers that reflect the truest of realities, absent cliche ("I don't know. His curly hair, short on his head, his smile, his smile, his smile...that is what real love is like").
Joel Nelson's nimble work across a small array of analog synthesizers creates a flowing backdrop to Johnny's stream of consciousness. At times, Broadcast's fuzzed out ballads come to mind, while at others, early Oneohtrix Point Never's gauzy, distant drones anchor beneath Johnny's slippery syntax.
Johnny recorded his poems while confined to a hospital bed, through an iPhone laid gently on his chest. Assisted by the caring presence of John Albea and Lauren Jones, we can hear through these recordings Johnny immersed in his world of words, taking in the world of sounds Joel had provided for him. We hear his breath, at times we hear the harsh sibilance captured by the iPhone microphone, but more than anything, we hear the tenderness and poetic resolve of his caring soul. He was incredibly grateful for the past years of connecting with the small cohort of Birmingham-affiliated musicians and artists who upheld him as the unofficial poet laureate of "The Magic City", Birmingham, AL. Perhaps most appropriately, Johnny closes the album out in a state of gratitude:
"My funeral was perfect
I was buried wearing a very charming jacket
A very charming jacket I just happened to have on when i died
He was always the lucky one, Mary-Ellen said
I've been looking for a nice casual jacket like that I could wear to casual little outdoor parties and to my funeral all my life
But Johnny just had one
Probably someone left it in his car
He was so lucky
It doesn't even make sense
But its true
He really was that lucky"
