Johnny Coley - Where the Smoke Goes

Lobby Art brings to light two albums by Birmingham, AL poet & artist Johnny Coley, recorded in his final years between 2022-2025 while contending with multiple sclerosis, and assisted by a range of local musicians and composers such as Old Saw’s Henry Birdsey, Turner Williams Jr and Joel Nelson amongst others. It’s hard to do justice to art, words and music of such profound emotional breadth and understanding, but I’ll nonetheless try to do my job as best I can. Coley’s work is elusive in its categorisation, bending Southern idioms and colloquialisms through a surrealist lens that often verges on magic realism, and hugely favours humour while reflecting on both familial and romantic love, identity and mortality. You will laugh when you hear these words, as equally as you’ll be caught open-mouthed at their sudden beauty and personal truth. There is much joy to be derived from the writing itself, but of equal significance is Coley’s voice, both fragile and assured, and in complete command of delivering the message. The man could land a joke, and he also knew how to pause at just the right time to knock you right off your feet. Crucially, the musical collaborators are hugely sensitive to the values of Coley’s work, building a series of sonic tapestries that perfectly accent the various observations, tensions and epiphanies. On I Slip Into the Sky, Nelson’s use of the Buchla creates an uncanny electronic landscape that drones, whirrs and chirrups in ways that feels perfectly expressive of the sideways spun worlds Coley imagines. By contrast, Where the Smoke Goes is mostly helmed by Turner Williams Jr and in part fleshed out by contributors from the French underground in which he’s now situated, amounting to a musical backing that’s caught somewhere between Loren Connors impressionism and Jon Collin-styled evolutions of the American Primitive. No two ways about it, these are significant records, the kind that offer up notions of truth and understanding that stay with you long after the needle is lifted. You may hear in here echoes of David Berman’s ‘A Cowboy Overflow of the Heart’ or Blue Gene Tyranny’s ‘A Letter From Home’, as fine a comparison as I can think of, but still a disservice - Johnny Coley had a voice all his own, a will to communicate it right to the last, and a cast of supporting sympathisers around him that understood their duty to serve that. It’ll be a struggle to find records of greater humanity this year or any other.