In the past five years, Jack Johnson has gone from filmmaker, shooting and scoring his 16mm surf films to a well-known singer-songwriter. After spending the remainder of 2003 on the road in support of On and On, and slowing down in 2004 to welcome his new baby boy, Johnson is now ready to release his third, and most musically upbeat release to date, In Between Dreams.
Raised on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Johnson practically began to surf as he began to walk. As the youngest of three wave-riding brothers and a long-boarding father, most of Johnson's life lessons were learned in the water. With Pipeline in his front yard, Johnson started surfing the legendary wave at age twelve, at seventeen was invited to surf in the Pipe Masters competition, and one month later suffered a surfing accident which kept him out of the water for three months. Although Johnson had began playing guitar as a young teen, it was these land-locked months that allowed Johnson to hone his guitar skills and find influences in a wide range of musicians from Cat Stevens to Fugazi.
At eighteen Johnson left the islands to study filmmaking at the University of California of Santa Barbara. After graduating in 1997, Johnson began a year-long adventure around the world with old surfing friends Chris and Emmett Malloy. The result was the acclaimed 16mm surf film Thicker Than Water, hailed as a return to the purist beauty of early surf cinema, which Johnson co-directed and shot. It was during the scoring of the film that Johnson found his musical voice. Before its release in 1999 Johnson's soulful folk tunes, inflected with blues and hip hop flavorings, soon began circulating as bootlegs in all corners of the global surf community.
At this time Johnson met fellow surfer Garrett Dutton (aka G. Love) who recorded Johnson's "Rodeo Clowns" for the G. Love & Special Sauce disc Philadelphonic also released in 1999. The recording quickly gained radio airplay and Johnson's reputation as a musician was building beyond the surf community. Despite offers to sign a record deal, Johnson chose to escape to the South Pacific to film his second surf film, The September Sessions. By the time Thicker Than Water was named Surfer magazine's Film of the Year and its follow-up The September Sessions nabbed the Adobe Highlight Award at the ESPN Film Festival, Johnson's bootleg tape fell into the hands of musician Ben Harper and his manager/producer J.P. Plunier who helped Johnson to make a record.
In January of 2001, Johnson's full-length debut, Brushfire Fairytales was released on Enjoy Records; an upstart indie label founded by veteran A&R man Andy Factor and Plunier, who produced the recording. Brushfire Fairytales was an impressive debut on numerous levels: From the opening "Inaudible Melodies"-which seemed to boil Jack's personal philosophy down to a chorus of "Slow down everyone/You're moving too fast"- to the anthemic "Flake," Brushfire Fairytales turned many people across the nation onto Jack Johnson.