Jamey Johnson on His New Album "The Guitar Song," and What He'd Like to Be Doing in 40 Years

Dagen McDowell’s got big love for country star Jamey Johnson, maybe because of his beard, maybe because of the smooth, deep tenor of his voice. Either way, Imus did not get into it with Johnson, whose overt musical genius does not hide the fact that he’s just a little bit scary. 

Johnson’s most recent album That Lonesome Song was a huge hit, and next week he’ll release a double album called The Guitar Song featuring 25 tracks that, according to his website, chronicle “the journey form darkness to light.”

As for whether Mercury Nashville, his record label, had any objection to the somewhat unorthodox album, Johnson told Imus, “I come up with an idea and they support me on it. I don’t have to consult with anybody to make a record the way I want to make it.”

The Guitar Song took three years to write and record, and the idea for the double album’s so-called “white” and “black” records came to Johnson and his engineer one night when they were studying the yin-yang.

“The Chinese used it as a calendar,” he explained to Imus. “The thickest part of the white would be the longest day of the year, and the thickest part of the black would be the longest night of the year.”

He then realized this theme could be “a gauge for emotion of all the songs we wanted to put out.” And no, I-Man, Johnson was not taking drugs that night. Not that he remembers.

Johnson is sort of an accidental country music star. He started out writing music for other artists like George Strait and Trace Adkins, but never stopped working on his own stuff.

“My thinking was I could release them on my own, put one out every month if I wanted to,” he said of his songs. That never happened, though, because of That Lonesome Song’s success: the song "In Color" was named Song of the Year at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 2009, and to date Johnson has been nominated for five Grammys, including Best Country Album for That Lonesome Song and Best Country song for both "In Color" and "High Cost of Living."

But being a star was never Johnson’s purpose, though the man who once had trouble playing guitar and singing at the same time admitted everybody kind of hopes for it. His view on his profession, “I just ride around and play some country music for some people,” is decidedly simple, which is how he prefers it to stay.

“Forty years from now,” he told Imus, as he prepared to play another song, “I’m still going to be riding around playing guitar and singing.”

Simultaneously, we hope.

-Julie Kanfer