From ‘The Nada’ to ‘Algo Ritmos’, a Dive Into Kevin Johansen’s Music Journey
The ‘sub-tropicalista’ celebrates his 20-year career anniversary.
About a year ago, Kevin Johansen was sitting in a rooftop of a hotel in Miami, Fla. garbed in a spiffy navy-blue suit and his habitual tranquil look on his face. From that time onward, many things have happened, and in spite of his 20-year career anniversary, his spirit remains the same. There is no sound of birds or the robust trees whooshing through the air in the background. Instead, our conversation dwindles to the soulless connection of two screens 4,406 miles apart.
Sitting in the comfort of his house in Buenos Aires, Johansen sips mate, crossed legged dressed in blue jeans and a blue sweatshirt. “I’m here, resorting to endurance, like everyone else,” he sighs with a smile. “Like my mother used to say, ‘do like the Philistines, hold on and beat it’.”
He’s just released “The Available 20’s,” an addendum to his 2019 Algo Ritmos, an album that expanded his reach, putting him ahead of the experimental folk-pop pack with compositions that continue to eschew the informal for profound and selfless poetry.
“The Available 20’s” loomed during a stroll around his loved CBGB in the old Bowery neighborhood in New York City. “A couple of years ago, one summer night, I was walking around the neighborhood thinking back at my years in the 90s and I stepped upon that typical corner that vibrates, full of young people dancing on the sidewalk waiting to go into a bar and with certain melancholy I started humming, ‘everybody is drunk, like that funk, everybody is drunk, what the funk, we just wanna party’,” he remembers.
The tune, produced by Cachorro López (also on guitar) and Sebastian Schon (also on clarinet, ukulele and keyboards) is as brisk and equally appealing as his past releases which relish on creating chasms between genres and savor the synthesis of styles, adapting to infinite variables, fiddling poetically with puns and humor.
Posted from: https://www.billboard.com/music/latin/kevin-johansen-music-journey-9428088/