Album of the Week: Daniel Johnston – Love Lives Forever: BBC Sessions (Staff Review)
Out today on vinyl is Love Lives Forever, a 2023 compilation of recordings by the late, great Daniel Johnston (1961–2019). This collection brings together songs from various BBC radio sessions recorded between 2003 and 2011, offering a rare, intimate experience of Johnston’s incredibly beautiful songs, performed live in the studio with accompanying musicians.
Often labelled “outsider music” by the press (whatever that really means, how many of our favourite bands and artists had formal training anyway?), Johnston’s songs are delicate, vulnerable, deeply personal, and frequently heart-wrenching. His ability to express raw emotion with such simplicity and sincerity is what makes his work so unforgettable and so genuinely affecting.
Johnston first rose to fame in his early 20s when MTV covered the Austin, Texas music scene. Around the same time, he was prolifically making and handing out home-recorded tapes, with early standouts being Songs of Pain (1981), Yip/Jump Music (1983), and Hi, How Are You (1983), the latter catapulted to cult status when Kurt Cobain famously wore a T-shirt featuring its artwork to the MTV Video Music Awards at the height of Nirvana’s fame.
The 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston went some way in further introducing his music to a new wave of listeners, as did the consistent support, and covers, by indie artists including Sparklehorse, Teenage Fanclub, The Flaming Lips, Eels, and just last year Irish musicians Jerry Fish and May Kay released the tribute album Dreaming of Daniel.
While admirers have long championed Johnston’s legacy, nothing compares to hearing his music first-hand. And that’s where Love Lives Forever shines. Even though many of the brilliant songs here, Walking the Cow, Go, Hey Joe, and True Love Will Find You in the End were already decades old at the time of these recordings, they retain all their emotional weight and raw beauty. Given the challenges Johnston faced performing live, he struggled for much of his life with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, it’s remarkable to hear him deliver these songs with such clarity, intensity, and feeling.
But it’s not all heart-breaking melancholy, Speeding Motorcycle and Rock ’n’ Roll pulse with unrestrained joy and wild energy. On the latter, Johnston throws himself into the role of chaotic frontman with such abandon, you can’t help but feel swept up in it. The production quality here is also notable step up from Johnston’s early, lo-fi cassette recordings, and it serves to highlight just how singular his talent really was. His greatest gift was his ability to write with unfiltered, emotional honesty.
Johnston’s talent is often described as naïve or childlike, labels that do a disservice to the rare gift of conveying so much with so little. Even 40 years on, there’s still something undeniably curious, and at times challenging, about his music. Despite its emotional immediacy, it may not always resonate with everyone. But for those it does reach, it often hits like nothing else. When I first heard it, it struck me in a way no other music ever had. Johnston’s songs felt magical, transformative and powerful, like being privy to secret, sacred music.
Daniel Johnston passed away far too soon, at just 58 years old in 2019. But with releases like Love Lives Forever, we can hope that more archival gems like this will emerge, ensuring that the music of this once-in-a-generation artist truly does live on.
