Johnny Pears
From midnight voice notes to existential questions, Johnny Pears opens up about “Pin Cushion,” his spontaneous songwriting process, and the DIY journey shaping his evolving musical world.
1. Your songwriting process seems very spontaneous, with ideas arriving through midnight voice notes, scribbled lyrics, and unexpected guitar lines. When an idea first appears, what makes you recognize that it is worth developing into a song?
The sensation is fleeting, but what makes me recognize I’m onto something is this peculiar kind of warm rush at the core. It’s hard to explain really and it’s exciting when words and melody just start emerging and you’re thinking ‘Where is this coming from?’ You feel like you’re channeling something. I guess it’s your subconscious coming into play and things just arriving, as and when they should. I cherish these moments because of the rare and transient nature of them and though you can bottle what they produce, you can’t bottle that initial sensation. It’s probably why I can’t and never will stop songwriting; even if nobody were to ever hear it and it just acted as a release valve for whatever bubbles up.
2. “Pin Cushion” explores existential questions, adversity, and the search for meaning. What was going through your mind when you first started writing the song, and how did those ideas shape its final form?
The song came to me in 2024 after I’d spent Christmas and ten days in hospital the previous year feeling like a pin cushion – regular bloods, IV drips, all that stuff. I heard the phrase ‘a permanent cessation of consciousness’ on some show or film around the same time and it sparked a sudden dark, existential anxiety in me. I had to write it down. I’ve experienced severe mental health issues since my teens, so the sudden realization took me a little by surprise, having had innumerable panic attacks, where you think you’re going to lose consciousness, never for it to return again. I thought maybe I’d grown an immunity to all that stuff. I made a demo in 2024, and the chorus was kind of weird and insubstantial and two octaves up, so I couldn’t sing it anyway and it was all set aside because I didn’t quite know what the song was and it began to feel forced. It truly felt like unfinished business and so I returned to it this year. A bridge part to a chorus had been floating around for a while and then the chorus just came one day this summer, and it all fell into place. Without forcing it, it found its way back to what it was meant to be. A song about going through what was essentially an existential crisis and resting somewhere between accepting the reality of our predicament and still being able to wonder.
3. The title “Pin Cushion” works both literally, through your experiences with hospitals and medical procedures, and metaphorically, through the challenges life throws at us. How did these two sides of the concept come together?
If you take the lyric ‘stick a pin in me’ then I guess I’m saying, ‘bring it on’ and inviting uncertainty. Life jabs you with all sorts and this happens both physically and emotionally and so the concept can be stretched from that literal feeling of being a pin cushion in a medical setting, to an analogy for the experiences you endure emotionally as adversity inevitably comes your way. It’s coming for us all in one form or other, so I’m trying to take this stance of radical acceptance and do a sort of dance with it: a dance with the inevitability of death and life’s difficulties, whilst not constantly asking ‘why’. I’m probably breaking grammatical and semantical rules, but that’s where the lyric ‘the why is in the rub’ comes into it. There’s nothing wrong with a curious mind but constantly asking ‘why’ can drive you to dark places and send you spiraling. Maybe the constant ‘why’ is part of the problem and if you don’t find balance, you’ll be forever trapped. Perhaps sometimes, we just need to accept the great mystery of life and accept that the ‘not knowing’ is also all part of our suffering and all part of something bigger.
4. You describe your music as a DIY sonic journey using software, physical instruments, and both punchy and harmonious vocals. How important is experimentation and unpredictability to the sound you are creating?
I have the skeleton of the song before I start recording and I usually play it through over and over on an acoustic guitar, until it sounds tight and workable on that level. But the speed and the style and the whole soundscape of it comes largely from experimentation and unpredictability, so yeah, I would say that’s pretty important. I didn’t know how Pin Cushion would end up sounding, I just knew I wanted it sound to fuller and bigger the more I worked on it. The more you work on something, the more of an idea you get of what it can be and where it ought to go. It’s simultaneously daunting and exciting and I spend a lot of the time somewhere between ‘I’m onto something here!’ and ‘This is terrible! Why am I even doing this!’ There’s no magic formula, I just persevere and keep tweaking and layering until I have something that to me at least, sounds good enough to put out into the world.
5. “Pin Cushion” is part of your ongoing project Sounds from the Primordial Soup, which you are working towards developing into an album. What can you tell us about the bigger musical and conceptual world you are building through this project?
I’m just staying true to the concept, which is, as the theory goes, we all come from this primordial soup which was the catalyst for life on earth as we experience it today and the reason, I’m able to answer these questions and you kindly ask them. It’s channeling echoes of the past in whatever form they come, even it’s from something that was only experienced yesterday or an hour ago. Humans have been making music in some form and moving to a beat for a long time; it’s embedded in us. It does something special to us and for some reason, we just can’t stop doing it. I’m just another human – among many – from a long lineage doing essentially the same thing, in whatever way it manifests. I’m sure in some way the songs will have links as the project goes on and enough for an album is possible, but not in any contrived way. I’m just waiting to see what comes out and hoping I get that feeling and it has some resonance with people when I release it.
6. Looking beyond “Pin Cushion,” what would you like listeners to discover about Johnny Pears and your music as you continue this journey?
There’s some gifted producers and sound engineers out there with so much experience who know exactly what they’re doing and how to make music that sounds fantastic. I’m not one of them. I am for the most part ‘winging it’, which is why I call this ‘a sonic DIY journey of discovery’. I’ve probably picked up more bad habits than I’d care to admit, but whatever I make, even if it’s not to the standard it could be, I made it myself. And when this project is over, yes, I’m seriously thinking about collaborating and working with people who actually know what they’re doing. That, and I love to draw. Bricks, mostly. I have an Instagram art page. Take a look if you’re interested. I appreciate it’s not the most tantalizing of insights.