Surf rocker Jack Johnson reveals mystery ‘instrument’ on his new record

What started as a joke has now become a feature of Jack Johnson’s new album Meet The Moonlight and his world tour, which is headed Down Under.

On the credits of his new album Meet The Moonlight, American purveyor of surf sounds Jack Johnson is down for playing “bottles”.

Beer bottles, in fact. Intricately tuned via taking sips out of the bottle, to create the opening sounds on the track Costume Party.

What started years ago as a late night joke playing the descending bassline of Led Zeppelin’s Dazed and Confused on his beer bottle to impress a friend is now not only a piece of recorded music but a rather hilarious sketch on his current world tour, which lands in Australia in November.

“It’s either fun or a disaster, it depends on which night,” Johnson says.

“Our crew figured out this whole table for the bottles and even put a little lip on it so that they can’t slide off.

“But during soundcheck, I caught it on the lip and spilt all the bottles. So I got that out of my system and that night, it went pretty good.”

American singer songwriter and surfer Jack Johnson heads back to Australia in November. Picture: Supplied.

Of course Johnson didn’t invent playing the beer bottle.

But Meet The Moonlight underscores the rich vein of musical history which courses through the veins of the Hawaiian surfer turned global hit singer songwriter rocker turned conservationist.

He laughs when asked if it’s in his singer songwriter contract that each album must have at least two songs with that quintessential Hawaiian sound evoked by slide guitar and ukulele, as evidenced by Calm Down and Windblown Eyes on his new record.

“No, it’s not in the contract, but it tends to happen. It just seeps in there, I can’t help it,” he says.

Johnson then shares a history lesson which underscores just how influential Hawaiian musicians have been on the evolution of contemporary music.

Courtesy of a friend who curated an exhibition on the subject, he discovered it was Hawaiian musicians who first played the Dreadnought guitar, the standard acoustic guitar everyone uses today, in the vaudeville era of the late 1800s.

“And the slide guitar was invented in Hawaii (in 1889) by a 15-year-old kid from the town that I went to high school here, which pre-dates blues or country music; they used to refer to it as the Hawaiian slide guitar in the early days,” Johnson says.

“So Hawaii really has influenced the whole world musically quite a bit.”

The Hawaiian slide guitar and ukulele sound play an integral sound in Johnson’s music. Picture: Supplied.

Meet The Moonlight is Johnson’s eight studio album. He marvels at that number, because he fell into music as a side hustle 20 years ago.

The son of well-known surfer Jeffrey Johnson, the musician’s aspirations for a professional surfing career were dashed as a teenager when he was smashed at Pipeline – a week after becoming the youngest competitor to make the finals of the Pipeline Masters – and needed 100 stitches in his forehead.

He became mates with fellow cruisy guitar slinger Ben Harper, who was a fan of the surf films Johnson and his friends were making, which were also soundtracked by the young surfer’s own compositions.

Harper took Johnson out on tour where he shared the songs from his breakthrough debut record Brushfire Fairytales, which reached double platinum status in Australia in 2001.

Music brothers Ben Harper with Jack Johnson in Broken Hill in 2003. Picture: NCA.

It has been five years between studio albums for Johnson but it was inevitable the past two years would have an influence on his new works.

Songs like album opener Open Mind find Johnson seeking to make sense of the pandemic’s far-reaching social impacts, like friends falling out over anti-vax attitudes. Covid vaccination became an inflammatory social media debate among some in the surfing community last year.

“I think anywhere you were, there were certain areas where a majority of people were going one way or agreeing, and other places where some communities were butting heads on a lot of those things,” Johnson says.

“The last couple of years definitely fed into the songs, a lot of my observations and conversations about seeing the connection between people and coming together to support each other through really hard times and seeing the beautiful side of it.

“And then the uglier, kind of divisive side, seeing old friendships (end), people going in separate ways over something (because of) just the lack of being able to communicate in a successful way.”

As always, there are songs on the record which began simply as a sonic attempt to make his wife Kim Baker laugh – or to make up for forgetting a birthday or wedding anniversary; the pair have been married for 22 years.

“You know my formula!” he says.

“So the love songs, a lot of times they do come from those moments because they are me just trying to make my wife laugh. And that’s what love is, really. It sounds silly to say, but there are a lot of times they start as a joke because laughter and trying to make somebody feel good, that’s what it is.”

Meet The Moonlight is out now. Tickets and details of Jack Johnson’s Australian tour via jackjohnsonmusic.com

Foxtel Rewards members can access exclusive reserved tickets, on sale from 10am on July 1 via foxtel.com.au/music