Daniel Johnston: Fear Yourself : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Daniel Johnston has been recording albums for twenty years, along the way becoming a favorite of Kurt Cobain, Yo La Tengo and Sparklehorse, whose Mark Linkous produced his latest effort, Fear Yourself. But as loved as Johnston is for his music, he is perhaps most famous for his battle with manic depression, which simultaneously fuels his songwriting and threatens to destroy it. Fear Yourself is the clearest distillation of Johnston's genius as a songwriter and lyricist. Linkous, along with engineer Alan Weatherland, laid down synthesized orchestration, mellotron and keyboards around Johnston's simple but classic compositions on piano and guitar. On "Mountain Top," Melissa Moore contributes a gorgeous violin part that exalts the entire two-minute punk-pop masterpiece. On "Syrup of Tears" Johnston sings, "Depression has got me down/Drilling for the kill/It's too late to suffer through/God I'll make you a deal/Just let me smile, a while for real" as piano and crashing cymbals punctuate his plea, sung out of tune, with his slight childlike lisp. Johnston, quite possibly, has one of the worst singing voices in rock, but what's more remarkable is how well it works with the oddball imagery, charmingly naïve observations and of course Johnston's depiction of his inner turmoil. His voice crystallizes the pain of his illness -- as the album title suggests -- an unimaginable state, where the most frightening place to be is in one's own mind.

CHRISTINA SARACENO
(April 8, 2003)