Cover Story: Jack Johnson - The Dude Abides

Johnson spends his days outdoors: fishing, surfing, kayaking, swimming or just doing yardwork and looking at the waves. At night, when his boys — ages four and two, whose names Johnson wishes to keep private — are sleeping and the house is quiet, he'll stay up late reading The New York Times online or digging into a book. He's a voracious reader and sometimes quotes passages and life lessons he's picked up from Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Campbell. The folk songs Johnson writes come to him easily — he doesn't force them. "A lot of artists fall into a thing where they're constantly trying to create art," he says. "But I think you can forget to take things in. You've got to fill up the mind. When I get home from a tour, I put away the guitar and surf a lot. After a while, the songs just start comin'. It's not like some torturous process that I go through."

In the days I spend with him in Southern California (and during the time I was with him on the North Shore in 2006), Johnson frequently busts out a melody, whether we're riding in a car, sitting on the beach or in the middle of lunch. "There are two parts of a song for me," he says. "The choruses have to come from some place I don't really know. It might be something I heard somebody say but somehow morphs into something catchy. I don't really know how it happens — I'll just be walking down the street and find I'm singing some little line that somehow snuck in the back." Then he constructs the verses. "Those are what tell the story, or help convey some idea or feeling."

Johnson's casual approach has worked, making him perhaps the most laid-back rock star in history. Since his 2001 debut, Brushfire Fairytales, he has sold more than 15 million albums, and his latest, Sleep Between the Static, moved more than 370,000 copies in its first week, debuting at Number One. Some tracks, such as "Angel" and "Same Girl," are simple and direct declarations of love for Kim. But others are moody, somber departures from 2005's upbeat In Between Dreams, dealing with global themes like the Iraq War and personal ones like the loss of his wife's cousin Danny Riley, who died at nineteen from a brain tumor last Halloween morning. Riley, a student at UC-Santa Barbara and an aspiring songwriter, spent his final few months living with Johnson and his family. Sleep Between the Static is dedicated to Riley, and in the Johnson yard is a shrine where the family members leave rocks and shells they find on the beach. One of the album's strongest songs, "Go On," juxtaposes coming to grips with Riley's death and watching his own son grow up and learn to tread water for the first time. In fact, as Johnson was writing lyrics for the album, he noticed that many of the lines could apply to his children and to Riley. "It's about learning how to let go of someone you love," he says, "watching them swim away."