Ripley Johnson adds country music to his psychedelic repertoire

Ripley Johnson’s created such a specific body of work, his name’s been used as a song title to signify a sound.

For more than two decades, the Portland guitarist has investigated various forms of psychedelia, ranging from metronomic minimalism to fuzzy freakouts. So when he started releasing country music a few years back under the auspices of Rose City Band, it was a sonic departure—but one rooted in deep listening.

“This type of stuff, it’s things that I was interested in while doing the other bands, but it just never fit with those bands,” he says about Rose City, which released a fifth album, Sol Y Sombra, earlier this year. “There’s certain rhythms that just would never work with [my other] bands. … It’s cool to have restrictions and have a sort of identity, but that also can be frustrating.”

Over the years, Johnson’s bounded across the West, moving from the Bay Area to Colorado and eventually settling in Oregon. Each of those varied landscapes seems to have influenced how he writes music—and made it difficult to focus on Wooden Shjips, the San Francisco psych group that first brought him to prominence during the early 2000s. That ensemble, its melodies obscured by feedback, cranked out a few LPs before softening its sound, which led to Moon Duo becoming Johnson’s creative focus.

Alongside keyboardist Sanae Yamada—Johnson’s wife—Moon Duo began exploring jittery synth-forward compositions in 2010. That band, too, mellowed over time, expanding its parameters from taut textures to working in territory not wholly removed from the sunnier side of new wave.

“I think with Moon Duo, especially when you listen to the early stuff versus the later stuff, we said, ‘We’re just going to forget about any kind of boundaries,’” says Johnson, 

The guitarist figures he’s not the same person who made those early Wooden Shjips recordings, and doesn’t think Moon Duo was the right vehicle to delve into Americana.

“As you go through life, you change, hopefully, and that’s why it’s good to do new things,” he says. “I think the Rose City Band stuff is me right now. It’s very much what I want to do in this moment—but it’s not all I want to do.”

This latest ensemble is informed by Johnson’s childhood, spent listening to music that sometimes referenced country music. There’s mandolin on Grateful Dead and Rod Stewart recordings. And the Stones flirted with the genre, reveling in an imagined commonwealth on “Sweet Virginia,” where they’d need to scrape the shit off their shoes. Waylon and Willie are also easy touchstones, canonized outsiders in a genre obsessed with self-determination.

Johnson says Rose City Band started for selfish artistic reasons in 2019 and evolved through the pandemic to become a fully realized stage act that now performs as a quintet.

John Jeffrey is among that cadre and first played with Johnson more than a decade back, sitting in on drums for a Moon Duo tour through Europe. The Canadian-based performer previously studied jazz, but cites folks like Can’s Jaki Liebezeit as a signpost of his interests. He also records minimal, improvised music, adding to a combination of influences that suit his contributions to both Moon Duo and Rose City Band.

“I like the kind of cyclical nature of his music and how he can write these trance-inducing songs,” Jeffrey says about Johnson’s compositional acumen. “There’s a real simplicity there, but I think it’s so difficult to write such simple songs and have them be engaging, consistently. I think he’s really a master at that.”

“Sunlight Daze” is one of the more slowly paced pieces on Rose City Band’s latest recording. Jeffrey’s kit doesn’t propel the song so much as keeps it from stopping all together while Johnson calmly delivers lines about universal loneliness. But “Lights on the Way” opens Sol Y Sambra with the bearing of the Dead’s “Bertha;” by the time it hits its chorus, the song somehow also evokes the older group’s “Touch of Grey.” Along the way, Johnson recounts being lost—perhaps literally, perhaps metaphorically—and wishing on stars. Given its subject matter, “Open Roads” might be one of the more traditional country tunes here: There’s also a little drum shuffle undergirding the track, an effort scaffolded by pedal steel and mandolin.

While the melodies deployed across Sol Y Sambra can easily connect back to his earlier groups, Johnson says it’s tough to predict what’s next in a career that’s spanned genres and decades. And while the bandleader’s foray into country music has animated a new part of his creative life, heavy psych remains a constant companion.

He explains that sometimes ecstatic psychedelic music presents itself as the best avenue to express himself. Though, for now, it’s country: “I just try to work with what I’m feeling at any given time, you know?”