Je n'ai jamais réellement écouté, et suis donc très mal placé pour pouvoir parler de Daniel Johnston, aussi laisserai-je Everett True le faire pour moi, extrait des liner notes du tribute Discovered covered - The late great Daniel Johnston (les notes de pochette étant parfois plus grandes que les disques eux-mêmes) :
« I first heard Daniel's plaintive voice on his 1988 Homestead album, Hi how are you? My old best friend was round at my house in London - he wanted to hear something different. So we slapped on this odd-looking record with a picture of a bug-eyed frog monstrosity on its sleeve. Our first reaction: hysterical laughter. Laughter is a great defence mechanism. Here was a guy so deranged he couldn't sing properly, couldn't draw properly (witness the cover art), couldn't write songs...yet was still allowed to make records. He sang in a slight lisp over a tape recorder that could be audibly heard rolling, as his mother shouted in the background, and an out-of-tune piano played tunes clearly lifted from the Beatles. Oh, what a grand jape.
Days later, i listened to it again. My reaction: it reduced me to tears. Taken in solitude, his voice shook with an almost unbearable loneliness and pain - his songs were naïve, direct, deeply moving. (...) »
Rhaa c'est beau. Et un truc rigolo ici aussi.