Daniel Johnston, enigmatic singer-songwriter, dies at 58

Daniel Johnston, a singer-songwriter and outsider artist who battled mental-health issues while recording hundreds of humorous, bittersweet songs that made him a near-mythical figure in indie rock, died Sept. 11 at his home in Waller, Texas, a farming town outside Houston. He was 58.

His brother and manager, Dick, said Johnston had been in a hospital with kidney problems and was released a day before his death “feeling good and everything,” when he apparently suffered a heart attack overnight.

Johnston had manic depression and schizophrenia and faced increasing health problems in recent years, notably diabetes and hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid in the brain. Although he said he hoped to continue performing, he embarked in 2017 on what was billed as his “final tour,” joined by a backing band that included members of Wilco, Fugazi and Built to Spill – a roster of indie rock all-stars that spoke to his reputation as a master lyricist and intimate, uninhibited singer.

With a high-pitched voice and mild lisp, Johnston bared his soul in folksy songs about unrequited love, existential dread, his affection for the Beatles and the thrills of a speeding motorcycle. Emerging on Austin’s underground music scene in the mid-1980s, he used a $59 Sanyo boombox to record himself on acoustic guitar, organ and piano, and released cassette tapes decorated with his own ink and marker artwork. In “Grievances,” the first song from his self-released debut, “Songs of Pain” (1981), he introduced the character of a young woman named Laurie, who rejected his advances and married an undertaker. “I saw you at the funeral,” Johnston sang. “You were standing there like a temple. I said ‘Hi, how are you, hello,’ and I pulled up a casket and crawled in.”

His music was unabashedly simple and straightforward – “the amazing thing is half these songs are the same three chords,” Built to Spill musician Doug Martsch once said – but drew a cult following, notably after Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was photographed in a T-shirt bearing the cover of Johnston’s album “Hi, How Are You” (1983).

“These songs are recorded so intimately, it almost feels like an invasion to listen to them,” wrote music critic Sasha Geffen in a Pitchfork list that ranked “Hi, How Are You” the 145th best record of the 1980s. “He sang these earnest, infectious melodies to himself, into a cheap cassette recorder,” she added, “but he knew exactly how to reach people across time – to make them feel that, for the duration of a three-minute pop song, they weren’t on their own in this world.”

Johnston was covered by Tom Waits, Beck and Lana Del Rey, collaborated with singer Jad Fair of Half Japanese and guitarist Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers, and was the subject of a 2005 documentary, “The Devil and Daniel Johnston.”