Hot off the heels of Eagle Johnson’s recently released LP “Wild Heart,” he has just released a video that’ll give fans a ‘behind the scenes’ look at his creative workings. This “making of” video was filmed in the Spring & Summer of ‘22 at Bomb Shelter Studios (Alabama Shakes, Margo Price) in Eagle’s hometown of Nashville. Eagle explains: Wild Heart is an album about searching for love, ending gun violence, chasing money, and wondering who's in charge of all this chaos? In today's creative landscape of over-polished, filtered fakery, I think there is an emerging collective desire for the raw and real. The Wild Heart album is an attempt to fill that void with a live-to-tape, imperfect, performance-based record that's gritty and rough around the edges with plenty of bleed. The Wild Heart short film is a "making of" the record that hopes to bring our fans into the studio with us to see how we do our thing.”
After being released from a 9-mo stay in jail and a state-run mental hospital for vandalizing a church, Eagle Johnson began performing solo at local shows in the Jacksonville / St. Augustine area of Florida in 2011 as Screamin Eagle. Once he rose through the local ranks as a go-to show opener in north Florida, including opening for Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan and Shovels & Rope, Eagle moved to Memphis, TN, where he spent many childhood summers with his grandmother.
In Memphis, Screamin Eagle produced and performed with the self-proclaimed “last of the original delta-blues men," Zeke Johnson. The two met at a Valerie June show that Eagle opened for at a small coffee shop in midtown Memphis in 2012. Eagle arranged for Zeke to be recorded for the first time, while Zeke went on to mentor Eagle in the delta-blues ways while passing onto him (by request of Zeke and a mystical dream) his new surname, Johnson. After honing in closer on his signature sound and developing more as a seasoned songwriter and performer from working the Memphis music scene, Eagle Johnson moved to Nashville, TN.
In Nashville, Eagle started playing with a band while writing, performing, and sharpening his skills as a recording artist with the help of The Bomb Shelter Studios in East Nashville (The Bomb Shelter is owned and operated by Alabama Shakes - Boys & Girls producer, Andrija Tokic).
After minor success with his 2017 release, Tennessee Beach (that got him signed to The Paradigm Agency and added to Wilco's "Wilco Recommends" Spotify playlist), he was dropped during the pandemic in 2020 when his agent Lucy Beach and her boss Kevin French left Paradigm. Feeling down on his luck and needing to make something happen, Eagle responded to an online request from Bob Marley producer and Godfather of Reggae, Lee “Scratch” Perry, who was looking for songs for a band he was producing at the time. Eagle wrote to him saying that he was interested in working with Scratch on a production with his own band and asked if he would listen to some of their demos. Scratch did and responded that he liked the music and went on to co-produce/mix a single called All My Friends just months before Scratch’s 2021 passing.
On Friday, January 27th, Eagle Johnson will release his third album, Wild Heart, the follow-up to his 2021 basement-tapes-quarantine album, The Last Gun.
Wild Heart was recorded at The Bomb Shelter Studios in Nashville, TN with up-and-coming analog wizard Jack Tellmann engineering/co-producing while Eagle handles producing / mixing duties. This is a raw, live-to-tape rock & roll album with an extra large microdose of classic strings that ride in on the shoulders of all the rock & roll/soul giants that came before it. Patrick Carney of The Black Keys said, “it’s f***ing great…” Eagle describes his sonic aim as, "hifi-lofi" and strives to make live rock & roll drums "slap as hard as hip-hop drums." In addition to a planned 12" release, there will also be a short film of Wild Heart out May 2nd. Tour dates TBA.
