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Mercurial, mysterious and often impactful on tracks you didn’t know he had his fingerprints on, Johan Lenox is the producer artists turn to elevate, tonally extract and downright make music hum. On his latest album, Full Speed Nowhere, Johan takes those talents that buttress other artists and turns it into his own sonic display, a course of riffs, melodies and beats that entice and lure the listener into a hopeful barrage of compositional brilliance. Ever curious about a man who has so much to other to others, and his listens as an artist, we asked this prodigious polymath to break down this latest record, track by track: 

When Morning Comes

The first single I dropped, right when I left for tour at the beginning of this year. The video for this one was sort of the last glimpse of my apocalyptic storyline that I've been slowly building over the past two albums. With this song and the rest of this album I wanted to feel a kind of reset as I search for new life and optimism.

Running Running Running [feat. Quadeca]

This started with just the a cappella vocal idea at the beginning and went straight into the chorus at the end. The entire middle of it was the result of a lot of collaboration with Micah Jasper and with Quadeca, an artist I discovered a couple years ago whose production blows me away. His vocals in the middle of this provide the perfect ramping up of energy as the track runs away into the final stretch. Again this song focuses on optimism while stuck in the mire, a feeling I relate to a lot right now. 

Eclipse [feat. Kaycyy]

One of the last additions I made to this album. Kaycyy also appeared on my first album WDYWTBWYGU and I made this idea specifically to send to him. Throughout this project I wrote songs that personify my relationship to creativity and the process of releasing music as all part of a tortured relationship, and this song focuses on an interiority within that which I'm trying to break out of.

It Ain't Easy [feat. Kacy Hill]

Another song looking back on the past and trying to move on. I love Kacy Hill so much and she appears on my classical-adjacent side project isomonstrosity as well. I really tried to focus on collaborating with people I've worked with a lot on this album, less on finding new people although the next song is an exception.

Evening Walk [feat. Master Peace]

Discovered Peace recently and he has such a great energy especially in his live shows. We met up in LA and later in London to work on this. This song also focuses on the difficulty of letting go and features one of my favorite moments on the album in the choppy orchestral outro which Micah Jasper helped me with.

First Entr'acte

A big idea I had as I was finishing this album was to put these sort of bizarrely old-school Hollywood sounding transitions in. A lot of people know me for the work I do with various artists as an orchestrator and composer, and often in those contexts people associate strings with this older aesthetic. In my own music I've studiously avoided this in the past, trying to use them more as a central production element that occasionally comes into the foreground in outros and bridges. This is especially true on my first album. But in keeping with the idea of trying something new this time around, I decided to focus more on vocals, percussion and piano in the main songs here and thought it would be fun to go full Hollywood in the cheekiest possible way with these transitions instead.

Momentary Bliss [feat. 070 Shake]

070 Shake is one of my closest friends in music and someone who I've taken great inspiration from the past few years. I've also opened for a few of her tours, around North America and Europe, and her work is such a big part of my life. I really wanted to do something with her for my album that felt different from anything either of us do normally, together or apart. We started this as an idea at her house a year before I finished it for this album, and I kept working on it until recently.

Don't Take My Side

Wanted to lean into these folky textures more this time around as I stripped away the synths and more produced sounds. This song was an opportunity to do that and also has a second verse whose piano part I think lives somewhere in between Steve Reich and Sampha.

Second Entr'acte

This is the second one of these. Once I decided to have these interludes on, I wanted to try some effects that contextualized it in a modern way. The distortion and woozy modulation are one example. Some audio is pitched down. And another effect we tried on all three was slowly going between mono and stereo. The style of this music is more suited to older mono recordings so I wanted to reference that while not completely locking into it. My engineer Greazy Wil and I came up with this together.

Miniature

This started out as a vocal driven idea for the IFC movie The Plague, for which I did my first ever film score and which will be in theaters at the end of this year. It turns out to share a lot of similarities with the intro to Finally, another song on this album, and the director of the film actually suggested I release it, which I am doing here, with some modifications to the texture. This album is all about my vocals and this song most fully explores that.

Show 'Em Something New

One of my favorites that I played on tour this year, these lyrics most directly capture my feelings around everything right now and what I hoped to accomplish with this album--"Now’s no time to be selfish. I'll make mistakes so you can learn. I stare into the abyss, I never stop. It’ll be ok in the end."

Finally [feat. Alé Araya]

Loved making this with a newer artist who I discovered last year. She did a great job co-producing this with me as well. I think the song captures more of that anxiety of wanting to set off on your own. The video in the woods throws back to some of my earliest visual work on my first EPs and suggests forging a new path through the wilderness.

Third Entr'acte

The final one of these. I actually composed the string parts for the interludes on a plane and recorded them with string players later. I want to use them when I host cocktail parties, to welcome guest artists onto the stage to perform. I think that kind of anachronism is interesting and something I want to keep exploring further. Maybe I will have that chance.

Parasite

This song feels like something I would've played on the piano when I was just starting to do music. That's where it all began for me, with these piano-driven pop and rock songs that taught me how to use that instrument, or at least one way of doing so. The Quadeca drums coming in the second half take it to a more modern place. The lyrics focus on how I got to where I am and was seduced by this life.

All I Ever Wanted

I always like to leave my albums with some kind of concluding thought, and like the last two albums, this one ends with somewhat of a shrug, a realization that no matter how much I want to change it's never going to happen quite as much as I hope. Every time I do this I feel like I torture myself about how my life feels and then ultimately come to terms with it, at least somewhat. In the end we all die and I think it's better to spend your life doing stuff than not doing stuff. All I ever wanted was this, and in all likelihood I'll keep pushing forward forever, full speed, to nowhere.