How Matt Johnson Found His Way Back to The The and the Band’s First Album in 24 Years ‘Ensoulment’

In 2017, Matt Johnson and The The released the song “We Can’t Stop What’s Coming,” a tribute to his older brother Andy, who died in 2016 from brain cancer, nearly 20 years after losing his younger brother Eugene in 1989. Andy, also known as Andy Dog, started his art career illustrating some of the often misconfigured figures that made their way onto the cover of several The The albums.

Prior to the new song, Johnson had taken an extended hiatus of 16 years from The The since the release of the band’s sixth album NakedSelf, and filled those years working on soundtracks and scoring films, a transition later chronicled in Johanna St Michaels’ 2017 documentary The Inertia Variations, inspired by British poet John Tottenham’s 2005 book of the same name. In the film, Johnson’s struggle with self-doubt, creative block, disenchantment, and his own inertia, are documented and by the end, he’s seen performing “We Can’t Stop What’s Coming” in his studio.

The performance was a first for Matt in a long time and motivated him to revisit The The, resulting in the 2019 Comeback Special Tour and the 2021 concert film and album recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Several singles trickled out from there—“I WANT 2 B U,” “$1 ONE VOTE!”—until Johnson compiled a larger offering of songs on the band’s first new material in 24 years, Ensoulment.

Joined by regular The The members guitarist Barrie Cadogan, bassist James Elder, drummer Earl Hardin, and keyboardist DC Collar, The The was reformed with producer Warne Livesey, who worked on the band’s second album Infected in 1986 and Mind Bomb from 1989 and came full circle again, paying homage to Andy with one of his unreleased works on the album cover.

Named after the moment a human or other “being” gains a soul, Ensoulment embodies songs exploring the grave effects of technology and AI and its perpetuation in the modern world, living and mortality, some political pokes, and more. “We live in fascinating times,” Johnson said in a previous statement. “Things are becoming more and more strange, inverted, and hallucinogenic.”

Ensoulment opens on the moody pop of “Cognitive Dissident” and some self-assessment on the jazzy nostalgia of “Some Days I Drink My Coffee by the Grave of William Blake,” an older track shelved for nearly a decade, and based on a real-life event.

Living in proximity to Blake’s burial site at Bunhill Fields in Central London, Johnson would often sit by the poet’s grave, drinking coffee. “Over the years, I would often just sit and have a coffee and think about things, so that title was knocking around, but I couldn’t finish it, for some reason,” Johnson tells American Songwriter. “It was just in the drawer waiting to be finished.”

In “Kissing The Ring Of POTUS,” Johnson explores the truth of psychosis and gets his points across in more spoken word pieces “Zen & The Art Of Dating,” and the oddity of online dating, meditations on mortality on “Life After Life,” and the loving “I Want to Wake Up With You,” and the euphoria before consumption.

“The second verse on ‘I Want to Wake Up with You’ is probably the most romantic verse I’ve ever written,” says Johnson. “The first verse is nostalgia and looking back at past relationships and then the third verse is more philosophical about, the cyclical nature of life and relationships, friendships and love affairs. But in the second verse, I wanted to try to capture that moment just before consummation between two lovers—that moment where the walls start to dissolve, and they both feel this energy exchange between them.”

“Down By The Frozen River,” another song Johnson had for many years, reads like a novel and started as a poem on “truancy at school.” At one point Johnson lost the poem then found it, unfinished years later, and refined it.

“I tried to make this a hopeful, warm-sounding album, and there’s a lot of hope and positivity,” says Johnson of the different lyrical ripples on Ensoulment. “There’s a great quote that I’ve often used, which Nina Simone said about all artists have a duty to reflect their time (“An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.”) I’m just trying, in a way, to sort of capture the zeitgeist. On the one hand, in the background of some songs, there’s the rise of AI that’s going to become more prevalent and the increasing censorship. So there’s the political and the personal that are all bundled up.”

He likens Ensoulment to The The’s Infected and how it was a freeze-frame of a particular time. “With the 12 songs [on ‘Ensoulment’], I wanted it to be the way ‘Infected’ was about the mid-1980s trapped on a record,” says Johnson. “I wanted to do the same thing with 2024. Personally, a lot of amazing things have happened in my life, some sad things but a lot of rich experiences, and I try to bring that into these strange times that we’re living through.”

With “Linoleum Smooth to the Stockinged Foot,” there’s a tripped-out Leonard Cohen “You Like it Dark” vibe inspired by Johnson’s morphine-induced hallucinations while being hospitalized in 2020 for an abscess in his throat. “Where Do We Go When We Die” was written for his later father with the reflective “I Hope You Remember (the things I can’t forget),” and closing “A Rainy Day in May,” another older song in Johnson’s vault about how some chance encounters result in unexpected longing.

The fact that some tracks were held a decade or longer is not surprising to Johnson, who admits he’s a “collector” of songs and has hundreds of pages of “lyrical ideas,” and “titles, snippets, sequences, and melodies” jotted down somewhere.

[RELATED: Matt Johnson on Making The The’s ‘Comeback’ Grand, New Music]

“I obviously work at a slower pace than I’d like,” shares Johnson, who is currently working on a coffee table book of conversations with Jason Wood of the British Film Institute and The The’s next album. “I’m always busy doing things, but not always doing what I should be doing, which is finishing off songs and putting them out there. But that’s the process that I have, collecting ideas and when the time’s right, bringing them out, and connecting them.”

A proclivity for journaling away songs may have been the result of some advice Tom Waits once shared with Johnson decades earlier when the two met up for a drink in New York City and nearly worked on Infected together.

“He [Waits] reached into his back pocket and he pulled out a little notebook and said, ‘This is your butterfly net. As soon as you get an idea or hear a lyric, you got to write it down,’” remembers Johnson. “He said, ‘If you don’t commit it to paper and write it down, somehow it will fly away.’ That advice always stuck with me, and I always carried little notepads.”

Johnson continues, “As a songwriter, and a lyricist, I’m always on the lookout for things— internally or externally. I might have an interesting thought, and jot that down, or overhear something, which means I might have to stop in the street and get out my notepad or phone and jot it down. It’s really important to get into the habit of doing that and building up that archive of interesting ideas. When you look back over time, some of them do stand the test of time.”

Songs begin in one place but everything always comes down to perception, he adds. “Ten people could read the same book,” he says, “but the characters that they’re all reading about would all look different depending on who’s reading the book.”

The The’s 1983 hit “This is the Day,” from the band’s debut Soul Mining, is an example of one song Johnson says shifted in meaning to him over the years. “I wrote that when I was 20 or 21 and [the lyrics] ‘Reading some old letters, you smile and think, how much you changed’ is written from an older person’s perspective, and that song has grown with more meaning for me, particularly as most of my immediate family have died, apart from my younger brother (Gerard). So the song has taken on real depths and more meaning for me when I sing it now.”

Before he and his brother recently sold their family home, following their father’ died’s death six years ago, they cleared out the house, and Johnson found himself sitting, with an old box of letters.

“I literally came across old letters that one of my late brothers wrote to one of his girlfriends,” shares Johnson. “I’ve never seen these letters before, and it showed me another side to him, and I started crying. I sat there in this empty house reading these old letters, and I thought, ‘My God, it’s like I’ve appeared in my own song [This is the Day].’” I’m writing songs that are coming true in my own life later on.”

He adds, “So the interpretation of a song is an interesting thing, from the listeners’ point of view, but also as the writer. When you grow older and you bring new experiences to bear, to your life and to the songs, they take on a different meaning.”

Photos: Gerald Jenkins / Courtesy of Grandstand Media