If Centro-matic/South San Gabriel’s Will Johnson is nothing else he’s incredibly prolific. To put it simply, he makes Ryan Adams look like Terrence Malick. Really he has few peers in this area, save for maybe ex-Guided By Voices’ frontman Robert Pollard. But Johnson has a leg up on both Pollard and Adams—almost everything he touches turns to gold. While Pollard may release ten songs of mediocrity for every classic these days, Johnson tends to release ten good-to-great songs for every classic (and that’s probably an understatement). The man is simply a songwriting machine.

Even more impressive is the extravagant arrangements Johnson uses—especially on the South San Gabriel records. Besides the usual alt. country instrumentation of pedal steel, nylon-string guitars, B3 organs, violins, etc. there are harps, grand pianos, and generally a grandiose air to the whole project. So it’s that much more remarkable when he strips it all down, as he did on his second solo album, 2004’s Vultures Await.

While not quite as stark as his first solo album, Murder of Tides, Vultures Await is still nowhere as lush as some of his other works. If one were to beg for a comparison, John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band is as apt as any, not only because of the general stripped-down feel of the album, and not just because some of these songs sound downright Lennon-esque, (not the least of which is the beautiful “Just to Know What You’ve Been Dreaming,” with gorgeous lyrics that describe a love that almost seems to defy description: “I would steal a thousand smiles just to know that you’ve been laughing.”) No, the comparison lies in Johnson’s ability to speak directly about his feelings, without gussying anything up; much like Lennon found himself finally able to do on songs like “Mother” and “God.”

The closer, “Nothin’ but Godzilla” is the speaker telling his lover how he wants her there for everything that happens in his life—from the relatively mundane (“If we had nothing but this greyhound, would you help me train him?) to the most ridiculous of circumstances (“If we had nothing but Godzilla, would you help me fight him?”). It seems a wee bit cringe-worthy on the surface, but to hear Johnson deliver it, it’s an amazingly direct way of expressing love.

“Closing Down My House” features one-side of a lover’s quarrel (“It’s true I’m watching what I say around you”), before the couple give in to one another with the line: “If you’re calling off your dogs, then I’m calling off my dogs too.” The song is buoyed by a lone guitar and programmed beats that beautifully gives way to live drums for the last section, almost triumphantly.

But even on the loveliest of love songs, Johnson’s well-worn warble offers an indescribable pain to the listener, offering undertones that suggest, along with the stark instrumentation and production, that these songs are about past loves that have long since left him to fend for himself.

Is it so evil to wish for more heartbreakingly beautiful music from this man if it means he actually must have his heart repeatedly broken first?

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