Jillette Johnson
The hard-won optimism of Jillette Johnson’s new studio album 'It’s a Beautiful Day and I Love You' couldn’t have come without tremendous upheaval. “It would have been easy to lean into the melancholy,” she says. “It was an act of rebellion to not indulge in the pain, to look beyond it and not wallow.” 'It’s a Beautiful Day and I Love You' carries harmonic and emotional heft in the vein of Patty Griffin’s Flaming Red or Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark. There’s an open-heartedness in the Nashville-based Johnson’s songs, the kind of deeply experienced inner peace that results from a journey through vulnerability, pain, and struggle to gratitude, forgiveness, and, ultimately, acceptance. The album has been praised by NPR, Rolling Stone, UNCUT, American Songwriter, Refinery 29, No Depression, and more. Johnson’s a rare gem in Nashville, having written the entirety of It’s a Beautiful Day and I Love You alone, running contrary to the common Music City practice of co-writing. She did, however, find herself drawn to the city’s creative adage of “three chords and the truth” — though in Johnson’s case, it’s more like a dozen chords.\ Johnson started writing songs at age 8; by her teens, she was playing three-hour sets of original music at a restaurant near her suburban New York home. Soon, she was generating enough outside interest that she attended her public high school only one day a year while she developed and recorded her music.
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