Jack Johnson at Pavilhão Atlântico in summer 2008 (Photo by José Goulão)

Not that I’m running out of artists by featuring Jack Johnson for the second time in this series, I just wanted to get this out of the way. This is going to be the last one of the weekly archive.org entries, but by no means the last one ever. There are still many recordings to introduce, I just don’t have the time to write about a new show every week.

Many people say that all Jack Johnson songs sound the same. While I don’t agree, I can certainly understand them. There’s that certain style to his music and his vocals are very distinctive. And there’s a melody in many of his songs that first has a couple of low notes, this goes up about an octave, then comes back down and does that over and over again. But his music has never been too repetitive to me, I like it.

This is a recording Jack made for a San Diego radio show called “Latitude 32″ awhile back. The sound quality is fantastic, but very little is known about the recording, not even the date or if it ever aired. It’s an old one, most likely from the time before the release of his debut album in 2001. The recording is available in all the usual formats or can be played in the onsite player.

Jack Johnson Live at Latitude 32

It’s just Jack and his guitar. He’s introducing songs and playing them, there’s no radio host. Times were very different at the time of recording, Jack was just a starting artist, most likely with no idea how popular he was to become. All of the songs sound so innocent, and almost all of them are now fan favorites.

The first song is Rodeo Clowns. It first appeared on G. Love & Special Sauce’s 1999 album Philadelphonic, then later on Jack’s second studio album On and On. It’s one of my favorite ones. I saw Jack last summer in the beautiful town of Sankt Goarshausen on the river Rhine in Germany. G. Love was opening for him, and one of the things I anticipated the most was G. Love joining Jack and the band to play Rodeo Clowns, and sure enough, they did just that.

All of the remaining songs made it to Jack’s first album Brushfire Fairytales. The second song, Posters, lyrically touches some of the same aspects as the first one – I’m an energetic, apathetic version of another person, check out my outsides, there ain’t nothing in here – and Jack sings it so genuinely.

The News is a naive and beautiful song. Drink the Water interestingly has the same intro that is used for Rodeo Clowns on the On and On album. Bubble Toes and Flake have grown into big crowd favorites over time. To sum it up, this is eight early songs by Jack Johnson and some stories about the songs. Definitely worth a listen if you are at all into Jack Johnson.