Johannes Laitila – Feathers (2012)

It's always really difficult to write about my friends' albums. I'm very conscious that they'll probably read these posts when I share them in the social media. I will, however, do my best to also include these albums in my blog. After all, I'm supposed to go through all the albums I own. I first met Johannes Laitila when we were studying at the social sciences faculty in University of Helsinki and I organised an open-mic night called Kuppala unplugged. I wanted to play to audiences and when I started the night, I realised that so did so many other people. Johannes showed up for most of those nights carrying his electrical piano and playing mostly his own songs. I remember thinking that he had similar kind of intensity in his performance as Jarvis Cocker did. He also had similar kind of longish hair and glasses, which made me think of him as the Jarvis Cocker of the social sciences faculty.



I always really liked Johannes' songs. I also noticed that we often went to the same gigs in Helsinki, which meant that we shared a similar taste in music. We exchanged a few words here and there but we didn't really know each other that well. Then I moved to London and some time later Johannes came to London for a holiday and contacted me if I wanted to go for a beer with him. I did and as we were talking I mentioned that our flat mate was about to move away and we needed to find a new one. Approximately one week later he sent me a message asking if we were still looking for a flat mate. He wanted to move to London and was interested in the room. We ended up being flat mates for a couple of years in London. We became good friends and we both played music here in London, sometimes even in the same events. He opened for my band Vronsky at least once.

Feathers is Johannes' debut album. The songs are mostly about heartbreak. These topics have been, for most of my life anyway, very central to the kind of music I've been listening to. I'm not a person who really listens to the lyrics much, but I always felt that it was easy to listen to the lyrics in Johannes' songs. I've been moved by quite a few bits of lyrics in his songs. I thought he wrote really good English lyrics considering it's not his native language. The sounds are slightly lo-fi on this album, but still there's an effort to make them sound quite big. I guess with piano being in central role in these songs, they sound bigger than if they were just played on a guitar as many other indie singer-songwriter albums my friends have done.

As it always is the case with songs written by my friends, they become much more meaningful through knowing a bit about the real life events that have led to writing those lyrics. It's more relatable somehow when you know the people in the songs are real. This makes me think just how meaningful I would find songs by artists like Elliott Smith, whose songs I adore even now not really knowing that much about his personal life at all.

I'm not going to do my conventional listing of all the individual songs because I had so much else to say about this album. I am, however, going to list my favourite songs here. A Fallen Leaf that opens the albums is a great song that rises throughout the song. It also has some of the best lyrics on the album. Elisabeth sounds like it's definitely been influenced by Elliott Smith. I'm not actually sure if that's true, but I can really hear that influence in there. The near title-track Like Feathers is a fantastic indie song that grows beautifully throughout the song. Vienna is one of the best compositions on the album. Scared About Tonight has glorious production that shows a glimpse into what Johannes will sound like on his next album.

I'm genuinely very proud of many of my friends for making music that I can honestly say I like listening to. Feathers is one of those albums that always surprises me when it starts playing in my shuffle. I don't often intentionally play this CD, but I always like it a lot when I happen to hear a song from it. It was good to give a bit more intentional focus on it through this blog post.

Listen to the album on Spotify.