Daniel Johnston was one of the most well-known figures in the outsider music label. He would record his music on a tape player with his little piano and send the recordings to people on the local scene and friends. In fact, in the earlier instances of Johnston’s career, he didn’t even know he could copy the contents of a tape to another. This made him have to rerecord his songs for every new copy he made of his earlier material every time he wished to send it to someone; this makes up for many versions of the recordings we can listen to on streaming services today.

One of the few aspects of Johnston’s music that I will explore in today’s text is one of the things I seem to praise the most when discussing music: its simplicity.

To be simple in a song does not mean you have to be only a voice with an instrument. It does not mean that you have to be minimalistic. It does mean, however, some stripping down of your sensibilities. Perhaps, it is the true moment when an artist has the view of its subconscious through the popular subconscious; the commonalities between the itch he has on his back with the itch humanity has on its soul. But most of the time, I would say it is the moment we find the core of a fruit we ate in a simpler, younger state; it is the naked obvious. When you don’t need to write paragraphs and paragraphs telling how you feel about someone when you can say “I love you” to their face, and they understand the depth of your emotion immediately. If the usual writing, one even I do with the metaphors and the places to hide, is a way to hide the obvious feelings so to mask your true intentions, then the simplistic writing would be the exact opposite; it is the masking of the true complex depth of the feelings with the obvious nature of an ungarnished phrase.

Think of The Beatles “Something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover”, The Beach Boys’ “God only knows what I’d be without you” or The Rolling Stones’ “Well we all need someone we can lean on, and if you want it, you can lean on me.” The 60s had a lot of songwriters who were masters in garnishing love and denuding it; Dylan knew how to write “With your childhood flames on your midnight rug/And your Spanish manners and your mother’s drugs/And your cowboy mouth and your curfew plugs/Who among them do ya think could resist you?” and “I want you, I want you/I want you so bad/Honey, I want you” in the same album.

I love to talk about simplicity, so maybe the rest can be stored for future times. But it’s safe to say that it is one of the aspects in popular music that is the easiest to latch onto. The way a lot of people would end up discovering Johnston’s music was through Kurt Cobain using a t-shirt off his 1983 unfinished album “Hi, How Are You” — which is funny because Cobain would be one of the people I would say carried a lot of simplicity in his songs; if it wasn’t through how simple the lyrics were, the melodies and structures of his songs were very simple. He was very effective in his simplicity, which no doubt helped him appreciate someone like Johnston, the latter a Beatles aficionado.

The song we’re going to talk about briefly today is, in my opinion, a complete gem of beautifulness.

There are a few versions of “True Love Will Find You In the End”, as you might’ve guessed from the opening paragraph — however, there are two that stand out among the rest. The 1990 version, from the album titled “1990”, and the 1984 version from the album “Retired Boxer”. We will be talking about the original version from 1984, however, feel free to listen to the 1990 version first — it has way more streams on Spotify, and it sounds way more conventional with its elegant production.

But what attracts me to the 1984 version is hard to explain.

I’ve had a keyboard for about ten years now, and I’ve had a guitar ever since the pandemic, if I’m correct. I ended up not learning how to play any of them. I know some things, but definitely not enough to say I can play it. I quit my lessons many times, all of them through depressive episodes.

So, when I listen to a recording like the 1984 one, it fills me up with one of the funniest joys. The recording is so amateurish that right on the second phrase sang, the moment you need to change the chord just after another change, you can listen to Johnston stop his singing and resuming after managing to hit the chord change; which I always attributed to him looking at his guitar trying to remember the next chord. Learning about his story, you know it was around this time he was trying to sound more like Austin musicians from the local scene at the time, and they were all guitar players. He probably knew enough of the guitar, but with the piano being his biggest focus up until this point, you can imagine him trying to play his guitar with less skill, as playing and singing can be a bit daunting if you’re not there yet.

And to me, it’s so magical to listen to such a beautiful song made by someone who probably knew as much about the guitar as I do now. He is messing up, singing a bit off the structure of the melody — which whatever you may say about him, he did not do that at all on the rest of “Retired Boxer” —, but he is giving you the exact feeling he wants you to feel. It’s not as if he does not wish to fill his songs with a band or with guided production, since he did not have a choice being a one-man band. It’s beyond the notion of if he was envisioning it; he does not need to. You get the idea. You listen to his voice, the lyrics, the guitar… The picture frame gets completely covered with the paint from his heart.

“True love will find you in the end
You’ll find out just who was your friend

Don’t be sad, I know you will
But don’t give up until
True love will find you in the end“

So simple. And it gets better.

“This is a promise with a catch
Only if you’re looking can it find you
‘Cause true love is searching too
But how can it recognize you
Unless you step out into the light, the light?

Don’t be sad, I know you will
But don’t give up until
True love will find you in the end“

He does not need anything else than what he is giving to you here. The original version has less than two minutes. So short. And yet, there’s so much here.

He is saying that true love will find you, and when it does, you’ll know who was just a friend. He is talking, however, to a person who has had “a lot of friends” in that same sense. Someone who has had a lot of people into whom they put a lot of feelings, just for them to slowly have to realize it wasn’t supposed to be. I also love the word “friend” here. He does not hate the person. It just was not true love.

While checking the song’s Genius page, I got this excerpt from a Jeff Tweedy (from Wilco fame) interview for the Atlantic. He talks a bit about the “Don’t be sad, I know you will…” part.

“This captures a very real internal moment. I think it’s a window into the way someone really thinks and feels when they’re telling somebody else not to be sad. The speaker tells the subject to feel better—it’s even an order, “don’t be sad.” At the same time he knows that’s impossible. In fact, before the line is even over, he’s retracted it.

I love, too, how the line doesn’t have a “but”—the more obvious thing to write would be “Don’t be sad, but I know you will.” The way Johnson wrote it is so much more powerful. It means it’s not an either/or. It’s an all of the above. “Don’t be sad” and “I know you will”—two contradictory emotions, experienced at the same time. It captures a profound feeling: the desire to comfort someone, and the impossibility of doing so, all at once.”

I absolutely adored reading this. It’s a feeling I got from listening to the song for the first time, but he put it into such beautiful words that I can’t compete with him.

It reminds me of a few friends of mine, even.

They faced the harsh realities that came with a diagnosis of autism; in one of their words, it was “like understanding that you will never be able to understand the world. That you will always have a barrier between yourself and other people, that will always be near impossible to break”. I understand that, and every neurodivergent person might. They felt like the doctors finally told them they were aliens the whole time.

But with time, they grew to understand that things were not as harsh. You have a lot to suffer through in the process of understanding, but it’s only by getting to the end of it, or at least by working your way there, that you can feel a relief on being yourself, on having a right of existing in space.

In different manners, we can alienate ourselves out of love. We can feel too different from many hearts. You may even feel tired thinking of explaining all your being to a new person after passing through this cycle so many times. I understand that. And you’ll be sad. But don’t give up until true love finds you.

Johnston beautifully tells you to not hide, to not stop your search. He is accepting his own problems, he is understanding his own shortcomings. But he is telling you that this love will come, you’ll just have to go find it, or it won’t find you. This signals a beautiful moment, almost concluding his pre-1986 search for love. In here, Johnston tells himself to keep moving until he is loved as he loves, until he can find someone to spend forever with. With naked heart, he conducts you to a bottomless soul, emptied and filled by a world understanding and forgetting it, sleeping eternally and peacefully where men would only kick about.

About the text: A few words for our bachelors in the audience! (If you’re brazilian, don’t worry, I will still be posting more stuff in portuguese. I just have a lot of half-texts in the back burner, and they were all in english, so be patient, but always check! I released a Sudoku one in case you haven’t read it! If you’re not but want to read it, I can translate it for you; just ask me. I also added some links to my updates post, check here and scroll down if you missed any.)

This text comes after a few realizations I feel like a lot of us have after living for a while. I remember feeling this sort of obsessive love in my younger years that only served to put me down. After growing up, I noticed it wasn’t love at all. Love does not make you feel that way. Not to say love doesn’t make you feel bad, but I couldn’t say I was myself while having that feeling. I was a guest in my own life with nothing-people, I was loving because I needed to rest my head somewhere or else I would not sleep.

And then I felt love. It felt like true love, because it was different. But I suppose it wasn’t. Or was; if anything, it would need to find me as I find it. But if there was a testament to my soul and its capacity to care for another human being, it was the feeling I had. And it showed me the north on a map not mine, the lines from an estranged part. But I’m sure it will guide me to true love, if not to itself, true was the breath I had while swimming in its deepened ocean.

Be honest: have you ever felt love like this? A light to guide to a disparate destination, but that protects you from the dark while on your path? Many of us have never had it. Many of us had it, but it ended; they knew it wasn’t true love. And many of us had the light that they feel will follow them forever. I want to tell you to be by its side. I want to tell you that being with someone you deserve that cares about you is the grace of life in presence. And if you’re like me, who has not met that person yet, the person that loves as you love: don’t give up. True love will find you in the end.

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Listen to this month’s Nightporter playlist, with the song “True Love Will Find You in the End”, below.

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