Music Review: John Louis, ‘For Everyone (Especially You)’
The Minnesota singer-songwriter’s lyrics take center stage on an exquisitely rendered album that brings catharsis and healing to themes of addiction and grief.
John Louis’s For Everyone (Especially You) album artwork.
If you’re like me, you’re swimming in great new music this year. One of the first 2024 records to catch my ear was John Louis’s For Everyone (Especially You), which came out in January. This quietly radiant jewel of an album continues to impress me even more with every listen.
Louis, a masterful Minnesota singer-songwriter, gathered contributions from an impressive roster of local talent to craft this album, including ethereal backup vocals from Siri Undlin (aka Humbird) and Hannah Hebl (aka Hemma). Louis and other talented musicians bring the songs to life with a sweet tapestry of Americana sounds: fingerstyle acoustic guitar, gentle banjo, keening pedal steel and fiddle, and more. But the star of the show remains Louis’s exquisite lyrics delivered in his emotive, softly husky voice.
Although this isn’t a full-album story concept, two stories (to my mind, at least; your mileage may vary) emerge, along with some companion songs that feed the overall themes. The first story is a tale of addiction, relationship strife, and pain inflicted on the self and others; the other of being separated from loved ones by illness and death. Despite these sad themes, the empathy and humanity of Louis’s perspective brings catharsis and comfort, making it feel uplifting at times.
After the cryptic and dreamlike opening track “Ground”—which feels like shorthand notes given to someone who’ll understand the experiences hinted at (“Dixie Beer and Early Times / Heat and sweat and reading signs / Twenty-four miles ’cross the causeway / Saturday or someday”), the album launches into the first story arc, anchored by one of two songs that have been previously released as A/B singles and have rightfully been given a home on this album: “Gone Too Far.”
The relationship that could be the subject of the next few songs is pretty much over from the opening lines of that single: “Pack up your beauty / Pack up your inspirations.” Sparse, vivid lyrics depict the wreckage left behind, both physical and emotional:
Holes in the drywall
Size of a fist, shape of a heart
Say it’s gone too far
In the next song, “Another Day”—the most uptempo, rocking song on the album, anchored by electric guitar and pedal steel—the narrator drinks to have an excuse not to leave the bar and fantasizes about patching things over:
Would you come if I called you
On the phone right now
And told you that I can’t be alone right now
We’ve got a lot to lose
But come to me
Keep me company
But the next song, “Shut Down,”—the other previously released single—suggests that booze took over instead. It opens with a grim scene that’s somehow even more jolting when delivered in Louis’s soft croon. The narrator wakes up at home after a blackout with his car missing and the dreadful notion that he left it in a ditch to be “inspected by a gung ho cop / Finding blood and hair on the grill.” This fear may end up unfounded, but it’s indicative of a life in tailspin as he attempts to drown his pain in alcohol. Hopes of reconciliation from the previous track are gone now: “I don’t want to wreck your day / If you see me you should go the other way.”
As a balm to this triptych of pain, the title track comes next, sad and wistful but comforting in its expansive love for anyone who is suffering. If you think you don’t need a song where every line ends with “I love you,” it’s because you haven’t yet heard “For Everyone Especially You,” which feels like a tearful but soothing hug from beginning to end.
John Louis. Photo courtesy of the artist.
After that bittersweet palate cleanser, the album enters the second story arc: one of gradual, devastating loss of a loved one, told across five (well, technically four) songs from multiple perspectives. This novella plays out mid-album, starting with “I Wish I Remembered You,” and opens from the point of view of someone suffering from dementia. He laments having forgotten what the people around him used to mean to him. But he can intuit something about what their relationship might’ve been like:
But I know I like your face
And I can tell by the way your voice breaks
You feel something for me
Strong and deep
That must have come from someplace
Immediately after the slow, acoustic track comes another rendition of the same song, brighter and faster, with electric guitar and percussion. (Louis was inspired by how Dylan ended side one and opened side two of Planet Waves with different renditions of “Forever Young.”) He describes this alternate take as a “fever-dream” version.
The next track, “Wake Me Up,” continues from the same POV. It’s about wanting to have one more special moment with loved ones, even if it means being brought to consciousness (with “Whatever it takes—ice cubes or amphetamines”). We were honored to premiere this song here on Adventures in Americana, so you can read more about it here!
The next two songs are about the aftermath of loss. “After the Funeral” explores strangely mundane moments (“Silent, awkward, hugs / Meant to console”), tongue-in-cheek observations (“The priest drank all the wine”), and details that need to be carried out (“Boxing clothes bound for Goodwill / Sorting treasures from landfill”) after the death of a loved one. Perversely lighthearted throughout considering the subject matter, it ends on imagery that hints at profound grief without explicitly speaking of it:
I drank all the wine
Watching the sun sink in the ground
The house is dark
Except for the lights I left on
Next we shift from the mundane to a hint of the supernatural with “The Wind,” in which the narrator feels as though they’re being visited by their dearly departed:
You were here just now
I could tell
From the way the wind moved
And the air felt
As time goes on and the mourning becomes less intense, they wonder whether what they really felt was just wishful thinking: “Sometimes the wind is just the wind / Sometimes a chill is just a chill.” But the song ends the way it opens, as if they’ve decided to believe it whether or not it’s true: “You were here just now / I could tell.”
The penultimate track, “Independence City Limits,” is also about the aftermath of death, though it seemingly tells a separate story from the quintet of songs that preceded it. After the narrator’s friend dies, their family slowly disintegrates; the father drinks himself to death, the mother goes “around the bend,” siblings are raised by someone else as a result. It’s a sweetly sung but wrenching portrait of innocent people dealing with “The life they got / Not the life that should have been.”
The album closes on “Sleep Well,” a slow waltz that’s sung like a lullaby. It’s a deceptively gentle delivery for a song that starts and ends with “No one will sleep well tonight.” It ties together aspects of the previous tracks with references to “saying goodbye” and drowning sorrows with “four fingers of whiskey,” and it contains jaw-droppingly amazing lyrics, describing said liquor as:
The fuel to feed
The internal combustion
Of freedom and lust and
Cognition of us and
The sweetness
Actually, on that note, this is one album where I strongly encourage you to read all the lyrics, helpfully provided on Louis’s website. I had to hold myself back from just quoting every song verbatim in this review! Even without hearing the music, the songs stand on their own as poetry.
It’s not even April, and there have already been several amazing albums released this year—and many others have been announced that are going to make 2024 a banner year for new Americana music. Although it’ll face some stiff competition, I feel utterly confident For Everyone (Especially You) would’ve secured a spot in my top 10 of 2024–except I actually got my hands on the CD at a show in late 2023, before its official release, and included it in my top 10 albums of 2023!
For Everyone (Especially You) Album Credits
All songs written by John Louis
Produced by Dex Wolfe & John Louis (all except tracks 2, 4)
Engineered and mixed by Dex Wolfe (all except tracks 2, 4)
Produced by Shane Leonard (tracks 2, 4)
Recorded and mixed by Shane Leonard at The Bungaleau, Eau Claire WI (tracks 2, 4)
Cello recorded by Mark Ettinger at Lethe Lounge, New York NY
Piano, organ recorded by Sam Kassirer at Great North Sound Society, Parsonsfield ME (track 2)
Mastered by Pete Lyman at Infrasonic Sound in Nashville, TN
John Louis: vocals, acoustic guitar (all except track 7); electric guitar (track 3)
Jimmy Johnson: pedal steel (tracks 1, 3, 7, 9, 10, 11)
Hannah Hebl: background vocals (tracks 1, 3, 7, 9)
Clifton Nesseth: violin (track 8)
Mark Ettinger: cello (tracks 5, 6)
Robbie Weisshaar: upright bass (track 8)
Bryan Hanna: drums (tracks 3, 7, 10)
Jeremy Boettcher: bass (tracks 2, 4)
Ben Lester: pedal steel (tracks 2, 4); mellotron (track 2); Wurlitzer keyboard (track 4)
Sam Kassirer: piano, organ (track 2)
Siri Undlin: background vocals (tracks 2, 4)
Shane Leonard: drums, acoustic guitar (tracks 2, 4)
Dex Wolfe: banjo: piano (track 1); electric guitar; bass (tracks 1, 3, 7, 9, 10); acoustic guitar (tracks 3, 7, 9, 11); background vocals (track 3); drums (track 1); percussion (tracks 1, 3, 9, 11)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is the primary writer, social media manager, podcast producer and event-calendar updater for Adventures in Americana. By day she’s a marketing writer/brand strategist. In addition to playing guitar and songwriting, she writes self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley.
