Freedy Johnston

Freedy Johnston

Johnston, who released his first album in 1990, landed on best-of lists with his 1992 indie LP, Can You Fly, which established him as a critics' favorite. Before Right Between the Promises, his albums were filled with elegant, catchy melodies and rich, short-story-like vignettes, long on character development and narrative detail. Playing those FM radio standards with the Boyfriends encouraged him to strip things down, he said.

Song Review by Kristi Coulter  [-]

"Bad Reputation" was the leadoff track and single from Freedy Johnston's 1994 major-label debut, This Perfect World. The song is a showcase for Johnston's reedy, melancholy voice as well as a distillation of his best qualities as a songwriter. Opening with a lone guitar and voice before blooming into a cleanly arranged mid-tempo ballad, "Bad Reputation" is both a confession of the singer's unreliability as a lover and a mating call; Johnston sings the refrain, "Do you want me now?," as if hoping against hope that the very shiftiness he's admitting to will turn out to be an attraction. His voice and the song itself are both bereft and proud; there is a beautiful moment near the end when the supporting instruments drop away and the singer proclaims nearly a cappella that "nobody's gonna tell me who to love." The prickliness and sadness in that moment are a snapshot of Johnston's songwriting voice. Though seemingly tailor-made for adult alternative radio, "Bad Reputation" never found a home on the charts, but it did receive some radio play and is Johnston's best-known song. It also made an ideal ending-credits coda to the post-college romance Kicking and Screaming