John Vanderslice

Ideations of what FOCUS could be emerged a few years ago on a cozy night in, listening to music and doing lines of cocaine with our friends. I told John how much I loved that he was experimenting with electronica on records like d E A T h ~ b U g and CRYSTALS 3.0, completely digressing from his former style. I found it inspiring that he continued to challenge himself musically, not relying on the formulas that succeeded for him in the past. I had only one complaint: I missed his voice. John’s voice was one of the first things I fell in love with years before I had even met him.

“I’m over writing lyrics,” he said, “I don’t want to do it anymore. I have nothing left to say.” So we agreed, that night, if I could write lyrics for him, he would return to singing.

FOCUS by John Vanderslice is an artistic rebirth, a sudden and very welcome departure from his recent electronic musings. It also marks a personal rebirth, leaving the comforts of home in Los Angeles for the excitement and possibility of the unknown in the Netherlands. John seized the chance of yet another self reinvention, and made one of the most realized full length albums he has made in years.

FOCUS was recorded simultaneously with the newest Google Earth record in 2025 as another collaboration with producer and musician James Riotto, who played on, produced, and mixed the record between his own studio, Altamira, and John’s Oakland studio, Tiny Telephone. The result is another incredibly weird, high-fidelity experience from two veteran sound engineers.

The record begins with plodding, distorted, Elektron synth patterns squealing on top of a bona fide indie guitar melody while John sings, “I’m dancing with damnation / got these homicidal ideations / someone’s got to keep me away from you”, directly threatening the listener and alerting that the narrator is untrustworthy, possibly dangerous. This song was the first written and recorded for the new album, inspired by an Ingmar Bergman film John and I watched on ketamine. Later that night, dreams leaping with psychedelic insomnia, I jotted down some ideas that would later become a poem, and later, become a song. John read the lyrics the next day and said, “we might actually be able to pull this off.”

Although John takes on different personas throughout the constantly shifting narratives on FOCUS, the common thread holding everything together is his voice; singularly him, more raw with age, more vulnerable, less careful, and incredibly close-feeling, maybe because it is often mixed a little louder than the other tracks. While the narrator might be threatening with a bread knife, it’s John Vanderslice’s sweet tenor that fans have grown to know and love over his decades-long career that anchors the often troubling messages into a place of safe familiarity. While the narrator may keep changing, John is more fully-fledged himself than ever, “learning how to love / and be loved in return”, swearing he “never really opened up” on the only song he wrote, “Song for Maria.”

Duality permeates the entire record. Oscillating between instrumental and vocal, chaotic and refined, familiar and new, natural and theatrical, contradictions Vanderslice not only embraces, but somehow does so exuding authenticity. Like a healthy relationship between two people, there is space for nuance, space to let opposites exist harmoniously.

While his new record, FOCUS, nods to his indie background with songs like “From the Life of the Marionettes”, “Steep Land Surveyor”, “Aquamarine”, and “Magnolia”, it also disregards the listener’s expectation for structure and resolution, creating songs that at first feel simple, but soon, are delightfully complex. The album’s impression is bifurcated, as both a lyrical journey, a story to be told, and, a narrative-free experiment. “Magnolia” could be a synecdoche for the rest of the record; a ballad to a simple guitar progression devolves seamlessly into over a minute long electronic B section with chopped vocal samples and deep bass.