Jack Johnson never completely fit inside the “Life Is Good” T-shirt that two decades of adult-contemporary hits wove for him. Sure, Johnson—a strong-jawed Hawaii native with a disarming grin and a twilit voice as tuneful as a commercial jingle—extolled making banana pancakes as a romantic getaway, turned an ode to a lover’s bulbous toes into a staccato jam, and recruited certified goof G. Love to sing along about Curious George. Perennially posed on the edge of some salty shore, guitar in hand, he seemed the heir apparent to Jimmy Buffett’s fiefdom of mixed drinks and beach breezes, a pleasant guy with cheesy tunes about the surf and your soul, man.
But Johnson’s emotions and concerns have been mixed since his perspicacious 2001 debut, more complicated than facile no-shoes/no-shirt/no-problem sloganeering. He somehow snuck “diegetic” into a pre-9/11 plea about media callousness toward murder, and commiserated with a sex worker while excoriating a john’s religious hypocrisy. More James Taylor or even Jackson Browne than the cash cow that Mister Margaritaville became, his preternatural sense of sangfroid has sometimes crowded out his surprising depth as a world-weary songwriter in search of small moments of respite and delight.
Johnson’s timely and calming eighth album, Meet the Moonlight, should clear up some confusion. The 10 balmy songs sway into two broad lyrical categories, unified by the same open-toed shuffle from which Johnson has only occasionally wavered: polite protest numbers and little devotionals. He stakes out the twin territories on opener “Open Mind,” a winning lament about trying to step back from perpetual disappointment. First he bemoans blind faith in unseen gods—Christ, capitalism, whatever—and then tries to leave such true believers alone, intending to afford himself the sanity of ignoring what he cannot understand, let alone accept.
These sociopolitical songs aren’t out to change anyone’s minds or offer some revelatory worldview. If you’ve ever bemoaned a reply guy or frowned inside an infinite echo chamber, you’ve had the same worries about social media Johnson broadcasts during the tensile “One Step Ahead.” “I give in, I give up/It’s too much,” he snaps without a breath, his voice suddenly sharp as flint. “3 A.M. Radio” takes on the cheap salvation of disinformation with an irritation so velvet-gloved it’s easy to mistake for tenderness. The breezy “Costume Party” seeks to leave a society of posers, where we camouflage our true selves to be liked; its rudimentary accompaniment of beer bottles, blown by Johnson so they sound like pennywhistles, offers a charming and playful send-up of careerism.