#49, “Devil Town,” Daniel Johnston (1990)

150 Favorite Songs: #49, “Devil Town,” Daniel Johnston (1990)

It’s such a simple song. It’s just eight lines, almost more of a nursery rhyme than a song. When Daniel Johnston recorded “Devil Town,” it was just a minute long, with the first verse repeated once, his voice adorned with some heavy reverb but otherwise unaccompanied.

i was living in a devil town
didn’t know it was a devil town
oh, lord, it really brings me down
about the devil town

and all my friends were vampires
i didn’t know they were vampires
turns out i was a vampire myself
in the devil town

That’s it. The whole song is sung with the guilelessness that was one of Johnston’s chief characteristics. Not all of his songs are as simple as “Devil Town,” but they’re all free of irony. That’s true of “Peek a Boo,” one of the saddest sungs he, or anybody else, ever wrote, a meandering stream of consciousness where Johnston, accompanied on a piano, offers a glimpse into what it’s like to feel haunted the way he did. (Here’s Phoebe Bridgers singing it at End of an Ear in Austin in 2017.) It’s also true of “King Kong,” a re-telling of “King Kong” he recorded with his voice breaking in a way that makes the lyric “they thought he was a monster / but he was the king” feel impossibly poignant despite the fact that it’s literally just about “King Kong.” (Tom Waits’s cover of the song is a better adaptation of the story than Peter Jackson’s remake.) But “Devil Town” is, I think, the finest example of what made him so special.

Because it is so simple, like something he tossed off one day, an idea that for a fleeting moment passed through his head, on a day that he had his tape recorder handy. That’s not true—there’s an early demo of “Devil Town” that might be that version of the song, but he re-recorded it with care later, but the intimacy of his work makes so much of what he made feel like it was a document of a moment, rather than a planned artistic expression. He could often be both over- and under-estimated as an artist. So much of Johnston’s art feels that way; his drawings were often just sketches, markers on printer paper, his songs seemingly half-formed, except, well—just listen to it. It’s perfect, simple but beautiful, nursery rhyme lyrics set to a melody that Lennon and McCartney would have been proud of.

Outside of maybe “True Love Will Find You in the End,” most of Daniel Johnston’s songs sound more like proper songs when performed by other artists than when he recorded them with whatever resources he had available to him. And that’s very true of “Devil Town,” the bones of which exist in that minute-long, reverb-drenched a capella take that he recorded himself, but the melodic genius of which really becomes clear when someone else takes it on. The best known version of it is probably the 2004 recording that Conor Oberst/Bright Eyes and Nick Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs made for the Late Great Daniel Johnston tribute album (which, confusingly, was released fifteen years before Johnston died). It takes that melody that Johnston found and starts a capella, or mostly (there’s a little bit of bass and some hand-claps), before a toy piano comes in playing a lovely counter-melody, and then the drums come in and a fuzzy guitar joins, and Oberst runs through the lyrics a second time, and you can really hear the way it feels full, even though it’s still very much a children’s song, a point highlighted by the final verse, where a voice—whose voice I haven’t been able to identify, so if you know, please tell me—sings the first verse one more time, again bringing it back to that nursery rhyme level that makes the devil town seem like something that’s been a part of our culture forever. There are others; a singer named Tony Lucca covered, essentially, the Bright Eyes version for the soundtrack of the Friday Night Lights TV show; the pop-punk band The Groovie Ghoulies did a version that would sound good on your Halloween playlists; Glen Hansard plays it live sometimes, leaning solely on Johnston’s vocal melody, singing it a capella, sometimes joined by the crowd, who can all pick it up very quickly even if they’ve never heard it, because it’s so short and the melody is so easy and memorable. (Hansard also incorporates parts of “Don’t Play Cards with Satan,” another Johnston song from the same album, into his performances.)

I don’t know if there’s a song I’ve sung more times to myself than “Devil Town.” Those elements that make it a children’s song also make it feel timeless, like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” It feels like it might have been around forever even though it didn’t exist until Daniel Johnston sang it into a tape recorder sometime in the 1980’s. I’m grateful that he did.

the artwork for today’s entry doesn’t have anything to do with “devil town” specifically, but it’s the one piece of daniel johnston artwork i own, and i thought it would be nice to share it.