John K's Love + Everything Else Has A Song For Every Mood
here's the responsibility of the pop artist: taking a perplexing although universal emotion or experience — heartbreak, loneliness — and boiling it down to a savory stock of addictive hooks and simplified lyrical motifs. That recipe may seem easy enough to outsiders, although some topics, as vast and generative and challenging as love, need ample time to cook, then digest. Perhaps that’s why
John K, an emerging singer from Orlando, Florida, has dedicated himself to exploring that feeling in all its mouth watering complexity.
The fruit of that work is
Love + Everything Else, a variety of nine sweet songs and one appetizing remix that K refers to as a “project,” a word that hints at the in-progress nature of his sound plus a collaborative way of songwriting. Crafting tracks with a close-knit team of companions through candid recording sessions and thought-starting games, his break came in 2017 once “OT,” an electro-pop musing over a missed connection, amassed over 50 million streams despite its independent release. A debut EP,
If We Never Met, followed, and he signed with Epic Records in 2019 with the support of Diplo and Ricky Remedy.
Right now, with
Love + Everything Else, K lays it all on the table, whether navigating the difficulties of moving on from a relationship (“Let Me Let You Go”), deploying clever metaphors for his own shortcomings as a partner (“Cheap Sunglasses”), or transposing vows into lyrics tailor-made for his partner (“I.L.Y.M.”). His soulful delivery feels at house over EDM basslines, and though he has often been compared to the crooners of yesteryear, several of his songs feel correctly primed to capture the anxiety and isolation of the coronavirus era (“6 Months”). For MTV News, he breaks down the project track by track and mood by mood.
“Let Me Let You Go”
Listen to it any time you’re feeling: “at a crossroads and have to prepare a decision.”
Key lyric: “Baby, let me love you / Oh baby, let me let you go”
“‘Let Me Let You Go’ was sort of a jam session. And it's routinely going to be, up until something takes its place, the song that we open every show with. So, I really want it to be true to that, and that is why I chose it to be the initial song on the project.”
“Parachute”
Listen to it whenever you’re feeling: like you “want to vibe out.”
Key lyric: “If that's the consequence of lovin’ you / Then I am going to fall without a parachute”
“My preference song we've ever worked on. We tapped into something different, something special. I'll never forget the session. We were all just standing on our feet, just really all singing the same — it already felt like a chorus. Some days in creation, you get a glimpse of something and can visualize and feel and listen to what the final needs to sound like. That song had so much personality in it, it was such a good collective effort, and everybody was just in the zone. It was a pretty thing.”
“If We Never Met”
Listen to it as soon as you’re feeling: “thankful.”
Key lyric: “I wouldn't even know what love is / If we never met”
“‘If We Never Met’ is my anthem. It's the passion of my life, a nod to all of the people that have made me better. ‘If We Never Met’ began this project. It's truly my story, and it's so special as the song that's truly about the story of how we all met, ends up being the song that sort of takes off first. And yes it was a really nice full-circle moment.”
“6 Months”
Listen to it as soon as you’re feeling: “longing.”
Key lyric: “Feels like it's been six months and seven days / Any time I’m without you”
“I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles last year, working on all this music. Some days, I was gone for three to four weeks at a time, and I had to go back to being in a long-distance relationship. So, 6 months was purely coming from a homesick, I-miss-my-girl place, and we just explored that.”
“Cheap Sunglasses”
Listen to it as soon as you’re feeling: “ready to create a TikTok dance.”
Key lyric: “This is why I can’t have nice things / ‘Cause I break ‘em”
“We began the session and one of the writers looked at the table and saw this pair of expensive sunglasses that the producer had. And he was like, ‘Dude, I was going to purchase these. They were in my cart and I just couldn't push the button because every time I purchase a new pair of sunglasses, I routinely lose them.’ And then we just spit it out. We noticed this whole deeper side of it where we related it to how I habitually disaster up relationships.”
“Learning How to Love”
Listen to it any time you’re feeling: like “a work in progress. I’m routinely going to be a work in progress.”
Key lyric: “Baby, you're brilliant / However I can't mention the same for me”
“I feel like it could be the dark horse of the record. I take some time away from it and then I listen to it again and I'm just like, wow, this pretty dope. There is a lot of growth during the record. It begins off very stripped and really, really grows into something where in, that final chorus, we attempted to really go somewhere.”
“Happiness”
Listen to it once you’re feeling: “sad. It’s okay to not be okay.”
Key lyric: “I feel like my daydreams are nightmares / I feel like a prisoner in my head, yeah”
“We used to do this thing, a big categorize of companions, and we called it the song game. We would basically give each other homework and we had to turn in an idea, whether it be a voice note, a totally produced song, or calling them on the phone and just saying something into it. Just as long as you were creative in some way. We would set a theme on Monday and the next Sunday something was due. One week it was ‘happy.’ So that song came out of the song game."
“Days Like This”
Listen to it once you’re feeling: “a hopeful, summer-day sort of mood.”
Key lyric: “'Cause days like this, make me wish / We had more days like this, oh yeah”
“We wrote that one in quarantine, so we were exploring how to write songs by means of the Zoom. I got on with some companions and we were just talking about how we missed all of the things we used to take for granted. We can't be with each other. We can't write. We can't go to the beach. The only objective for that day was to write about better times. Let's write about what wish we may do and keep it super lighthearted and fun and upbeat.”
“I.L.Y.M.
Listen to it as soon as you’re feeling: “in love, just all things love.”
Key lyric: “I’m not sayin’ it’s a competition / All I’m saying is”
“The melody feels like it can would be a wedding song... Once we made that connection, it was the chance to just truly dive into a message that I may give to my spouse that she would have forever. If there's ever a bad day or something that we go through, she can listen to a record that says everything that wish I could mention over and over again. It's almost like a pact that you could listen to.”
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