2025 has been shaping up to be quite the year for Johan Lenox. He has been booked and busy, touring and producing, making film scores, and releasing an album of his own. “Full Speed Nowhere”, featuring the likes of KayCyy, 070 Shake, Quadeca, and more, was released on October 31st.
Saanshi Panigrahi: What does it mean to you now that the album is out?
Johan Lenox: Some of the songs are a year and a half old. I played a lot of it on tour in January, I’ve been kind of living with it for a while. It’s always a weird thing, when you release music; for everyone else it’s about to be this new thing, and for me, well… I love the music, I’m really proud of it. Of the music I’ve put out, it’s got the most of me in it. The music has a lot more vocal layering, piano, the things I can do in a room by myself that don’t involve crazy layers of production, it’s just very me.
SP: You said that you’ve been working on it for a year now?
JL: I was trying to figure this out because I have bounces or exports of some of these songs saying “final version” that are from April 2024. I don’t know what happened last year, I must have been working on it right after my other project came out that spring. I was already working on this stuff with [Quadeca]. I brought him a ton of ideas that I’d started on my own for various things like “Dude, I really need your help to help me figure this out” and we picked seven of them that we thought were worth finishing.
JL: I think we did nine and then we cut it to seven. At the time I was thinking it was going to be a seven song project, and those pretty much haven’t changed since then — actually one of the seven I did completely without him with another producer named Suzy Shinn, who’s amazing — but the rest were basically just with him, and my friend Micah who’d done a bunch of stuff on them.
JL: I sat with those when I toured at the beginning of the year with Shake. Quadeca was on that tour too, actually, in Europe. I performed a bunch of it, and then in the summer I was itching to make more stuff. It was really good to have that base, but I wanted to get features like KayCyy, formerly KayCyy Pluto, who I love. I put all the last pieces together, added the string interludes, all that stuff happened this year.
Of the music I’ve put out, it’s got the most of me in it.
SP: So what was the first song that you finished completely?
JL: It must’ve been “When Morning Comes,” but it felt like the seven kind of all happened at once. I was doing mix notes and everything on all of those last year, but those seven really kind of came together first. Then, this year, I was making the singles and features like with KayCyy, we were releasing them as we made them, and then sort of figured out how to work them into the project afterwards.
SP: There are a lot of features from very different artists on the project. Comparing the music that you make versus the music that they make, how did you find a way to blend all of those styles together to make this album?
JL: I struggle to understand how people perceive the type of music that I make. To me, it all sounds the same, but I realize it doesn’t necessarily come across that way to others. I definitely feel like the Quadeca one fits, at least with that song. The 070 Shake one was a bit different for both of us, I usually do much more synth based things and she has this passion for older, 50s type of music, so we started an idea and I figured if I finish this she’s going to really like it. I think that it was a good break for her. Obviously, I like to create my own unified world, my taste runs across a lot of different styles. Inevitably, to make that all work, you’re going to be pulling people into environments that they’ve never been in before, which I think is cool, but I try to compromise it.
SP: Are there any dream collaborations for you?
JL: Sampha would have been great on this. John Glacier, she’s a newer sort of alt-rap R&B. I want to work with James Blake. I’m not sure we need a song together because we’re kind of doing the same thing a little bit, but it would be cool to just compare notes. I wanted to hit Channel Tres up about doing something on this. I’m not sure that would have made sense, but I feel it would have been an interesting combination. Blood Orange, maybe that was another reference for this stuff, made some adjustments based on that.
This album, while feeling a lot more mature than most of his other music like he said, is much more stripped. The piano, the strings, all of it brings this feeling of autumn and winter. It’s plucky. Cold, almost. You hear it especially with the features, they bring something out of both artists that isn’t commonly heard in their own music, that’s where I think the beauty of this album mainly lies: finding something secret that makes each artist’s music so unique and building on that.
SP: What would you say your music sounds like — because you can’t really put it in a genre — what would you say it’s inspired by?
JL: Quadeca is a big producer on most of it, his influence is definitely there. I gravitated towards him because I was interested in the way he uses acoustic instruments and destroys the sound of them in his records. If I’m good at one thing, it’s always been classical music, I’m into doing things the “right way,” having pristine vibes, you know, and I was looking for someone who knew how to work with that type of sound but then destroy it, make it sound edgier and weirder. So, his input is probably the biggest on the project in general.
JL: However, I thought about Sampha, and I’m sure you can hear the Bon Iver influences throughout everything I’ve ever done. Taking elements of the music and really trying to think about how to make it as much about the voice in the piano without it being a bunch of ballads. Stripping away. My previous stuff is overloaded with these maximal sounds, kind of Travis Scott inspired, that world was what originally got me this type of music. Now I’m trying to pull away those layers and just do my stuff this time.
SP: This album is tied more to your musical roots, because you are a classical artist. It still has a lot of those experimental elements, which obviously is going to be throughout your work that you make as you progress as an artist. How have you found different ways to turn two styles into your own?
JL: I worked on this insanely weird experimental album with a bunch of classical composers that I knew from that world. Kacy Hill was on that. It has a bunch of different people, Danny Brown’s on it, actually. It took a bunch of weird choices and turned it into a thing that is fully abstract, atonal, where nothing repeats. There’s no memorable melody at any point in it.
I’m trying to pull away those layers and just do my stuff this time.
JL: I was interested in that, from the perspective of “what would force fans of these artists to engage with this stuff that’s more experimental” I figured if I feature a ton of them, most of their fans will be like “WTF is this” and maybe five percent will enjoy it. Right now, I’m trying to write songs that I like and appeal to simplicity. I think this is less weird, I don’t consider this that experimental. There’s a bit of classical in it, which is a part of my bio at this point, but I really go for big ass melodies. There’s a song here that literally sounds like a Coldplay song, like big tent stuff. I have a playlist that I keep, literally my favorite smash hits of this century. I’m constantly updating this stuff.
SP: What are some of the other songs on the playlist?
JL: I can read off the top ten if you’d like:
- “Teenage Dream” – Katy Perry
- “I Gotta Feeling” – Black Eyed Peas
- “no tears left to cry” – Ariana Grande
- “I Took A Pill In Ibiza – Seeb Remix” Mike Posner
- “Work” – Rihanna, Drake
- “Sunflower” – Post Malone, Swae Lee
- “Can’t Feel My Face” – The Weeknd
- “She Will Be Loved” – Maroon 5
- “Get Lucky” – Daft Punk, Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers
- “FourFiveSeconds” – Rihanna, Kanye West, Paul McCartney
SP: I’m just curious about — so music is like an era, right, and as you’re working on a project that’s kind of an era or your life that you’re putting into making this project — how has this project/era been for you? How have you changed from start to finish?
JL: It’s been interesting, I’ve had such a varied life already. I did my first film score this year, which comes out in the winter. I’ve done production things for bigger kinds of rap and pop stars. I think Covid changed stuff… it really just is a different world now. I wanted to try to start from scratch and figure out what I actually want to do. My last few projects dwelled on the sense of apocalyptic doom that surrounds all of us every day. The cover image had the sky visibly on fire, which it was for a while in 2020, of orange illuminated skies. I wanted to put that aside, I felt like I couldn’t say anything more about that. I really needed to start fresh. “When Morning Comes” was the last one where I was kind of doing the full apocalyptic cosplay type stuff, and — have you ever seen Wall-E? The Pixar movie? He’s searching for green, some piece of life. It’s like that.
JL: It’s hard because I’ve been mirroring life, but it’s fine, I’m not going through a mass amount of turmoil. But it is very frustrating and just scary to try to do this stuff. You can get really bogged down, like “we got to try to do this kind of campaign,” or a marketing thing, or anything, and in your head be like “well, but I did try it this way, and it didn’t really work, so it was no point.” Everything you do, I think after a while, if you’ve done it enough, you’ll have thought of everything you could do. At a point, you have to erase the whiteboard and sort of start over. Look at it and find what you actually want to be doing every day with your life. I like playing piano, I like producing records with my friends. That’s all.
SP: Like I’ve said, your music has changed so much throughout the past couple of years. Not changed, more like evolved. How do you see it evolving in the future? Are there any other directions that you want to go in?
JL: It’s a process of stripping away. The dream project that I wanted to do this time (but then I thought better, I thought I should wait), it would be fully acapella. Only voices, but not like Pentatonix. There’s a Bjork album from the 90s, I think it’s called Medulla? It’s entirely acapella, like to the point where she beatboxes the drums. I love singing, I love harmonizing, I feel that’s the best, the tightest version of what I could do. On the film score, I’m making weird noises and stuff like that, so maybe that was a test for what’s to come … Even that way I’ve also stripped back.
I used to be like, in the afternoon I’m with a big artist like Raye, or writing a pop song, and then in the evening I’m going up to an ASAP Rocky session, the next day I’m working on my own for three hours, I was kind of tired. Obviously, for those people, it’s worth it, but to get there you first have to do sessions for songs that’ll never be released with people you don’t really care about that much. That’s just what that grind is like for the people who want to make big ass hits, it got so fucking boring, and I’ve really narrowed; I pretty much just work with Ben (Quadeca) and 070 Shake at this point. I drop in one thing every few weeks if it’s with someone cool. It’s a change for sure. I think that my problem is that everything I do is really unique, or at least I feel that way. Maybe it doesn’t go with other people, but it’ll be just another thing that I do.
You know ericdoa? He does his own thing, but he started out in a zone where there was a clear audience. Unless there’s a massive movement of people making acapella albums, that’s going to be another thing that I’ve made where no one knows what to do with it, but it makes me happy.
The idea that “anyone can make music” has both its pros and cons. In the case of having such an online fandom, many listeners and fans alike will tend to lean more to the creative side, most being musicians themselves. That’s not a bad thing per se. It’s definitely frustrating to feel like the people who “support” you are really only there when they need you, or to use you, a sentiment Lenox echoes in previous responses, but when it comes to your own fans, it hits a bit harder. That’s why he took a step back for a while, it was that break that allowed for some reevaluation in his intentions with music as a whole.
SP: How do you feel now that your album is finally out for the public to listen to?
JL: I kind of dread it. I think it’ll be good. The potential is always there, and then when it’s out, you’re looking at the numbers. I don’t want to think that way. I’m really trying not to. I really have tried to retreat from worrying about it this time. I feel most artists I know are manically obsessive about that, maybe there are some who truly are as zen as they come off, but I don’t think so.
JL: As for post-release, I have some ideas. I’m going to do a live version of it in this studio, which I’ll probably figure out some way to roll out, and then I might make an all strings version of it, which I did on my first time around. I was surprised by that, it felt like a weird passion project, but then people were like dude you got to do more of those, so I think maybe that could be another way. But yeah, it’s out now.
SoundFynd 