Dean Johnson – I Hope We Can Still Be Friends (Blue LP Vinyl)
Product Details
Dean Johnson has been a beloved fixture in the Americana underground long enough to earn the kind of word-of-mouth reputation that no press campaign can manufacture. This limited blue vinyl pressing gives collectors a proper artifact to match the album's emotional weight, and the color variant feels right for music this honest about heartbreak and hard-won perspective.
With I Hope We Can Still Be Friends, Dean Johnson makes a pact with the listener: He will sing you his truth in the most heartfelt and charming way possible, if you promise to keep an open mind.
I Hope We Can Still Be Friends is essentially an anthology that bridges Johnson’s earliest days as a songwriter with his present-day outlook and abilities. There are songs that have been in his setlists for years, and others that will be new to fans. Each of its 11 tracks contains jocular social commentary or lovingly rendered affairs of the heart. The album’s songs about love and relationships offer another way to interpret its title: as a parting thought to an ex.
Like John Prine or Kris Kristofferson’s country-adjacent sound, devastating humor and economical profundity refracted through a barroom’s haze, the album is filled with easygoing twang, sad characters, universal truths and the absurdity of everyday life. “Carol” recounts the numb consumption and dissipating cultural attention that is besieging America. There’s a search for optimism amid meditations on dying in a plane crash in “Before You Hit the Ground.” Romance that is best forgotten steers “So Much Better” — only Johnson could weave electroconvulsive therapy into a gentle, chuckle-inducing missive on unbearable heartbreak.
I Hope We Can Still Be Friends floats in a liminal plane between timely and timeless, its minimalist instrumentation elevating Johnson’s affecting voice to new heights.
Tracklist
Side A
Side B
UPC: 648401039610
Label: Saddle Creek
Release Date: 8.22.25
Format: LP Vinyl