Young Enough to Go Crazy, Old Enough to Know Better: Johnny Payne Finds His Groove
By Johnny Kosmos
Pretty Beat, the new single and video out today from Johnny Payne, doesn’t arrive with urgency or spectacle. It moves at its own pace, relaxed and assured, rooted in feel rather than flourish. It sounds like music made by someone who has stopped rushing himself and started trusting where he’s landed.
Although the song is newly released, it comes from a period Payne now looks back on with some distance. He recorded the material a couple of years ago, during what he describes as a moment of finally coming to terms with growing up. The songs were soft, tender, and focused on observation rather than ambition. “I wasn’t trying to overthink the lyrics,” he says. “I just wanted to be honest and real with the songs. It’s a romantic record.”
That honesty extends to how Payne thinks about his sound. While listeners often describe his music as vintage or timeless, he resists the idea that he’s reaching backward. He listens to a lot of old music and openly admires it, but his goal isn’t revival. If a song is written now and reflects the life he’s living now, he considers it modern. Making guitar and piano based music in 2026, he suggests, is inherently collage-like, pulling from the past but filtered through a present-day lens.
One of the most significant shifts on this record was vocal. Payne stepped away from heavy double tracking, a studio habit he’d leaned on for years. “It’s a safe way to record,” he admits, but this time he wanted something different. He sang the songs straight through, as if onstage, without trying to protect or thicken his voice. The result is especially clear on Pretty Beat, where the vocal feels close, unguarded, and deeply human.
Much of that ease seems tied to where he lives. Based on Vancouver Island, Payne credits the environment with reshaping his creative process. “The tranquility and, for lack of a better word, boredom you experience in the country can really do wonders for creativity,” he says. His days are filled with tasks that occupy his body while leaving his mind free to wander. Those tasks, he explains, allow ideas to surface naturally rather than being chased.
That slower rhythm doesn’t mean isolation. Payne hosts a thoughtful music podcast that keeps him connected to other artists and ongoing conversations about making work in a fractured industry. Community, he says, feels more important than ever, especially when living somewhere remote.
Since recording this material, Payne has also become a father, a change he describes as transformative. But he’s careful not to fold that experience into this record retroactively. Those songs belong to a slightly earlier version of himself. The next chapter, he suggests, will tell a different story.
When asked what subtitle he’d give this era of his work, Payne doesn’t hesitate: “Young enough to go crazy but old enough to know better.” It’s a fitting summary. Pretty Beat doesn’t chase relevance or reinvention. It simply exists in its own calm, confident space, and trusts the listener to meet it there.