Daniel Johnston

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  Daniel Johnston

Daniel Johnston's fractured legend began with a few cassettes of innocent-yet-eerie songs and gradually began to spread through the cracks of underground music in the '80s. While the emotional directness of his music still holds up, much of that legend has to do with the bipolar disorder and dangerous, erratic episodes that have kept Johnston from pursuing a music career in any conventional sense— though all that could change with the new, Jason Falkner-produced Is And Always Was, which takes Johnston’s songs out of the grotty, lo-fi world they’ve always inhabited and reveals the fully realized pop symphonies hidden within.