Spotlight: Making His Internal Worlds Come to Life, Huron John is Expanding
AN HOUR INTO OUR INTERVIEW — as we pull away from the coffee shop parking lot and get ready to head to Third Man Records for a quick photoshoot and a round of crate digging, John Wallace Conradi, better known as Huron John, glances at the flashing “E” on his dashboard.
“Hold up, I gotta get gas then we’ll do whatever we got to do,” he says as he steers into the construction-filled Nashville downtown.
Gas is priced at $4.29 ⁹/₁₀ at the Exxon. John backs his car into the gas slot in the wrong direction, since he got used to driving his friend’s car on their recent spring break trip to Florida. We take a moment to stare at the soaring gas price against the bizarre backdrop of a giant American flag and a McDonald’s sign, recalling how, just moments ago, we were chatting about being the products of a failed American dream through the subject of vaporwave.
“Part of the meaning behind the genre is that whole old-school, super stereotypical, hyper-capitalistic American ideal,” John explains. “It’s just so fascinating to me. If you look back to the advertisements and music from the ’80s and the ’90s, just the way America was depicted … was almost like they were promising us this future that never arrived. Not to get heavy — I read a lot about that kind of shit — but there's a lot of theories out there that say the hyper-consumerist innocence of America died with 9/11.”
Much of that obsession reveals itself in John’s visuals for his last two full-length LPs, which eventually transformed into a double feature called aw / ct: Andy’s Journey. Visually, the music videos look as if someone from the 2000s splattered vaporwave onto a color palette, painting with the mind of Picasso and the skill of a 3-year-old. Sonically, the albums give more concrete clues as to what John had in mind for the story.
“The first part, Apocalypse Wow, is [about] the boy, Andy, his life, his past, his whatever,” he explains. “He is the one human being the aliens beam up to space. He’s now the representative of the human race — just a fucking young boy who rides BMX in the suburbs.”
John begins detailing a very grand storyline of alien abduction, in which one human being’s understanding of love, death, nostalgia, and everything in between would have to be enough to convince the aliens to stop their plan of destruction of Earth, eventually revealing itself as John’s debut album.
“And then [in] Cartoon Therapy, the second album, the story gets a little weird,” he continues. “Only my biggest listeners get the story — and even they don't really get it. Basically, Andy did such a great job explaining humanity to the aliens, so they were like, ‘Wow, you're actually pretty cool. We like you a lot.’ The aliens now want to take Andy in one of them, then they give him the capabilities to time travel.”
Simply put, in John’s second LP, the singer-songwriter attempts to right the wrongs of the past: the past of Andy, who originally was inspired by Andy in Toy Story, Andy Warhol, and, of course, John Wallace Conradi himself.
To tie it together, John envisions his double feature of two full-length LPs to be a 4 a.m. broadcast on public access TV, hence the TV special artwork of aw / ct: Andy’s Journey.
Older Gen Z kids from the late ’90s and fans of John will understand and feel the impact of the artist’s sound, noticing how it reiterates the deeply buried melancholy in their heads. John certainly succeeds in breaking the fourth wall, as he presently uses a method from the past to reflect on the past.
Throughout our conversation, John gets excited whenever he chats about the details of his craft. He communicates in an extremely graphic fashion, as if Huron John functions beyond the limits of a musical project but as a world of its own that plays out in the artist’s head, accidentally bleeding into reality. It is only natural, then, to bring up The White Stripes and Jack White, who quite literally created a world of his own with his record store and label, Third Man Records, which resides in the very Nashville neighborhood where our interview takes place. Fittingly, John has something similar going on with his self-established label, Always Outside Creative Arts.
“I would love to own my own store one day,” he says. “That's a big dream of mine. It doesn't even have to be some big shit — it could just be a little shoebox store in Manhattan or Los Angeles or Chicago. Always Outside is basically all the projects that I put out but under that umbrella term. I’ve looked into taking lesser-known artists who are just starting to build their craft and help them afford to press physical cassettes and vinyls… I’d say that’s my label — but really it’s just like a term.”
John goes on to explain that the label will function by itself. “It's really just supposed to elevate people on an independent level,” he continues. “There's a lot of dreams down the line. I’ve even had conversations with my manager [talking about how] it could someday have an after-school program for kids who want to make music. And it's independent — it's us. We don't need money from the company — we're gonna do it all alone, and that's gonna be badass.”
The plan sounds grand, but for a 22-year-old, John has already achieved a lot. He recalls his 2017 album under the alias Wavehouse, in which he took exploration to an extreme. “It’s almost like one of those scientific experiments where they find a kid in the wild that was raised by the wolves and didn’t know how to be a human being — it was that in music form,” he says. “I literally didn’t know what I was doing; it was pure exploration with no structure, no anything.”
“I want to get more explorative,” John describes, addressing his outfit choices for the first time in the conversation. He’s wearing a knitted beanie/ski mask with sunglasses and a utility vest. While Nashville certainly is an odd outlier in the south, John’s outfit blurs the line between a fashion choice and a statement in the making. “Three years ago I wouldn’t walk out of the house wearing this, but music is allowing me to do that. The music tells my story at the most authentic and raw level.”
And rightfully so — despite all the extensive projects he has completed, John is still young. For him, the days of adolescence still echo while he envisions a different future. Four years ago, he moved to Nashville completely by chance quite literally, as he picked Belmont University out of a hat among all his other college choices.
“It's an interesting thing, because I love Nashville,” John says as he tries to explain his potential plan to move to Los Angeles. “I love Nashville so much [that] I would rather live here. It's so much more affordable and clean. I love the pace of living; the people here are very polite and move slow. I really would love to get into film scoring with film and that kind of thing. The unfortunate reality is that the opportunities are there [Los Angeles], not here.”
Besides, John prefers playing in towns like D.C., Toronto, and Philadelphia over the chatty artist-filled crowds of Nashville. Unlike the emerging artists in town, he doesn’t need a training ground anymore — his inner theater kid treats stages more like playgrounds.
On his last tour, supporting Inner Wave, instead of playing his own songs the way they were recorded, John and his drummer, Rick West, set out to reinvent the Huron John discography on stage — Death Grips, heavy metal–style.
“Every song would start out and I would build the beat live,” he describes. “This happened for every song, then the drummer would come in and I would add rhythm guitar and keyboard. Then, in most of the set, I had really disliked, corny hit songs melted into my songs. In New York City, I meshed ‘Maple Syrup Tears’ with ‘Hey There Delilah,’ so that kind of shit.”
Elaborating on building this intricate set live, John explains the technicality behind bringing the songs to life. “The last thing I want is [to play] the songs exactly how they sound,” he says. “For Inner Wave, they have such a big band and so much gear, but I'm not a band and I still got to hold it off. I'm like a one-man show, so how do I bring this to life? I don't want to just be up there alone because then I'm going to look like a rapper or something — and that's not really what I am.”
In fact, John might never be associated with one particular genre. Currently, he has his eyes set on dance music for the Huron John project that would sound even more psychedelic than his previous releases, as well as another album for Wavehouse coming up at some point this year. Changes are coming for John, but one thing remains certain: he’s confident — he’s got a brain that has the capacity to create whatever worlds he’s got in mind.
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