Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit

Singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Will Johnson has long navigated beloved bands (Centro-matic, Monsters of Folk, the 400 Unit), singular collaborations (Molina & Johnson, New Multitudes, Overseas) and the many open roads a career musician travels. With his 10th solo album, however, the prolific journeyman tapped a creative well at home — in one room alone with his thoughts. In the Texas farmhouse where he lives, nestled among the hills of Hays County, Johnson dreamt up and chronicled a perfectly imperfect world.

Diamond City, out April 4th on Keeled Scales, surveys mythical places whose spirit dwells among barren Midwestern landscapes and stark Southern outlands, reflecting the hollows of Johnson’s childhood in southern Missouri and the spartan Texas expanse where he now lives. Like many towns that line America’s midsection, Diamond City’s fancy name belies its reality. As with albums such as John Prine’s “John Prine” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” Diamond City’s vast fortune is found in its gritty folk tales — of hovering ghosts, open wounds, tender hearts, little jokes, and the everyday people and scenery that compose a cracked iconography. Like Muhlenberg County, Kentucky or Mahwah, New Jersey, Diamond City is a place that people may leave but never truly escape.