The Thousands

Daniel Johnston’s songs are pregnant with visuals, so it’s not hard to imagine this white bear of rock as a seminal pilgrim of both pencil and song. Daniel draws just like he sings – harrowing recitals that eat at your heart strings. Drawn pages of cracked nuts, anthropomorphic stumps and monster children dance with bitter hope and confusion around the intimacies, accidents, raw chords and uncomfortable notes we oft try to suppress. There is no restraint as he plugs into American eccentricity, demons, love and dirt.**Taking the weight of our world inside for regurgitation and wrestling with mental illness can’t have been a piece of toast. But as seen in the Dead Lovers Twisted Heart exhibition, his visual outputs document a colourful odyssey that’s less like a nursery rhyme, more like the news. They’re a fantasy of the real. If songs transpose as contemporary poems, then these pictures are worth a novel.

He’ll be storytelling in both mediums tonight with the help of a legend.