Is your real name Earl Johnson?

Fun fact about me is I come from a long line of Earl Johnsons. I am actually Earl L. Johnson III (L standing for Leonard). I decided to go with just Earl Johnson as I felt adding the “III” to everything would make it more confusing for people to find me. I mean, on one platform someone would have to type in three “i”s and on another platform the number 3. I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have registered my name as Earl Johnson III for something only for it to either not show the “III”s at all, or it looks silly like “iii”, “Iii”, “3”, or even “LLL”! So I just kept it simple, Earl Johnson.

Is your music affiliated with the Earl Johnson from 1927?

No. We just so happen to have the same name, so when my works get published sometimes it gets mixed in with his. Separating my solo piano music from his old-timey music is something I am currently in the process of fixing.

*Update: I have currently separated my music from the other Earl Johnson(s) on most if not all of the major popular streaming platforms. I am aware that my music may still be mixed with other Earl Johnsons out there on a few of the smaller streaming platforms however, so if there is a particular streaming service that you absolutely love where my music is still mixed with another artist, please reach out to me here to let me know and I will do my best to work with that platform to resolve it so you can listen to my music in peace :)

How long have you been playing piano?

I was born in 1990 and I have been playing piano since I was twelve years old. I took lessons for five years privately with a wonderful piano teacher Liz Joy in West Hills, California from age twelve to seventeen. After that I went on to study music in college where I learned about music theory and harmony. It amazed me to learn just how expansive music truly can be!

Why did you pick piano as your instrument?

Well in elementary school I played my very first instrument which was the tenor saxophone. Though I was good at playing the sax and played in elementary jazz band for three years, my memory of that instrument was that it was rather challenging to play. Also it was huge! I mean, I was only in 5th grade at the time, so carrying this large instrument around in a big brief case, having to screw the instrument together in like 5-10 different parts (or unscrew when done), always needing to replace the wooden reeds since they get soggy after too much use, always needing to clean out the puddles of spit collecting in the instrument “musket” style by jamming a pipe cleaner down the tubes, how LOUD the instrument is when you practice indoors and how it makes a screeching “wrrraahhh” sound if the position of your mouth isn’t perfect or if a reed tears, and not having big enough hands as a child to be able to press all the different keys the sax had on it were just some of the major reasons why I began to gravitate towards a different instrument.

I desired an instrument that just “sat there”. No more needing to clean spit out of it, no more needing to screw it together, no more needing to pack it away to travel it to somebody’s home. Most people do not have a saxophone in their home so you have no choice but to bring your own. Even if they do have one well…uhh…let’s not forget that the saxophone is played with your mouth! Unlike the sax, I would say that many families have a piano or keyboard already in their home, and even public spaces like churches, malls, schools, subway stations, grocery stores, etc. will you find a piano just sitting there waiting to be played! So alas, piano was the instrument for me :)

What led you to composing?

When I was just a kid around the age of twelve, my piano teacher would always tell me that she believed I naturally had an ear and that I had a gift for composing. Over the years, sometimes I would sit down at the piano in front of her during my lessons and just start playing either a song that I was making up on the spot, or a small melody that I had worked on for fun earlier that week. She always let me play those songs. Never once did she interrupt me, scold me, or ever tell me to stop playing my made up songs to instead play a song from the lesson books. She simply sat there quietly and listened with a big smile on her face as I busted out playing something that was not part of her intended lesson plan. She would instead use those opportunities to encourage my playing, give me tips on how to add to my simple songs and offer me advice on how to make the songs even more dynamic. Time and time again she would mention how she saw a future composer brewing inside of me, and according to her, specifically believed I was cut out for composing scores for movies/tv shows and for videogames. As a kid I definitely appreciated those words, though such words were difficult to fully grasp when so young. Of course I understood that my ear was strong, and that maybe one day I COULD do something crazy like compose music, but honestly I just didn’t know what my life was going to be like, or where my musical journey was going to take me since I was still only just in high school at the time.

As the years went by and my love for piano grew, I remember begging my parents to buy me sheet music to all of my favorite songs so that I could learn to play them on the piano! These scores were all from my favorite piano composers, my favorite video games, favorite movies, tv shows, and the like. Still in high school, one day my friend asked me to play him a song that I was learning on the piano at the time, and of course I was happy to play it for him. After performing the song for him he then reached over and grabbed the sheet music off of the piano, placed it aside on the table next to him and said, “Ok now you compose a song.” I was shocked and said “What? How do you expect me to do that?!” See at the time I was used to learning songs note for note on sheet music. Something had to “tell” me what to play. My young mind couldn’t even begin to fathom composing a “real” song. Sure I had created some simple songs and some simple melodies here and there, but those were just baby beginner songs, right? Mind you I am still in high school at this time. The bulk of my piano journey thus far has been simply practicing what I was supposed to learn for my piano lesson each week. My friend looked at me and said, “Well the person that created this song I am sure is just following a formula. What is the formula for this song that you just performed for me? Whatever that formula is, use that to create your own song.” Oh what wise words from my high school friend! The funny thing about what he said is that he was 100% correct! I mean, after all, music at its core is just built from various patterns. Scales in their most simplest definitions are just patterns - so are chords - so are chord progressions - so are most finger movements, etc. The more patterns you can learn and introduce into your songs, the more interesting your music will become. However, my limited mind at the time could not even begin to comprehend what “formulas” my friend was claiming were being used to build songs. I knew how to play scales and chords, sure, but…how do I use those to create “real” songs?

Now fresh out of high school I went to college to study music with an emphasis on music education. It is here that my knowledge for music absolutely exploded. I was taught music theory, history, performance, ear training, harmony, and what felt like literally everything under the sun that relates to piano and music. To this day it still blows my mind just how expansive music can be, it truly is infinite! During college is when my working years began and continue to this day. I have had many jobs in my lifetime and during my college years often had two or three jobs at the same time just to pay for the tuition. I went from working at an ice-cream shop, to working as a mover for a moving campany, to a host at a restaurant, to a server at a restaurant, to a bartender, to a 9-5 career at a high paying insurance company complete with board rooms, suits, and quarterly reports. One important piece of information is that no matter what job I have ever had in my lifetime, I also always taught piano on the side. It was inescapable really. People knew that I could play piano and had taken lessons privately for many years. They knew that I had studied music education in college, and naturally people were always asking me for lessons (and still are), and I have always happily agreed to teach anyone who shows interest. I have actually been a piano teacher ever since the young age of seventeen, and the joy I receive from being part of a student’s growth is incredible.

At the age of twenty-three I got the idea to start working on my first solo piano CD Reflections (released in 2013) because I wanted to be able give a CD to future piano students so that they would always be able to hear me play, and so that they could use the music to decide if they even wanted to take lessons from me in the first place. I also just wanted the challenge to see if I could even do it! I knew that I wanted the album to be about an hour in length, that way if either myself or anyone else was ever bored, had a long drive, or just needed to relax for a bit, they would know that they had an hour of peace with my music. Because of this, it required about 15 songs for me to naturally fill up that hour’s worth of time. Ever since then that number has stuck with me, and all my CDs feature 15 songs on them. Some of my albums are around 50 minutes though so that just means you have room to replay some of your favorite songs! ;) For the next six years I simply kept on living my life normally, working hard, teaching, and staying happy.

Ok so here is the interesting part of this entire story. At this time in my life I am now twenty-nine and decided one day to go back and re-listen to some of my favorite composers and piano pieces that I used to listen to when I was a kid. It had now been well over ten-fifteen years since I had listened to many of these songs again, and it is here that I discovered my light bulb moment. When I was a kid, I would listen to a piano song, and if I wanted to learn that song, I HAD to buy the sheet music because I needed to be told exactly what to play and exactly how to play it. But now, as an adult, I over the years naturally grew to be far more intelligent, confident in music theory, have been surrounded by piano music my whole life, have been both a student and now a teacher of piano, and through all of my education and experience am an infinitely more advanced individual than I ever could have imagined I could be as a kid. (Now to be clear, I am not saying any of this to boast or to brag. This simply comes from a place of excitement as we ALL tend to grow in our lives over time!) The best part is that I did not ever stop to think about how far I had grown up until this point. When I now listen to the same piano song that I used to listen to as a kid, I can literally hear that the composer is playing the song in the key of G. I then think, “well the key of G is made up of these notes, in these scales, with these chords, etc, so the composer will likely go to E minor next.” and alas the composer would go to E minor. Not only that, but now I visualize the piano in my head and in real time hear what notes are be played and see myself playing the exact same notes on the piano. This is someone who as a kid could not ever dream of such formulas to create songs, but now with my knowledge of music theory, my experience, and my trained ear, I finally recognize and understand the “formulas” of a song without even needing to buy the sheet music and be “told” what to do! I can literally hear what to do! (Ok if the song is crazy hard then yes I absolutely still need to buy the sheet music!) However, my epiphany while re-listening to these songs was that I thought to myself, “not only could I play that song, and not only could I compose that song, but maybe, just maybe, I could compose something even better!” It was that day, March 1st, 2020, that the spark to ignite my composer flame was lit, and I have never been happier or more true to fulfilling my purpose in life. I truly hope others enjoy and appreciate my music just as much as I do!

How long did it take you to create your first Album, “Reflections”?

Nine months from start to finish. This also included the time it took for me to build my home studio and gather all equipment necessary to create the CD.

How long does it take you to compose a song?

Some songs only take me an hour from first thought to fully fledged recording. (Oh if only all my songs were like this!) Many songs take me between 1-3 days to create and record, though some can take me several weeks, months, or even years to finish! It all just depends on my inspiration at the time, my mood, the difficulty of the melody/chord structure, and my ability to be creative enough to finish the composition in a way that I am fully satisfied.

What is your first step when composing a new song?

So generally my creative process starts with me taking one hour of my day to just sit down, hit record, and play the piano. I record the entire hour of me “playing”, which is mostly me experimenting with melodies and chord structures. Truth be told, most of this hour is filled with countless mistakes and useless garbage, but that does not stop me from recording the entire session!

I will continue recording practice sessions like this for about a week, until I have roughly 7 hours worth of practice sessions saved. In the following week I will sit down and just listen to my practice sessions. You would be surprised how differently your mind reacts to music when you are playing vs. when you are listening. When you are listening no longer do you have to think about what chords should come next, does this even sound good?…maybe I should go here instead…none of that. When you sit back and listen you get to do exactly that; sit back and listen. What I find when doing this is that 90% of what I played actually was garbage, but the excitement comes from the small 10% of music that naturally catches my attention. It being natural is very important to me as I never want to force anything when it comes to music. As I come across more parts that seem interesting, I will cut those sections out, and place them into a new project along side all other interesting snippets I have collected.

Here is where the magic truly lies. After I have about an hour’s worth of interesting snippets compiled, I will then sit back and listen to just that hour. It is here that I now have a whole host of things that I actually like! If a particular snippet extra catches my attention, I will begin the “expansion” process for that song, basically meaning I will turn that fragment of an idea into a full composition.

What I like so much about this process is that it allows me to always have inspiration to fall back on. Most songs, at least for me, do not start with the perfect idea right away. Since the highly desired golden nuggets (songs that take little to no effort or time to create) are far and few inbetween, with this creative process there is always something to do.

Simply put:

1.) Record practice sessions.

2.) Collect all the interesting segments from the practice sessions.

3.) Turn those segments into full compositions.

Repeat.

How do you know when a song is complete?

Interestingly enough I intentionally balance three key forces. First and foremost I personally need to be satisfied with the way the song sounds and feels. After all, if I didn’t like or love my own music then who would? Secondly, I compose with the listener in mind. Whether or not you play piano I want you to be able to tune in or tune out of my music at any moment. I want the music to be relaxing enough to where you can have it on in the background, yet dynamic, varied, and interesting enough that if you were ever to stop and listen with intent then you would be able to appreciate each and every note of each and every song. Thirdly, I compose with the piano player in mind. I want those who play piano to appreciate the sheet music, the subtle nuances of the songs, the variations in the melodies and chord structures, and I want piano players to know that I intentionally compose songs that are realistic to learn, fun to play, and dynamic enough to where they will be able to recognize the level of respect, love, and care I pour into each composition. The last thing I would ever want is to have listeners feel that I mindlessly piece compositions together, or that all my songs sound exactly like one another! In all honesty, I spend countless hours on my compositions, day and night listening to them, making improvements, recording and re-recording them until I am absolutely 100% satisfied with them. I can’t even tell you how many songs of mine I have trashed because they simply just don’t make the cut or they don’t match the standards I have set for myself. Once I know that I am fully pleased with my composition, and I believe that the listener will fully enjoy it, and that piano players will love playing it, then I know the composition is complete. A tried and true rule I live by is if the song just wouldn’t be the same if it was missing (or added) even a single note then I can rest knowing that the song is complete.

How hard is it for someone to learn your songs?

My songs range from the super easy to the high-intermediate level. I don’t believe that any of my songs are or ever will be in the “impossible” category to learn - not even close. On a scale of 1-10 (1 being the easiest and 10 being the hardest), I range the difficulty of my songs as anywhere from 3-7. I also have tutorials on YouTube!

Do you have sheet music for all your songs?

Yes! I offer sheet music for every single one of my original pieces on my online store, in digital songbooks, and in physical songbooks.

Who are some of your influences?

For various reasons, my favorite influences are Chopin, Jerry Martin, David Lanz, and David Nevue.

How often are you creating music?

If fully inspired I often find myself creating music all day long. Otherwise I try to spend at least an hour or two every day playing piano.

Where do you record your music?

I record all my music in my home studio.

Where can I listen to your music?

Whisperings: Solo Piano Radio, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, Youtube, Deezer, Tidal, and iHeartRadio just to name a few, but really any place that streams music you should be able to find me on there!