Jay-Jay Johanson
"Backstage is usually an area where no one is allowed to come in, except me" ... Jay-Jay Johanson said that about the record this song names, and then said what he wanted to do with the rule ... break it ... "I wanted to invite the listener to my private room, my private area" ...
He is Swedish, and has been making records since the 1990s that sit somewhere between a jazz club and a trip-hop basement, always with that hushed voice that seems to be singing to one person ... This is his fifteenth album ... It came out in May 2025 ... He recorded it in Stockholm in the winter of 2024, then sent it to Paris to be mastered by Alex Gopher ... Winter in Stockholm is a long dark thing, and the record sounds like it was made indoors, with the lamps on ...
The title song is the invitation itself ... the corridor behind the curtain, the small room with the mirror and the coat on the hook, the singer sitting there before or after, when nobody is watching ... He said he made the record to be listened to in a calm, quiet place, letting every note sink in ... "almost like I'm singing these songs especially for you, only you" ...
The measure of it is where it was made and where it was finished ... a winter in Stockholm and a mastering room in Paris ... The same record holds his first song entirely in French, for Rimbaud, and a Henry Mancini tune he has loved for years ... so the private room, it turns out, has a French poet and a film composer sitting in it too ...