Martin Johnson Talks With Alt. Press

The Night Game

Martin Johnson of The Night Game talks with Alt. Press about the upcoming album:

When you’re a kid and you’re posing in the mirror with your first guitar and you’re thinking about being a rock star, you’re really not thinking about maintenance. You’re thinking about glory and telling your story and being honest and your internal torture and what that means and allowing the world to hear that and see that and do something great. And then you end up in this 12 by 12 box with no windows—in the major-label guts creating songs just to pay the mortgage. And it was like, “All right, let me see if I can do something great.” I said no to working on a lot of big projects in 2014 and just said I’m going to quit, or I’m going to make something that I believe in and that I feel is real, and I’m grateful I did it. I found my love for music again, and I found my love for creating and the art of it. I guess the biggest thing for the Night Game was I just detached from the results. I never really detached from results before. My personal validation has always depended on whether or not people like the song. Who I felt like I was as a man really depended [on], “Do you like my work?” And with the Night Game, it was like, “Do I like my work?”