There was a time when you couldn’t find a big surf flick without at least one new Jack Johnson track over somebody’s section. It didn’t hurt that he was close with the entire Momentum generation and his sound accompanied any and every Taylor Steele film for a period. And as Johnson explain it himself, some of his familiar songs were in fact, inspired while traveling the world with that crew and surfing all day long. Johnson shared stories about two songs in particular that were more or less born on trips: F-Stop Blues and Rodeo Clowns.
“I never think they’re gonna be real songs. But it’s like, when we start, it’s like everything I’ve seen in the daytime — I just come on the boat later at night and I start playing around,” Johnson says about F-Stop Blues. “And like 90 percent of the songs never end up being a real song. But then some of them, they’re catchy enough and they’ll make it on an album.”
Rodeo Clowns, which came out on Jack’s 2001 album On and On, was put together in different parts of the world. Each destination contributed another piece of the song until he had another catchy tune that found itself on an album.
