Communist Daughter's Johnny Solomon Finds Comfort in Sobriety

"Speed of Sound" is the centerpiece of Lions & Lambs, the new EP from Minneapolis band Communist Daughter. For a while, it was also the hardest song for bandleader Johnny Solomon to perform.

The tune originally appeared on Soundtrack to the End, Communist Daughter's 2010 debut. It was a record that sounded like it was about getting sober, and Solomon didn't dispute that interpretation. Except that he wasn't sober.

"I had gotten sober a little bit, but I fell way back into it, and that's when Soundtrack to the End came out," Solomon tells Spinner. "'Speed of Sound,' especially in the lyrics, there was a lot of cry for help in there. I was referencing a lot of drugs I was using, and people thought I sober. It was the most depressing thing I'd written."


Solomon came up on the Twin Cities scene in the early 2000s fronting the power-pop group Friends Like These, before substance abuse felled the band and resulted in jail time for Solomon.

Once he was out, he retreated to a small town in Wisconsin, intending to turn his back on music. Instead, he wrote the rootsy, resigned songs for Soundtrack to the End, met his fiancée and, ultimately, started a new band. But it wasn't as smooth a process as all that.

"I wasn't really writing that album to put it out there," Solomon says. "It was kind of like a eulogy. It was, "Here's a bunch of songs about the end of what I felt I had to write about, and luckily it did get out there, and people connected with it. And then it was like, how do you write after you've said what you needed to say?"

For starters, he cleaned up for real -- "I'm a year and a half sober now," Solomon says -- and started learning how to write and perform without the protective shield of drugs or alcohol.

"That's part of the thing that takes some getting used to," he says. "Sometimes it's easier to hide behind the façade. It's easier to say things without saying it. I had to find a voice that I'm comfortable standing behind now."

Lions & Lambs is in a way an introduction to Communist Daughter. It's a six-song sampler for the uninitiated, featuring songs Solomon wrote before getting sober and after, bookended by tunes that embody the experience: Closer "Don't Remember Me" is a wrenching piece of self-negation, while the brooding rocker "Ghosts" opens the EP with gorgeous vocal harmonies on lyrics that convey a sense of starting over.

Solomon thinks of the EP as a bridge between the elegiac tone of Soundtrack to the End and the more forward-looking self-discovery Solomon has planned for the band's next LP.

"I think still like an album-making artist: I want a cohesive album," he says "The EP is like, you've got six songs to make the transition from here to here. The missing piece is what we're doing now."