Johnny Williamson finds himself on the other side of ‘Nightmares’

Johnny Williamson had already gone through the process of rebuilding his life once, having become addicted to drugs as a younger man before finding sobriety at age 23.

In the years that followed, Williamson, 42, rediscovered his faith, got married, returned to school, and eventually began a career as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, his daily duties centered on managing medications for people with substance-use disorder. “Wild-ass people are my people,” he said in an early June interview. “And I love it. I love being the same hand that was there for me when I needed it.”

But just when Williamson began to feel settled, he and his now-former wife experienced a series of upheavals both outside of their control (a pair of miscarriages) and born of self-described bad decisions (Williamson had a brief extramarital affair). The aftershocks that followed led the artist and musician to relapse following 18 years of sobriety and culminated in the couple’s divorce 18 months ago. 

“The one thing that I have going for myself is that I’ve done all of this once before when I was 23, and it was a total life reorg, taking many years to get back on my feet, and it not coming easily or quickly,” Williamson said. “And so, I do know that if you walk straight enough long enough, things will improve.”

In the wake of newly bottoming out, Williamson immediately turned to art as a means of coping, connecting with Joey Gurwin of Oranjudio Recording a week removed from treatment to bring life to Nightmares, a gothic soul album filled with darkly melodic earworms that swing between snapshots of these more desperate days – “High as a kite now/Hiding from the light now,” he sings on “Sinners” – and self-flagellating expressions of guilt. Witness “Oh No,” which opens with Williamson chiding himself for his immaturity. “Grow the fuck up, Peter Pan,” he offers.

Around the same time, and not long after he moved into a one-bedroom apartment from the seven-bedroom house he once shared with his wife and children, Williamson took up art – a side effect, he said, of having purchased crayons, markers, and paper for his kids to draw with on the days they stayed with him. “And I got really fixated on drawing, and I just started cranking things out,” said Williamson, whose earliest works consisted of collaged portraits of Columbus musicians that he then passed along as gifts, including a number of those who appeared on Nightmares, such as Brandon “B-Jazz” Scott of the Liquid Crystal Project. “And then I was like, I’ll just keep [drawing] and see where this goes. And the art and the record, it’s all about failure and redemption, and then also these meta-narratives where I’m asking, what does it look like to clean up your mess? And what does it look like to try and make things better when you’ve got blood on your hands?”

Initially, Williamson viewed drawing as a way to get out of his own head, his attention centered on crafting portraits of the people he admired within the Columbus art community. But even the process by which he created these works came to reflect his current state, with Williamson taking the stark marker drawings and then fleshing them out with collaged elements that required him to cut up existing images and then reshape them into something new and hopefully beautiful. “And sometimes things are cheesy or cliche, but there’s still a profound truth in it,” he said. “And it reminds me that I’m still trying to glue everything back together.”

Williamson recorded Nightmares almost two years ago, and he said revisiting it now can feel like watching a disaster movie where you already know the ending but are powerless to stop what is coming. “You’re just like, God, don’t let the plane crash, but you know it’s going to,” said Williamson, who will host a dual art exhibition and album release listening party at Rehab Tavern beginning at 8 p.m. on Friday, June 5. “It’s very much like looking at your life and wishing you had a time machine.”

The first time Williamson rebuilt his life, he relied heavily on religion as an anchoring point. This time around, that hold has become more slippery, his relationship to the church having shifted in the wake of a larger crisis of faith. “My relationship with it is so different, and a central theme of the record and a lot of the art I’ve been doing is wrestling with God,” said Williamson, who described himself as “a crazy atheist” turned devotee turned believer with more questions than answers. “And in trying to get on my feet now, recovery and faith are still the anchors, but … where the first time I was really gung-ho [about religion], now it’s more contentious. And I would argue that’s what faith is, where if you wrestle long enough and honestly enough with these questions, what you get on the other side is something better and deeper, but it’s less clear.”

Growing older has introduced similar concepts, Williamson acknowledging the sense of shock he felt in his early 20s when he realized everyone is just sort of fumbling through life the best way that they can, and that no one really has any idea what they’re doing. “It turns out it’s almost all a joke,” he said. “But there’s freedom in that, too, because you get to take part in the joke and see how you manage.”

This is an idea Williamson is attempting to hold to amid this challenging personal stretch, allowing that he still feels skittish from having lost many of the people closest to him when he bottomed out a couple years back.  “I was radioactive, man. All my Jesus friends dumped me. All my treatment friends dumped me,” said Williamson, who through art and especially music has begun to rediscover the person he believes he is meant to be. “And that’s how I would describe this record. It’s the first thing … I’ve ever made where I’m showing my true colors. It’s like I’m actually doing it instead of mimicking what I think I’m supposed to be doing.”