Silvis opens up with ‘A Tendency to Seek Distraction’

On the new Silvis album, A Tendency to Seek Distraction, singer/guitarist Luke Johnson repeatedly addresses his words toward an unnamed “you.” On first blush, this can make the 10-song LP play like a breakup record, but according to the musician, the majority of these lines actually reflect a larger internal dialogue in which he has more recently engaged.

“I was in the process of figuring out my purpose, asking, ‘What do I want my life to be? What do I want to do here?’” said Luke Johnson, who will join his bassist brother, Matt Johnson, and drummer Nick Allen for a record release show at Rambling House on Friday, May 2. “My brother had kids recently, and I got married a couple years ago. And I feel like just a lot of things have been going on – graduating college, getting a job, starting a relationship, and getting married. And now that all of that has happened, where I had all of these life experiences in rapid succession, it feels like I’m finally slowing down to the point where I can think more introspectively about things.”

As depicted on the band’s new album, it’s not always an easy journey. On shimmying opener “Do I Need It?” the frontman sings about being dragged beneath the tide. One song later, he finds himself engulfed in flames (“I’m on Fire”). Gradually, though, Johnson and Co. find their footing, the back half of the record populated by more explicit love songs (“Hear You Speak”) and comparatively settled confessionals in which the singer begins to uncover a greater purpose (“Who I Am”).

“The way the album started out, for me at least, was with a lot of hard conversations with myself. … With ‘I’m on Fire,’ it’s recognizing when you’re so swept up in a moment that you’re kind of losing sight of everything else going on,” said Luke Johnson. “Then with Side B, I’m finding that better sense of understanding … so the tone is lighter and there’s a more upbeat feel. … When I wrote ‘Hear You Speak,’ I definitely had my wife in mind, but I was also zooming the scope out a little bit, where it’s about being grateful, I guess, and understanding what you have and learning to celebrate it and appreciate it and nurture it.”

In the earliest days of Silvis, Luke Johnson said he considered the audience more heavily in the writing process, sometimes asking himself what other people might find interesting in a song. Stepping into A Tendency to Seek Distraction, however, he abandoned this approach, more intent on exploring his inner world than in those concerns that might exist in orbit around him. 

“And when I sat down to write the lyrics, it definitely became more like a journal to me, where I was exploring my own thoughts,” he said. “And it was interesting, because the lyrics were definitely coming to me more quickly. And it was less about what do other people want this song to be about and more along the lines of what does this song want to be about.”

Growing up in Fayetteville, a small, rural village 40 miles west of Cincinnati, Luke Johnson said he often felt out of place, initially finding in music a space of connection and escape in which he existed as less of an outcast. “And it disconnected me from any guardrails, where I could do my own thing and explore my own self,” he said. “I feel like a lot of the things I do in life are guided by the norms. I’m going to school, and now I’m going to college, and now I’m getting a job. … But every time I would come to music, it was a place where I could just be myself, and where I could be vulnerable and explore whatever I wanted to explore.”

It didn’t always come naturally, with the musician describing his younger self as “tone deaf to the point I could not even sing.” Shortly after he started playing guitar at age 13, he said he locked himself in his bedroom for a week, intent on overcoming this hurdle. “I knew I could only go so far just writing things on guitar, so I would sit there, play a note on the guitar, and then hum it up and down until I felt that sensation of being on pitch, and then I kept going until I got to a point where I felt I could actually sing on pitch,” he said. “And everything else blossomed from that.”

At age 15, he formed his first pop-punk band alongside his brother, Matt, though the two didn’t begin to take the music more seriously until they formed Silvis in 2016, not long after Matt returned to Ohio following a stint living in Chicago. The majority of these early years were spent homing in on “what the Silvis sound is,” Luke Johnson said, with a particular turning point arriving in 2024.

“In March or April of last year, we did a writing retreat where we really discussed what we wanted to do with the sound, and what we thought we could pull off,” said Luke Johnson, who framed these conversations as an extension of a larger internal shift that had taken place. “In the beginning when I was writing, it was more about creating songs that might catch someone’s attention or that people might enjoy hearing and less of just trying to be an artist, for lack of a better way to put it. And with this album, we just wanted to create something we loved, and that was true to ourselves. And I think that’s really what opened things up for us.”