Piano rock troubadour
Hailing from Montreal, Canada, Johnny Coull is a rock troubadour from another era. Wielding a virtuoso style on the piano and a poignant narrative voice, Coull brings to life stories of joy and heartbreak, set to a wild vintage sound. His third full-length album Hagiographies and Hit Pieces was released on July 31st, 2023.
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Praise for his last album, That Cold Year:
““Coull packs his second full-length album with great big piano rock, each song brimming over with power and words.” - Bob Mersereau, Canadian Top 100
”Completely encompassed by the exquisite vocals and intricacy of the album, That Cold Year will surely entice and excite listeners.” - Canadian Beats
”Coull spouts out vivid lines of lyrics as fast as he tickles the ivory, wrapping the listener up in a storm of melody and verse.” - Huffington Post”
Coull’s debut album City on the Hill was released in 2014 in the wake of a massively successful crowdfunding campaign and was quickly followed by a cross-Canada tour and a subsequent 2015 EP, Songs to Control the Weather By. In 2016, Coull received a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) to fund the composition and arrangement of a new full-length project. That Cold Year was recorded in Montreal later that year, with production headed up by renowned Canadian producer Terry Brown (Rush, Blue Rodeo). The album went on to receive widespread acclaim in Canadian and international publications.
After extensive touring in Canada and the US in 2018-19, Coull was the recipient of a FACTOR Artist Development grant and was awarded official showcases at Folk Alliance Region Midwest, the East Coast Music Conference, and Indie Week Canada, among others.
Coull’s lyrics probe the dark places in life: the loss of our innocence, the instability of our desires, and the frantic desperation that draws us on in a life that only sometimes delivers what it promises. He has been described as “a singer-songwriter and a first-rate storyteller with a sound somewhere between Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel […]” (Divide and Conquer Music), and in live performance has been lauded as “a veteran pianist, […] skilled at showing off his virtuosity and his voice.” (Boucle Magazine)
In 2021, after receiving funding from CALQ and the Canada Council of the Arts, Coull began work on a new concept album. Set for release in 2023, Hagiographies and Hit Pieces comprises a series of musical vignettes that explore the lives of a group of strange characters: a young idealist on his small-town soapbox slowly transforms into a power-hungry tyrant; a woman living on the French border during WWII discovers that liberation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; a man wanders around the afterlife yearning for the life and love that he left behind. These stories and others are a window into Coull’s unique vision of the world, and they’re told with his characteristic poignancy and wry humor, amid lush and complex musical arrangements that seamlessly merge his folk, blues, and classical influences.