Balancing Curiosity and Acceptance with Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson is a musician and scholar based in Chicago.

Golden Egg: Do you think about getting older, and what you'd like your life to look like?

Whitney Johnson: Indeed, I think all the time about getting older. This mortal coil and our youth-fetish culture wouldn't have it any other way! Ha ha. When I imagine my older life, I see it as an every-more-peaceful variation on the present. Making music as a member of a community, moving increasingly slowly, observing more precisely and without judgment. Being deeply in love. Balancing curiosity with acceptance of the unknown, and finding as much adventure as my body can handle on any given day.

GE: Do you want to retire, or keep playing music for your whole life, or some combination of both?

WJ: I want to keep playing music for my whole life. 

GE: Have you planned (financially or otherwise) for retirement or ageing?

WJ: Through my 20s, I had a premonition that I wouldn't live past the age of 30. More precisely, I couldn't envision my life after 3o, not at all, so I believed I wouldn't exist after that birthday. As you might guess, I didn't make any decisions oriented toward the future! When I dodged the anvil falling out of the sky on my birthday, I slowly adjusted to the realization that I would likely become an old woman one day. It took about another decade to envision that possibility. And here I am with almost no financial or other planning for my later years, but I'm starting. Better late than never?

GE: Is/are there musician(s) who's lifestyle you'd like to emulate as you age (these artists can be younger, older, or the same age as you)

WJ: My mind goes first to Don and Moki Cherry, maintaining the nomadic tour-life-style in its many variations, what Moki called "improvising on stage and in living." With a mothership like the schoolhouse in Tågarp as the source, some younger-generation family figures like Neneh and Eagle-Eye in the orbit, and a material reality to anchor the caravan's navigation.  

GE: Who are some of your favorite artists over 65, or a favorite album of theirs?

WJ: Éliane Radigue's Trilogie de la Mort comes to mind, made as she was moving toward that 65-year-old threshold with its intention fixed on the space between this life and the next. But now the Occam Ocean! All these works of transmission and communication of her mastery over sound, allowing masters of their own instruments to integrate her approach to composition into their own. She's not only making music but making musicians, and the ocean is vast.