Daniel Johnston: Hi, How Are You - The Unfinished Album [ETERNAL YIP EYE]

Why you'll love it

This remastered limited edition comes from the Johnston family's own label and adds two unlisted outtakes, with locked grooves at the end of side B. It's the album whose frog-covered T-shirt Kurt Cobain wore in 1992, sending Johnston's name around the world.

This edition

• Remastered
• Limited edition
• Two unlisted bonus tracks
• Locked grooves

About the album

In September 1983 Daniel Johnston moved in with his sister Margie in San Marcos, Texas, slept on a mattress on the floor, delivered pizzas and made a cassette. The subtitle explains itself: he meant to fill an hour of tape, as he usually did, and stopped short. It became the most famous home recording of its kind.

It's one of his most varied tapes, mixing piano and chord-organ songs with tape and noise collage and some tentative strumming on a toy guitar or ukulele. "Walking the Cow" is achingly sweet, "Big Business Monkey" later turned up in Richard Linklater's Slacker, and "Desperate Man Blues" borrows its backing from a Johnny Dankworth record Johnston owned. The cover frog, Jeremiah the Frog of Innosense, came from an old rubber stamp box he found while working at AstroWorld.

Homestead put it on vinyl in 1988, his first album on LP, and a mural of the cover still greets people in Austin. He promoted the original by handing copies to people he met, a marketing plan we've considered for the shop and abandoned on the advice of our accountant.

Also at Kops: more Daniel Johnston on vinyl · browse Singer-Songwriter

Tracklist

Listen

On Eternal Yip Eye Music (cat# EYE-308 CE), a reissue of the 1983 album.