The Painter

The Painter: to Italy with love

A little update:

It's April 2025. Life under the oaks these days is still and quiet in the tower. Spring flowers are everywhere in the gardens. The bees have been buzzing around, investigating the colors outside, and Ki Ki and I have let the weeds grow a while—just because we like it. A few wild, surprise sunflowers are miraculously finding their way up in the middle of the chaos. Such is life. The tall grasses are easy to hide under.

So many little things are in process, but it’s not like the daily lightning strikes of “social media”—it’s more like a rolling fog and silent work. The glory of the daily news buzz can leave me defeated and just tired from it all. The click and clack of my keyboard commands echoing off the tower walls these spring nights are music to my ears—same as the flickering lights of computer screens.

Although, it all just seems so inglorious compared to the magical daily “Insta” feed from the world we live in. Shark attacks and incredible feats. “Most People” blogs and relentless, inspirational ten-second quotes leave my nervous system in a frayed and exhausted state of being. Drug overdose.

Some days, I just smile and remind myself it’s okay not to feel the need to compete with it all. That seems like a losing battle, and it was never what inspired me to make a Breakers record in the first place. I suppose it’s nice to laugh now and then.

Thought I would share the last interview I did with Rock Hard Italia. Wardruna took that cover, which was very ironic, as I’ve been listening to them a lot lately. I love Wardruna. They’ve become mine and Ki Ki’s favorite new sounds in the garden here under the oaks.

I’ve added some of the extended version of my interview below, but soon it will show up on the new Interviews page with some extra stuff as well. It was the first interview that Mr. Evermore actually answered, and he certainly has a way with words. I actually enjoyed reading it myself.

Please buy the magazine here and support magazines and long-form media while you still can—it’s a beautiful thing. All my love to Stefano Paparesta and Rock Hard for all the support they’ve shown me during this first record. Hail to printed media.

In preparation for releasing the new LITR music video, there were so many things behind the scenes I wanted to tidy up before setting it free from my tower. I’ve been doing that most days and nights here this April. That includes the first major update to the Hadder website, which will go live when the video drops.

I learned a lot on this video—not only techniques I want to apply to Hadder in the future, but other things as well. Each thing we do in life can reveal so much later, if you're aware and want to learn. Failures especially can be ever so revealing.

I’ve slowly been trying to separate myself from Mr. Evermore, and that process has been part of the Breakers record from day one. I don’t know why Diamonds Hadder is what it is—or was what it was—but I do know there was no other way it could’ve happened for me.

I so want to create new music, but there are just a few things left to close out before Breakers II really consumes me.

I wrote a song yesterday morning called “The Painter,” a beautiful tale about a man who drew himself into a prison-like labyrinth and had to paint himself out into a magical world. It made me cry as I was driving through the fog, heading into Hollywood.

This is the start of things for Breakers II. These are the moments and memories I’ll recall later when the next record starts to drift away from me. Maybe those tears will be on that record, or maybe they won’t—it’s too early to tell what that painting will look like. But I know it will be another honest record.

Thanks for all the support, friends.

Time is a ladder.

—J

And so, without further ado, I present a portion of the extended dialogue between Mr. Evermore and Stefano Paparesta.

How did Diamonds Hadder take form and when did you start collecting ideas for the album?

Good day, my lords... Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Mr. Evermore.

I see that Johnny has had a few interviews in Rock Hard magazine, rambling about his “Breakers” record, and I thought it would be good to intervene on this one and give your readers another side of Diamonds Hadder—considering that I truly am the reason Diamonds Hadder and Beyond the Breakers even exist in the first place.

Diamonds Hadder was a word I carved into some tree roots that Johnny was sleeping on. He had been sleeping a while... too long, really. He’ll say he was under a spell of sorts—and perhaps that’s true—but aren’t we all? Here in BOK, the words Diamonds Hadder are very well known, and I thought those words just might send Johnny on a mission to uncover their meaning when he awoke.

I was right.

John, what does Beyond the Breakers mean for you, emotionally speaking, since it is your debut album?

Well, Johnny would say: it means everything. After all, he spent a lot of time crawling out from the hole he dug to avoid the fires in his life. He poured everything into that record. I know, because I watched.

I watched him decades ago in all the projects he was involved in. I watched him back then waking at 4 in the morning, lying on his back, doing all those stupid vocal exercises. Juicing apples and fiddling with that primitive VFX gear he invested in.

Sometimes Johnny can be overemotional about his work. I will say, it was nice to see him hold the vinyl in his hands the other night for the first time. As a fly on the wall, without him knowing, it’s obvious to me from his reaction that there is a great sense of accomplishment he feels. But at the same time, there was some collateral damage in his life during the process.

So, it’s a bittersweet kind of joy, I’m sure. He would say, It’s OK—that’s life... But I know he misses his home and the things that he lost during the making of this record. We don’t get them back, unfortunately. They just exist out there now, beyond the breakers.

“The Ballad of Dead Rabbit” opens the album with a gloomy, dark grandeur and a sense of imminent tragedy. What can you tell me about this song?

Well, I first came to Johnny when he was working on that song. It was a jumbled mess of sorts at that time... he knew nothing about the fires yet when he started it. He was confused about his life. I had seen him do so many things with such enthusiasm and effort over the years, yet he certainly felt his life was a failure of sorts.

Johnny was an interesting fellow. He had put himself in the path of the tornado so many times, and things almost worked out, but his dreams always eluded him.

One might look at this poor soul atop his mountain overlooking the Pacific and say, This man must have done something right to accomplish this. But material things mean nothing in this world when you're living with a broken heart. It’s not that Johnny was ungrateful—he just felt he was living an unfulfilled life.

I sent him a few messages from BOK... maybe I sent a wolf too, as a warning. I have my hands in a lot of things. But it was time for Johnny to wake up.

I watched the fire come and go, and I saw a man transformed from the ashes of his life. Johnny latched onto a rabbit from his time in the canyons. He had lots of wildlife in his yard then—I can’t take credit for that. He says the wolf called him that name. Again, these are things he imagined or heard... or who knows.

What I will say is this: that song lingered in him for a long time. It was the first song he started and the last song he finished for the Breakers record. It was very important to him, and I think that’s why he chose to start the record with it. It’s the ballad of his life, really—and the story of why the Breakers record exists.

If you had to pick three adjectives to describe Beyond the Breakers, what would they be and why?

Johnny might have other words to say, but from my perspective, I’ll say:

Human – Because Beyond the Breakers is the story of all people who dream. It’s about our loves and our losses, our weaknesses and our desires, our triumphs and our failures. It’s a human record. Even though I transcend time here in BOK, I can still recognize a human story when I see one.

Hopeful – Because without hope, this record wouldn’t exist. Johnny has a way of being optimistic about the future. His words at first glance might appear dark and somber, but there’s always a little silver lining in his poetry. I’ve watched him sitting by the Pacific with his iPhone app and paper and pencil, staring past the breakers with a crooked smile—never happy enough until that final word, like a puzzle piece, shifts the entire meaning of a phrase or picture for the better. He believes in the echoes of his life out there. That thought gave him hope. That’s why he didn’t stop or listen to other people while he was making it. I like that about him. It’s the reason I came to him in that dream so long ago. Hope is power. Let’s face it, there’s a time for compromises in life—and a time to know when not to compromise. It takes a broken man to know the latter.

Tragic – You might think that’s a negative word. But in fact, it describes this record perfectly. I’ve had the pleasure of watching the rains, and the fires, and the tears—and I can say this record took a lifetime to make. It wasn’t manufactured for this reason or that reason. It was just one person’s overwhelming will to create without compromise in the face of great loss, grief, and tragedy. The Breakers record was born from sorrow, but it stands defiantly against the forces that aimed to destroy it.

What is the link between the artwork and the music on the album?

I’ve given Johnny a lot to think about. I’ve shown him flashes and images of a place I call BOK. I’m sure he’s a bit confused with it all. You see, Johnny is supposed to write the story of Diamonds Hadder—not just make a record called Beyond the Breakers.

I remember when he was in art school, flipping through his fantasy art books... trying to draw. Pillows and models, oh my.

There are some things about Johnny I can say he’s really good at—but drawing was never his forte. Too bad. He really tried there for a few years, while he was singing in his first metal band. Community college during the day with his giant, leather-bound art portfolio (which, by the way, had a black-and-white photograph of Ronnie James Dio pasted to the leather), then off to his rehearsal room in the city where he lived for a while—and that long road of learning to sing.

Between me and you... I think if he knew how bad of a singer he was at that time, he probably would’ve quit that too. Who knows.

I didn’t approach him then, as he had a lot of things to figure out before I could even dare think of waking him up.

Let’s just say this: Johnny cares a lot about art. He’s always been focused on light and dark. He became an outdoor photographer—I’m guessing because he couldn’t draw, and maybe even because he couldn’t sing well enough yet.

The art for the Breakers record is his attempt to bring the songs to life, to share what he sees internally about the songs he wrote. That is the link.

(To be continued)

Look for the rest of this extended conversation on the interviews page in the coming weeks.

LITW: My dear june gloom

John Evermore on the 3rd day.

A quick note regarding this image: Shortly after I put Breakers in a bottle and set it adrift in the digital sea, I began scheming the LITR music video. Although I had reached the top of the first plateau, so to speak, there was another mountain in the distance—one I was already heading toward. There was no vinyl, no hurry—only a flood of ideas and a bucket to catch them.

It started with several film shoots, one of which was a three-day guitar trip into the Sierras—a windy journey, for sure. I stayed in a hotel with a window facing the Sierra, and the Three Amigos kept me company during my midday naps. Each morning and night, I carried my gear up the mountain—this included a few guitars, a DJI camera gimbal setup, an R5, a drone, an iPad monitoring system, and, of course, a playback system and wardrobe. I filmed at sunrise and sunset.

In full costume, I do believe I startled a few friendly hikers who stumbled upon a strange man with a long black and red cape and diamond eyes as they came over the ridge. Oh well—all’s fair in love and war.

On the third day of creation, I rested... and snapped this picture.

It's almost midnight—how about a little update?

It pains me tonight to leave the Canyon of the Wolf. But someone said something to me today, and it awoke a flood of words and emotions. Yes, I’ve actually been hard at work on Hadder things, even though the forest seems quiet and still. Such is life for the alchemist of creation—the red recluse that I am.

Today, someone said to me, “Long is the wait.” And I suppose those were the words I needed to take off my blinders. It broke my hyper-focused attention.

From those words came a flood of deep thoughts—just what I needed, actually, as I was cooking frog legs for some spring soup. I need to jump further, indeed.

Welcome back, Mr. Hadder.

A little story. I was in manufacturing for a long time, trading my life away for money to keep me off the streets. I traveled to the mountains every chance I could—the High Sierra—to chase the light with my camera. I carried a Ka-Bar knife and some bear spray most of the time because I saw a mountain lion once or twice while traveling in the twilight hours. I think I just felt safer knowing I’d put up a fight if I had to, to keep myself from being eaten. Luckily, it never came to that. I upgraded to a .42 caliber later in life when Mr. Hadder started showing up in my loft.

I had a fascination with the stars at night and time-lapse photography during my travels, so I built my own camera remote slider—literally. It took about three months to machine it on a CNC, including the rails, which I cut in Delrin (a small blunder, as temperatures below freezing caused the rails to shrink, which resulted in jittery camera footage in the cold and barren White Mountain landscape). I also wired it to turn on and off automatically in the mountains while I stayed safe in my car from nightly predators. But that’s me—I’m a dreamer.

The opening sequence to the LITR music video is a time-lapse of the mountain above my home that burned—the place where I wrote Breakers. I shot it with my slider just before sunrise, a few months before the fire, during the June gloom months along the Pacific.

The second clip is a scene of the actual view just beyond the breakers along the Pacific—where I spent a lot of quiet time wondering where it all went so wrong. Many words came from that horizon—literally.

It took over two years to record the Breakers record. Two years with blinders on. And when I decided to make a video for Long Is the Road, well, there was still a lot of unfinished business in my life. I never truly completed Breakers. It’s still ongoing. The music videos I’m working on are an extension of it.

Here I am again, with blinders on.

It’s been difficult not revealing too much of what happens in the video—my little ten-minute Avatar movie. Dedicated to someone special—the kind of person who left a mark on me and on hundreds, thousands of others. That’s what this video is all about, after all. Following the light out there, finding yourself—beyond the breakers. It’s about the people and things that inspire us to rise again.

In case you haven’t noticed, Beyond the Breakers is more than just a record filled with songs… and so is this upcoming video. For me, it’s a perfect extension of the record—complete with new musical scores and choirs created just for the video, tracked along my route into Hollywood each day, out of the canyons and under the oaks. And so The Ballad of the Dead Rabbit will be another closing chapter.

To some degree, my detachment from the outside world is a key element of the art I create. Isolation can be a wonderful tool—it can also kill you, by the way.

“Long is the wait,” perhaps. But what is time, really? Are you happy with who you are and what you’re doing? What will decorate your gravestone when you’re gone? Was it worth it? Did it make all your friends happy, or is it deeper than that? Is it personal? Is the story over, or is there another chapter—something ongoing that no one else knows about? Will anyone care… and does that even matter to you?

Okay, okay, I’m coming already—I hear you.

Stay the course, friends.

I wish so many good things for you. When you’re all alone, wondering if anyone cares—yes, I do.

I’ll meet you in the middle, friend. Someday.

Rise and shine.

Find your breakers and f%&k the haters.

—J

P.S. If you’re interested in some stories about Breakers, a few new interviews are up—"The Why" and "More than Gold", feel free to check them out. Thanks to my dear friends across the pond, Lord Yiannis Dolas at Rockpages.gr and Sir Michael Kohsiek at Deaf Forever for asking questions and giving me an early platform to speak on this adventure. I’ll be posting some more interviews soon, including a special one with Mr. Evermore himself, who hijacked one of my interviews with the Italian Rock Hard magazine. And lastly, I’ll be doing an exclusive interview with Jorn Reese at Zephyrs Odem, discussing the LITR video in detail soon after its release.

Thanks, Jorn.

Video info: A few visuals from the soon to be released "Long is the Road" music video.

Key of A

Me and some friends of mine.

 Good day, it’s February. Yesterday, I watched Punxsutawney Phil predict another six weeks of winter, but that didn’t stop the sound of frogs in my yard last night. I heard the first few ribbits of spring off in the distance, and the sun finally lifted over a ridge of oaks that have kept me in the shadows all winter. A lot has happened here in LA to start the year, so let me catch you up on some Hadder things.

Home Again:

First, I am safe. Thank you all for the kind emails during the recent LA wildfires. I was certain I was driving away from my place for the last time on that fateful Tuesday when the Palisades fire started with 100 mph wind gusts. I was in Hollywood when the fire was first reported, and the Palisades are directly behind my home, northwest of the Topanga State Forest that I call my backyard.

It took a while to reach my place that day, and as I raced down Topanga Canyon Blvd, I could see the huge, towering plumes of smoke growing larger as I approached. It was an eerie feeling. I frantically packed my car, not knowing if each trip back inside might be my last before I saw fire or smoke coming down through the forest into my yard. I made a mess of things, tearing apart my recording studio in a quick and chaotic fashion. When I was done, all that remained were wires and some gear I had to make the tough choice to leave behind. The LITR music video hard drives, of course, came with me, as well as all the Breakers master drives. I drove away, looking back at my little place under the oaks, thinking it might be for the last time—my first return to the canyons since the Woolsey fire took my other home.

The first night was the worst, as the 100 mph winds prevented fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters from fighting the fire. I slept in the valley at a friend’s house, occasionally thinking about my place and wondering if it would survive the night. I followed local news reports and community websites where locals documented the battle to save Topanga over the coming weeks. Hadder slowly left my mind as more pressing concerns took over.

A few days later, I realized my little town was essentially being saved on a daily basis as the fire slowly crept toward my community. This went on for about a week, and it became clear that there were two reasons I still have a home today. First, the wind on that first Tuesday was blowing in a southwesterly direction—lucky for me, but not so lucky for so many others, including some neighbors whose homes were directly in the fire’s path. Second, the firefighters who literally stopped the fire as it inched its way eastward toward my backyard and the Topanga community. The destruction it left behind is unbelievable.

My heart breaks for my neighbors who, unlike me, wake up each day wondering what to do next. I want to give them a hug and tell them it’s all right, that they’ll rebuild, and that someday they’ll move past this—but I know from experience that the grief for the home you lost, and more importantly, the memories tied to it, leaves a hole that never truly fills, even in better days or new places. I just feel for them all.

I thought it would be good to share this update, for myself as well, as it brought back a lot of old feelings and memories.

Breakers II

For the last week or so, I’ve just been grateful to be back home. I set up the studio again, plugged all the wires back into their little magic music boxes, and everything fired up. That was a relief—you never know.

The LITR music video is sitting a little idle while I’ve been having fun writing music again. I forget sometimes, because I’m forced to handle so many other aspects of Hadder, that really—I just love writing music, singing, and creating songs. It feels good to be fully immersed in recording new ideas. I know something special is meant to come from my time here under the oaks, and I’m starting to see what these twisted twigs have to say.

I tend to absorb myself in a song. I focus on chords, keys, and musical patterns, becoming hyper-focused until it’s complete. Right now, I’m in Out of the Black mode. Key of A. I usually work on one song at a time until it’s done—there’s just too much involved between drum patterns, vocal lines, choirs, keys, bass lines, and guitar rhythms and solos to tackle multiple songs at once.

When I’m tracking, I keep all my instruments wired and ready to record. I juggle bass and guitar parts, switching between them quickly as I build the arrangements. I’m not attached to predetermined guitar riffs; the mix of all the song’s elements creates the music I ultimately decide on. Being able to track and tweak everything on the fly is important to my process. At times, it makes me feel like a mad scientist, but when things start flowing, I can track quickly. Like the final brushstrokes on a painting, vocal takes are usually the last piece of the puzzle.

Interviews

During my evacuation, some of the Beyond the Breakers reviews and interviews I’d done over the past few months started appearing online, so I decided to consolidate them all on the Diamonds Hadder website.

So far, I’ve done about eight interviews—both online and in magazines—since Breakers was released, with a few still waiting to be published. I’ll try to post them all. I enjoy revisiting the story of Beyond the Breakers myself, and in a way, these interviews have become part of the record.

The first one I’ve added to this new “Interviews” page was done with Francesco Metelli over at www.metal.it. In this interview, we talk about Eastern culture artwork, the meaning behind Beyond the Breakers, influences, the Evermore writing phase, lyrical themes, and musical fashions, among other topics. Thanks to Francesco for the thoughtful questions.

I also added a new photo I took in the tower just before the LA fires, featuring me and some friends. I may alter the graphics a bit as I upload more interviews—we’ll see what I come up with. I’m a creature of print way more than I am of online formats, so I plan on having some visual fun with these interviews, maybe adding some new graphics here and there.

That’s all for now. I’m walking around in the key of A, out of the black once again… grateful for my second chance here under the oaks.

Long is the road, my friends. Be grateful for every day.

Soon, a new video will appear where there wasn’t one before.

For now… it’s Breakers II and the march of the spring frogs.

“Time is a ladder.” Be glorious, my friends.

—J