Johnny Jewel has functioned as a solo performer, producer, and composer while participating in acts such as Chromatics and Glass Candy and establishing the Italians Do It Better imprint, thereby influencing the visual and sonic character of music and cinema across the 2000s and 2010s. By drawing on the evocative resonance of analog synthesizers from earlier decades and pairing those sounds with distinctive imagery, he created an approach whose traces appear in the work of artists including Chvrches, in motion pictures such as Drive, and across his own releases and scores. Chromatics’ 2012 album Kill for Love received broad acclaim for its enveloping atmosphere, and his original compositions for the 2016 film Home together with the third season of Twin Peaks in 2017 confirmed his standing as a composer.
Born John Padgett, he spent his formative years in Houston, Texas, where he stood out as an inventive outsider drawn to the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth while producing provocative visual work during high school. Upon finishing his studies he relocated to Austin, adopted the name John David V, and began creating both pop material and electronic noise pieces shaped by figures ranging from Karlheinz Stockhausen to the Dead C.
During the middle of the 1990s he settled in Portland, Oregon, recording under the name Johnny Jewel; there he encountered Ida No, his eventual Glass Candy collaborator, while employed at a grocery store. The pair formed Glass Candy in 1996 and gradually shifted the group’s sound from abrasive post-glam rock toward crisp disco across the 1999 single “Brittle Women,” the 2003 debut album Love Love Love, and the 2007 follow-up B/E/A/T/B/O/X. In 2005 he joined Chromatics, the project Adam Miller had initiated after witnessing a Glass Candy performance in 1999; the lineup stabilized around Miller, Jewel, Ruth Radelet, and Nat Walker, the last of whom joined Jewel in forming Symmetry and Desire.
Jewel launched Italians Do It Better in 2006 as an electronic subsidiary of DJ Mike Simonetti’s Troubleman Unlimited Records. The label’s first release, the 2007 compilation After Dark, presented tracks by Jewel’s own groups alongside kindred artists such as Farah and Indeep; that collection, together with B/E/A/T/B/O/X and Chromatics’ Night Drive, crystallized his artistic outlook.
The film and television industries soon took interest: Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, an early admirer, placed Glass Candy’s “Digital Versicolor” in the 2008 feature Bronson. Although Refn initially commissioned Jewel to score the 2011 film Drive, Cliff Martinez ultimately composed the music; nevertheless, Desire’s “Under Your Spell” and Chromatics’ “Tick of the Clock” appeared on the soundtrack, while Symmetry expanded Jewel’s material into the 2011 release Themes for an Imaginary Film. After Chromatics issued the widely praised 2012 album Kill for Love and the 2013 compilation After Dark, Vol. 2, Drive actor Ryan Gosling invited Jewel to compose the score for his directorial debut Lost River in 2014. That same year Symmetry’s “The Hunt” served as the theme for A&E’s crime series Those Who Kill, and Jewel concluded the year with the thirty-one-minute track “The Other Side of Midnight.” Two years later his score for the Belgian film Home received the Georges Delerue Award.
Windswept, a 2017 anthology containing pieces by Chromatics, Glass Candy, Symmetry, and Desire along with solo recordings and selections featured in the third season of Twin Peaks, appeared that year. He followed with Digital Rain in early 2018, an extended suite reflecting his enduring fascination with rain and snow, and later that May issued Themes for Television, a set that incorporated previously unreleased music originally written for Twin Peaks.
