I was with Johnny Pacia the night he made the decision not to return to grad school and to pursue a career in music. We were driving down Park Avenue, on our way to a West Village open mic where we’d been performing off and on for several months. Johnny played songs. I did standup. Often we drove together, and in the car talked at length about our respective arts. Through these chats I got a close-up view of Johnny’s songwriting ethic. He wanted his songs to hold the audience’s attention, and he evaluated performances on how closely he thought the room was listening to what he sang. He wanted his lyrics to be perfect, and he frequently appealed to me for advice (I penned a lot of poems in college, some of which Johnny read, and one of which he took apart and built into a much better song). He thought a lot about what kind of energy a song had and what feelings it evoked, and when he started planning a new tune, he usually described it in terms of what experience it needed to capture—a breakup, a death, a friendship, a ballgame. That night, though, he focused on something bigger: not on his songs but on his career. We were both less than a year out of our philosophy majors, and we were only beginning to figure things out. We drifted into a familiar theme. Big ideas are great, but if you publish them in an academic journal, how many people will hear them? (We never did perform the follow-up research on this question. It always seemed safe to assume that everyone listened to music, including academics, whereas no one read academic journals, including academics.) We talked, then contemplated, then talked some more. We followed the curve in the avenue and rode up onto the elevated drive around Grand Central, passing the place where Will Smith flails at sunset, as mutants gather, in I Am Legend. Johnny kept mulling things over, and we began to repeat ourselves, adding volume. It wasn’t until much later that I learned what I was witnessing: the moment when Johnny decided to break with his study of philosophy and to throw himself full tilt into becoming a musician. PERIQUE took shape in the five or so months since that decision, but it represents the culmination of a youth devoted, in one fashion or another, to music. If you give it a close listen, one of the first things that becomes evident is how broadly Johnny conceives of music as a touchstone of life’s varied experiences. The record traverses young lust and adolescent searching, aging idols and familial disappointments, the joy of love enduring and the pain of its coming to an end. And Johnny’s melodic senses are acute. He’s not just sensitive to these moments as they actually occur—he knows how to capture their essence in music, how to transport you to the feelings they entail. For a while Johnny’s pursuit was solitary. Then in early 2010 Johnny found Lachlan and Dave, and things really started to swing. The D Train Riders took the singer-songwriter Johnny and gave voice to the rock roots that had always informed his style. Now there were Dave’s driving drums and Lach’s thrumming bass—not to mention his expert ear in the studio, which I got to see in action one summer night in Brooklyn, as the band put the finishing touches on “Letter for the Fire.” Hearing the band changed my perception of Johnny’s work. I realized that the songs he had been plucking out at open mics were only the tips of icebergs in his head, where he had already worked out a rich variety of effects, riffs, solos, and instruments. Dave and Lach helped him shape these ideas into a full-throated album. PERIQUE moves from the raw electric energy of “When She Kissed Me,” with its firecracker guitar solo, to the haunting “I’m Sorry Andreina,” which plays hurt and resentment against each other in a lilting melody. Then comes the majestically textured “Long Way Home,” followed by “Momma Went Crazy,” a song with an apt image of a highway at its center. Its weeping guitars and pointed vocals leave a taste of diesel in your mouth. “O. L. S.” and “Suzy’s Song” redeem the darkness for a moment—these songs make me think of summers I used to spend in Wisconsin, watching fireworks fizz over the lake—before the album roars out its last with the pained, purgative final track. These songs express things Johnny has felt and seen. He has striven to do them justice and succeeded. PERIQUE is the work of a perceptive, searching soul. May it be the first of many, as I know he has decided it will be. -Paul Barker