COLLEEN JOHNSON | INTERVIEW + EP REVIEW
There's something strangely beautiful about the idea of falling in love while the world is falling apart. For Colleen, that contradiction sits at the heart of Driving at Midnight, an EP that explores love, longing and the complicated business of figuring out where we belong. Across five tracks, she takes us through the emotional landscape of changing relationships, difficult decisions and the distance that can grow between the people we love. There's an almost cinematic quality to the record's central imagery: an empty road stretching into darkness, the uncertainty of what lies ahead and the possibility that having someone beside you might make the unknown a little less frightening. Blending her classical, jazz and folk influences with sparkling guitars and indie pop-rock sensibilities, Colleen creates a musical world where deeply personal emotions sit alongside infectious melodies. It's a compelling combination of vulnerability and optimism, where even an imagined apocalypse can become a love story.
What makes Driving at Midnight particularly interesting is how naturally its songs connect despite emerging across six years of personal and creative change. Long Distance explores the experience of leaving familiar places and people behind in pursuit of something new, while This Place You Left Behind considers that same separation from the perspective of someone watching another person move away. Hard to Read examines the frustration of being misunderstood, and the title track transforms feelings of anger and uncertainty into something unexpectedly empowering. Throughout the EP, Colleen explores queer love and desire with an appreciation for both emotional honesty and the things that remain unspoken. Working alongside Max Baker and Marcus Lintner also helped expand her musical possibilities, particularly through guitar arrangements that encouraged her to embrace a more pronounced pop-rock direction. Even the inclusion of Restless as a demo feels significant, preserving the recording that first gave her the confidence to imagine sharing a larger body of work.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Driving at Midnight is the personal growth revealed through its creation. What began as music shaped by individual ambition and the desire to discover herself gradually became a reflection on the importance of relationships, community and learning how to move forward alongside someone else. There's a maturity in that perspective, but also an understanding that growing older doesn't necessarily make love or life any less complicated. Colleen doesn't attempt to resolve every uncertainty. Instead, she finds beauty in the journey, allowing moments of yearning, frustration, joy and hope to coexist within the same musical world. The result is an EP that feels both intimate and expansive, capturing the strange comfort of knowing that even when everything around us seems uncertain, we don't necessarily have to face it alone. We caught up with Colleen to discuss the six-year journey behind Driving at Midnight, the influence of queer storytelling, the evolution of her sound, the importance of preserving creative beginnings and why sometimes the most meaningful journey is the one we choose to take together. This is a paid collaboration with Colleen Johnson.
EP REVIEW - Driving At Midnight
There's something incredibly satisfying about a record that grabs your attention from the very first moment, and Colleen's Driving at Midnight does exactly that. The opening title track arrives with an enormous sense of energy, immediately pulling you into a story of love, uncertainty and finding strength when everything around you appears to be falling apart. There's a real cinematic quality to the songwriting, with the music shifting beautifully between powerful, expansive moments and more intimate, stripped-back passages. Those changes in dynamics are particularly impressive, allowing the emotional weight of the story to dictate where the instrumentation goes next. The production is excellent, giving every element room to breathe without sacrificing the impact of those bigger sections. I can only imagine how powerful this song would be performed live, particularly when the arrangement opens up and the full band comes together. It's an ambitious opening that establishes the emotional world of the EP beautifully.
As the record progresses, what really stands out is the remarkable variety Colleen brings to each track. There's a different groove, atmosphere and musical personality waiting around every corner, yet everything feels connected through her distinctive songwriting and wonderful vocal arrangements. The harmonies throughout the EP are a particular highlight, adding warmth and emotional depth without ever overwhelming the lead vocals. I especially love the smooth saxophone on Long Distance, which introduces another gorgeous texture and demonstrates just how comfortably Colleen moves between musical influences. But beyond the instrumentation, it's the storytelling that keeps me invested. Long Distance captures the painful contradiction of leaving home in search of adventure, only to discover that the person you've left behind matters more than the excitement of somewhere new. Meanwhile, Hard to Read explores a different kind of distance, where feelings become so overwhelming that even the simplest conversation feels impossible. There's something painfully relatable about leaving someone's messages unanswered, not because you don't care, but because you care so deeply that no response seems capable of expressing it. It's a beautiful observation about the strange ways love and vulnerability can leave us completely lost for words.
What makes Driving at Midnight such a compelling listen is how naturally Colleen balances emotional complexity with genuinely enjoyable music. The title track imagines two people escaping a collapsing world together, transforming apocalyptic imagery into a surprisingly hopeful declaration of love. It's an intriguing contrast to the loneliness of Long Distance, where independence and personal growth come at the cost of physical closeness. Across the EP, those different perspectives begin to form a larger story about relationships, change and discovering what really matters. Knowing these songs developed over six years makes that emotional progression feel even more meaningful, while the inclusion of Restless as a demo offers a glimpse into the beginnings of the project. Musically, the record never settles into predictability, moving through different rhythms, textures and arrangements while maintaining a strong sense of identity. The production is polished, the musicianship is excellent, and the vocal harmonies are consistently beautiful. Most importantly, every song gives me something new to appreciate. Driving at Midnight is an engaging, heartfelt and wonderfully varied EP that takes the listener on a genuine journey, proving that sometimes the most powerful love stories aren't about finding the perfect destination, but discovering who you want beside you along the way.
You describe Driving at Midnight as a soundtrack for “falling in love during the apocalypse.” There’s something strangely romantic about putting those two extremes together. Does love become more intense when the world around it feels uncertain, or does uncertainty make it harder to trust something good when it arrives?
Love definitely becomes more intense, but it also gives you hope. It's so incredible to realize that you are not alone when the world seems to be falling apart around you. And there is something so satisfying to imagining having a partner-in-crime to go through life with and to plot your own survival with. The song originally came about from a feeling of anger at the state of the world, but by the time I'd finished writing it, it felt hopeful and empowering and created a world in which I can do anything as long as the person I love is beside me.
Driving at midnight is such a specific state to build a record around. You’re moving somewhere, but most of the world has stopped; you’re surrounded by darkness, but there’s this small illuminated stretch of road ahead of you. What did that image mean to you when you realised it could hold the whole EP together?
Driving at Midnight became the title because I realized that Long Distance and the title track were both songs about traveling and changing. In Driving at Midnight (Apocalyptic Road Trip), the subjects are in the literal sense fleeing some kind of natural disaster ("the mountain is crumbling") but in a more metaphorical sense they are running in survival mode against the oppression that they face. They are dealing with the anger and fear of surviving in a world that doesn't want them to exist, and on that road finding power in their relationship with one another. In Long Distance, the subject is moving away from home, from what is comfortable in hopes of finding herself or discovering new things about herself, only to realize that she left people behind who she cares about. So I guess both songs deal with the emotional journey of moving and evolving in life, whether that is literal geographical relocation, or a more metaphorical movement and evolution. I felt that this common theme could tie together the EP, especially since there are so many different moods that can be encompassed through that theme of travel and the liminal space of the night time. And I am just realizing this now, but This Place You Left Behind is almost the reverse of Long Distance, told from the opposite perspective of someone feeling left behind as they watch the other person moving away from them while also knowing that they could choose to follow, but are not.
The track titles alone create an interesting emotional progression: Driving at Midnight, Long Distance, Hard to Read, This Place You Left Behind, then Restless. Was that sense of movement, distance and eventual absence something you consciously built into the record, or did you only recognise the pattern once the songs were sitting beside each other?
I don't think I consciously built it into the record, but I do thing unconsciously there was a reason that these were the songs I wrote during that time and these were the songs that felt important enough to actually record. I've experienced many pretty big life transitions across the 6 years that I was working on these songs and grappling with what is important to me, who is important to me, and where I need to be to both find fulfillment in my work and art and also have and maintain the kinds of relationships that I want in my life.
You use the phrase “sapphic yearning” to describe part of the emotional world of the EP. Queer longing has such a rich history in art partly because, for generations, so much had to exist in implication, subtext and things left unsaid. When you're writing about desire now, are you more interested in saying it plainly or in that tension of making the listener lean in and discover what isn't being said?
I think it's a little bit of both! I do aim to make my work undeniably queer, but sometimes that emotional impact can be much stronger when things are left in the subtext. This is especially true when we're trying to explore emotions around unrequited love or complicated situationships which many of us find ourselves in. Even when you know the other person returns your feelings, sometimes circumstances are just impractical and the challenge and pain of that often lives in what goes unsaid.
Your musical background stretches through classical, jazz and folk/Americana before arriving in this indie pop-rock space. When you're writing, do those different musical instincts ever argue with each other, or have they become so embedded in you that you no longer notice where one influence ends and another begins?
I don't think I am ever directly thinking about my influences when I write, it's usually after the fact when I listen back to the song that I can pick up on "oh that is a little more jazz influenced than another songwriter may have done it" etc. I am not very cerebral about my writing, I prefer to just rely on my instincts, but I am also aware that those instincts didn't develop out of nowhere!
Hard to Read is a fascinating phrase because songwriting is often an attempt to make feelings readable. Have you ever written a song about someone because you couldn't understand them in real life, only to realise through writing it that the person you were actually trying to understand was yourself?
That is an interesting question... I'm not sure I have! I think Hard to Read was more of the opposite, knowing that I was appearing confusing, unpredictable, unreadable to another person and feeling the need to explain myself.
There are some very deliberate contrasts in how you've described this record: sparkling guitars against apocalyptic imagery, soaring vocals around complex emotions, romance existing alongside distance and restlessness. Do you find yourself naturally making beautiful-sounding music around difficult feelings? And if so, why do you think those opposites belong together for you?
I always start my songwriting around an emotion and the challenge of writing becomes how to convey that emotion in the most impactful way so that other will feel it. But I do think music where the instrumentation and the lyrics hold some contrast is extremely interesting. I love a dark lyric that is a bop musically. I also think it comes with the tension of writing to express what you are feeling at the same time that you have to write a song that you are going to want to perform! The music has to be fun, has to be something I want to get up on stage and sing night after night. I don't want to create music that is just depressing to perform and depressing to listen to. So I can hold both things as I write.
You recorded these songs with Max Baker and Marcus Lintner rather than building the entire world alone. Was there a moment during recording when one of them interpreted a song differently from how you'd heard it in your head, and their interpretation actually revealed something new about your own song to you?
I don't know about interpreting it differently, but Max definitely brought things to my sound that I had not been able to imagine myself. Max is such an incredible guitar player, and I am not at all. So explaining to him what I hoped for in terms of the guitar part and then actually hearing what he came up with was a very cool experience and it did reveal something to me about what I could do and where I wanted to go genre-wise. I don't think I considered my work pop OR rock before we recorded together, and then hearing those guitar lines and how they complimented my voice just opened up a whole new avenue of possibility.
You chose to include Restless specifically as a demo rather than presenting every song in its most polished possible form. What can an unfinished or less polished recording preserve that sometimes disappears once a song has been properly produced?
I think putting out Restless as a demo was more for myself than anything else. A way of honoring the journey because it was really the first song that I feel kicked off this project. It's the first song that I fully self-produced a demo for and the first song that made me think I could really make something worth sharing with the world. I never ended up recording professionally because there was about a four year lapse between when I made that demo and when I came back to music with the drive to record a full EP and it just didn't feel as representative to where I was in my journey both as a musician and just as a person. But I still really wanted to honor it and share it because that demo really is where this project started and is what created the momentum for the rest of it to come into existence.
Imagine the apocalypse in Driving at Midnight isn't literal at all. It's simply the moment when one version of your life ends and another begins. If that's the journey this EP documents, what did Colleen at the beginning of that midnight drive still believe that the Colleen who reaches the end no longer does?
I think the previous Colleen was a little more individualistic, and thought of herself as someone who would chase her dreams regardless of the cost. I don't think I believe that anymore. I think I have grown and matured and really learned to appreciate the people in my life in a different way, and I've also fallen in love and dealt with the complexity of navigating two peoples dreams and ambitions while trying to maintain that relationship and continue moving together in the same direction. So I think I am more conscious of my place in a community and in a relationship. It's the difference between Long Distance and Driving at Midnight. In one, I have gone on the journey alone and left my loved ones behind, but in the other I'm on the journey with someone and her presence makes all the difference.
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