Jo3 H3nson shares light, dark sides on L.A.M.E.

ALBANY — On “I’ma Be Sumthin,” one of the several standout songs from his recently released debut album “L.A.M.E. (Living As Me Everyday),” Carlo “Jo3 H3nson” Johnson proclaims — defiantly, with an intensity that would do the late Chester Bennington proud — “I ain’t another wannabe, I’m’a be sumthin.”

Johnson, the younger brother of Albany rap icon Field Mob’s “Shawn J” Johnson, sat perched on the edge of a sofa in the living room of his south Albany apartment recently, playing the tracks from “L.A.M.E.” for a visitor. As he listened to his own words of affirmation, lost as he was in the hypnotic beat of the song, his face betrayed his emotions, breaking into a smile that said, “That’s me, but that’s damned good.”

“Yeah, that song — this whole album — is me, this is my life,” Johnson said. “It captures a specific timeframe, from the time I was 11 years old to now. It’s a concept album, divided into a ‘bright side’ and a ‘dark side,’ and it’s all about the cycle of life. Just as things run in cycles, from good to bad and back to good, even in a single day, a life follows that same cycle.

“The album takes you from a time when I was young, still caught up in the child-like wonder of life, to a dark time when I had suicidal thoughts and lost my faith in God. It’s an album of self-awareness, of coming to realize that your worst enemy — the person who takes you into that dark place where you doubt God — is not the world, it’s yourself.”

Johnson (his “rap name,” Jo3 H3nson, is simply his last name, minus the threes) has admitted in past conversations that his awe of his brother’s success with Field Mob squelched somewhat his own musical ambitions, even when songs and rhymes started coming to him in his early teens. But his artistic endeavors over the years kept circling back — that cycle again — to the music that was in him. He started working on the songs that would become “L.A.M.E.” five years ago.

“The songs came to me in fragments,” Johnson said. “The first one (of the 18 on the double album) was ‘My Enemy,’ which I wrote in 2013. As the song would indicate, that was the worst year of my life, one filled with trials and lots of tribulation.

“Conversely, the last of the songs on the album was ‘Where to Now?’, which is a song of hope. I wrote it earlier this year, which has been one of the best years of my life, certainly the best in the past five years.”

But Johnson says that even the darkness that led to the creation of “My Enemy” and many of the songs on the “dark” half of the album was significant to his life.

“Yes, 2013 was the worst year of my life because of the frame of mind I was in at that time,” he said. “But it was also one of the best years of my life, because it’s what inspired many of the songs on the album. When you’re living your life and you go through difficult times, you don’t know what those times will produce. As it turns out, living through the hardships of that year inspired me when I was able to move past it.”

There are no throwaway elements on “L.A.M.E.,” nothing tossed off as an afterthought and thrown into the mix to fill space. Producers Glen Thomas, J. Cayo, Kash, T.C., LiGriv, David Luke and Caesar — the latter three of that group from Albany — offer compelling beats and arrangements, while Jamiko Cochran, Allena Whitaker, Alil Silliw, A’Lex, Stephenie Re’ and Briley, Johnson’s honey-voiced girlfriend, enhance Johnson’s often gruff, but smooth-when-they-need-to-be vocals with their own able backing.

Each song on the album is introduced by voicemails that sound too real to be the contrived gimmick used by enough rappers now to be considered cliche.

“Those are real voicemails left on my phone,” Johnson said. “I have some music on my voicemail message, and people have left me some interesting messages reacting to it. I said to myself, ‘These have to be on the album.’”

Even the album cover, created by Albany artist Sean Mulkey, adds to the theme of “L.A.M.E.”

“I told Sean I wanted the cover art to be a broken man in the South walking toward a storm,” Johnson said. “If you look behind him, you see broken pieces of the man behind him, a broken heart, other pieces that he’s lost to life. But even with the lightning flashing ahead of him, you can see rays of sunshine behind him. That’s the hope.

“The green grass represents the South, and those footprints on the sand beside him represent that poem about the man walking alone who discovers Jesus’ footprints alongside his own.”

The songs on “L.A.M.E.” are a compelling mix that vividly convey the emotions Johnson felt in the darkness and the brightness of the telling of his story. “n.W.o.” and “This Is My Life,” which come near the end of the bright side of the album, show Johnson leaning away from the brightness toward the darkness that would envelope him through the album’s second half. In the latter song, Johnson shows off his verbal dexterity with a fast rap that would do Machine Gun Kelly proud then hits the listener with the eye-opening couplet, “I don’t know if I can keep going on. Living is oh so hard, dying is easy.”

The self-awareness of “My Enemy” — which is enhanced by the old-school pops of a vinyl record sharing time with the more modern turntable scratching that became a seminal piece of hip-hop — is palpable as Johnson asks, “Who’s going to save me from me? … My enemy.”

As much as “L.A.M.E.” is about the ups and downs of one man’s life, it’s also about that one man’s quest to find love, happiness, meaning and God.

“A lot of our questions about life are questions of faith,” Johnson said. “I took the initiative to go deep into the Bible to find some of those answers. We question God, and then we often end up opening the door to evil in our lives. Eventually, though, you realize that the fault lies within, not with God. And while the second half of this album is about the darker side of life, the cycle completes itself with songs of hope, songs about getting back to the bright side.”

Downloads of “L.A.M.E. (Living As Me Everyday)” and additional information about Jo3 H3nson are available at the website https://mrjo3h3nson.com. Fans can also subscribe to Johnson’s Youtube channel, visit his Facebook page or follow him on Twitter, Instagram and Soundcloud.

Johnson and fellow artists Nexus and Christopher Jenkins host spoken-word gatherings “L.A.M.E. Voices” on the third Fridays of each month at Icons on North Washington Street in Albany. Performances begin at 9 p.m.