“I’m a bit of a polarizing guy,” Hobo Johnson laughed, in between drags from his cigarette. The indie rapper leaned on a parking meter outside the venue after his San Francisco show.
“A lot of people are saying I’m getting Nickelbacked,” he said.
Hobo Johnson, real name Frank Lopes Jr., 30, just released a new album, HOBO JOHNSON DRINKS!— his first in four years. In many ways, it’s a return to form for the Sacramento artist (who now lives in San Francisco) after his last album was critically panned.
But a lot has happened to him since then. His dad suddenly passed away. He’s adjusted to life in the Bay. He’s loved, and lost, and loved again, and lost again. He’s taken it all to the recording booth, and the result is pretty cool — an album about living your late 20s in bars, struggling with sobriety, and loving someone you couldn’t stay with.
In many ways, it’s exactly what fans have been asking for — more weird samples, more hyped-up energy, and more heartbreaking raps about his life, this time tempered by a newfound maturity.
But in August, Lopes started trending online for a completely different reason. People were debating what the worst song of all time was, and he was at the top of everyone’s list.
“You should see Twitter. The last, like, month has been an absolute fuckin’ shit show,” he said.
I’m not sure if there’s any artist out there more maligned than Hobo Johnson.
Lopes has been writing music since he was 15, but started going by “Hobo Johnson” at 19, when his dad kicked him out of the house, and he briefly had to live in his ’94 Toyota Corolla.
By day, he worked at a pizza shop to make ends meet. After hours, his car became his studio, as did the local library and various laundromats, while he honed his skills at open mics around the capital city.
In 2016, Lopes blew up for a series of YouTube videos titled “Live from Oak Park,” which featured him and his band, The Lovemakers, playing in their backyard, but his big break came in 2018, when his entry for the NPR Tiny Desk Contest went viral online.
Even though he didn’t win, his popularity landed him a Tiny Desk Concert anyway, catapulting him to indie stardom. Record label deals. Radio interviews in L.A. Playing Outside Lands and Bonnaroo. That sort of thing.
Which brings us to Twitter.
“I have a bad habit of searching my name up on Twitter,” he says, shaking his head.
And I get the feeling that it’s getting to him.
Tonight, Hobo Johnson and the Lovemakers played a show at The Chapel for more than 250 people, where the crowd knew all the words and shouted 90% of the lyrics back at him. They even knew the long, spoken monologue parts on “Romeo & Juliet” where the music cuts out.
That’s usually superfan behavior. But tonight, everyone seemed like a superfan.
One showgoer, Jane, traveled from Alberta, Canada to see him tonight. It’s her fourth time seeing Hobo Johnson, and she’s been all over the world to see him — twice in Canada, but once in Scotland.
“It’s my first time in the United States,” she told me, adding that all the travel was worth it.
Another showgoer, Dan Fitz, said that he digs on the infectious positive energy that Hobo Johnson brings to the stage.
“When he came out, I mean the man’s smile… We need more of that in the world,” Fitz said.
But when I asked Lopes about the audience that night, only described them as “very tolerant.”
“Yeah, I mean, today they were super into the songs, and even the new songs too, it seemed like. They were very tolerant crowd,” he laughs.
In an unusual move, the San Francisco show started with an open mic. Fans were able to sign up at the merch table, and then a member of the band’s touring party drew names out of a hat to see who went up.
Three guys did some spoken word poetry, one with music backing him up. The final person who signed up was a young woman named Amelia, who was enthusiastic, but didn’t have anything prepared.
“I’m just gonna do Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” she said, a little nervous. And the crowd sang it along with her.
In effect, they just became the openers for a show they were about to watch.
When Lopes took the stage, he came out fist-bumping people in the front row and having full-on conversations with them between opening songs like “Mover Awayer” and “Subaru Crosstrek.”
Still though, a shadow hung over him a bit.
“Booooooo! What a terrible song,” he said with a big smile after performing the latter.
“We love it!” an audience member called back.
Later, he dedicated the song “Ugly Kid” to everyone from Sacramento in the audience, perhaps a reference to how his hometown was ranked the second-ugliest city in the country.
Halfway through his set, he took his handwritten set list and gave it to an audience member to hold for a while he played a guitar on “Feb. 15.” And then, a song or two later, he actually got it back from them.
Lopes also has this oddball sense of humor that totally plays with the audience.
At the beginning of the set, he announced that he had 30 songs left. A couple of songs later, that number changed to 45.
“We have 10,000 songs left!” he shouted near the end. The crowd, in on the joke, cheered like madmen.
Overall, his set clocked in at 14 songs and just under 56 minutes.
“He listens to the fans and will kind of go off on a tangent with them and play along with them,” Stacy, another fan, said. “It’s why I keep coming back to these shows.”
Hobo Johnson ended his main set with “Peach Scone,” his hit about desperately loving a friend who’s already in a relationship. It’s based off an experience that he’s talked about at length before.
But during the song’s breakdown, Lopes told a much different story than he usually does — one about the guy she was dating. Apparently, he bumped into the guy at a Grocery Outlet recently, and “he looked at me like I was a fucking ghost.”
“I walked up to him, shook his hand, and said, ‘I am really, really, genuinely sorry I wrote this song [about you].’”
He stepped offstage briefly, and then came back for an encore — “Typical Story,” off his 2019 album, The Fall of Hobo Johnson.
Outside the venue, it was 52 degrees, but more than 30 fans were milling about on the sidewalk after the show, waiting for Lopes to show up. Apparently, he does this at every concert.
“Every single concert that I’ve been to, he’s come outside to meet people afterward, and he stays until he talks to every single person,” that showgoer Jane said. “Not everyone does that.”
45 minutes later, Lopes appeared in a black hoodie and sweatpants thrown over his stage shirt, rocking socks and strappy sandals.
“Hi, I’m Frank,” he said, shaking their hands, sometimes going in for a hug.
He spent four to five minutes with every single person in this crowd, talking and joking with them, taking pictures, signing things and asking how the show went, until the street was empty.
“VIP Meet-And-Greet” packages get sold to fans for hundreds of dollars, often to imitate a fraction of this genuine interaction between artists and fans. When I brought up that this kinda thing isn’t the norm, he was unfazed.
“Really? That’s kinda weird,” he said.
He puffed his cig a little more, and we chatted for a few minutes before I took out my recorder and we talked about the new album.
He told me that he recorded some of the songs in his Dad’s old house after he passed away in 2022, which is where the new song “DADS BED” came from.
“It was fucking awful. It was weird. It could be really, really nice to live in his space at times, and to feel like he’s still there at the same time. But it became really obvious that he wasn’t there as well,” Lopes said.
Meanwhile, “METAVERSE” was both his lighthearted stab at tech oligarchs and his own personal way of returning to the sample-based beatmaking he did in his early career.
“That song is just a hodgepodge. There must be a hundred different weird samples I found and put together,” he says.
But was most proud to talk about the production on “ME & YOU,” which details the double-edged sword of staying out late in the bars. Specifically, he said he loves the piano part that creates the backbone of the song. He performed it organically, then chopped it up in post to make it sound like a sample.
“That was one of the best lines I think I’ve ever written,” he said.
Eventually, I popped the question every interviewer must: After the new album and two tours this year, what’s next for Hobo Johnson?
School, he said. No, really.
Starting this month, Sactown’s favorite indie rapper is going back to college.
“I need two semesters to just finish my AA, which is still kind of a long way to go,” he explained. “But yeah, I hope to get a BA, just in case I need to fall back on something or get a real job.”
He said he’s blessed that he’s got a career where he doesn’t need to have a day job right now, but there’s a lot he’s still going through, and he likes the structure that school provides.
“I want to be a better person. I want to, you know, be smarter. I want to be more wise. So going to school really fits in with that,” he said.
I want to ask, well, what about the music? What about another tour? What about the album “Hobo Johnson Tries Really Hard,” which was probably just a Twitter joke?
College is awesome, but won’t it get in the way of, well, everything else?
But mostly, I just think of all the genuine energy he put out there tonight, everything his fans gave back to him, and the giant online shitstorm out there bearing down on him.
More than anything else, Frank Lopes Jr. wants to care less what other people think of him. It’s partially why he hasn’t really done interviews “since the Peach scone era.”
Suddenly, there was nothing left to say, so I lined up my lightning round of questions.
Are there any Sacramento artists you want to shout out?
“I think Silk Animus is one of the best musicians, one of the best rappers to ever live. Like he is so goddamn clever to me.”
Did anything big in the music world excite you this last year?
“Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter is like one of the best records I’ve ever heard, in my entire life. He’s like Daniel Johnston and Julian Casablancas mixed into one person, and I really like both of them. He deserves all the praise he’s getting.”
He also gave a nod to folk artist Jesse Welles, who he said has released “like four albums this year.”
“That guy’s one of the hardest working guys in music right now.”
Do you think Death Grips, also from Sacramento, is going to sample you on their upcoming album?
“Definitely not me. No, they’re far above that. It’s below their pay grade, I believe.”
I thanked him for the interview, and suddenly he was the only one standing on the sidewalk outside the venue.
Frank Lopes is not “cool.” And maybe he’ll never be cool. He’s too honest. Too emotional. Too loud. Too happy about it. He’s not quite emo, not really hip hop. And even if you get past all that, people really don’t like his mustache.
But for some, he’s hit upon a perfect blend of all those things that make him very endearing to his fans, who will travel the world for him and show up in droves.
During the show, he tried to shoot water from his plastic bottle into the audience by twisting it, but it came out in a splash instead of a spray, splattering water all over two femmes dancing in the front row.
“I JUST BOUGHT A SUBARU CROSSTREK – sorry – I COULDA BOUGHT A LAMBO BUT I’M NOT QUITE THERE YET,” he apologized.
They didn’t care. They just squealed joy and kept dancing.
I’m not sure when we’ll get another Hobo Johnson release, or tour, or whatever. But knowing there’s music and shows like this out there gives me peace.
Godspeed, Frank. We’ll see you when we see you.
(tldr: The internet isn’t real, the people around you who love you are. Twitter is a cancer hole where the CIA goes to test its newest psy ops. Touch grass, y’all.)
