You don’t need a fine-tooth comb to find the smile buried beneath Stove Johnson’s bushy brown beard. It gleams while it sits directly under a septum piercing, glowing as the St. Petersburg songwriter delivers quips about The B-52s, Stone Sour and Evanescence — acts that members of Johnson’s new band can all respect. The Indiana-born Stove landed on CL’s radar in 2016. Their music is influenced by the lyrical styles of Randy Travis, Tim McGraw and even The Wonder Years’ Dan “Soupy” Campbell. Stove moved to Florida at nine years old and played guitar in ska and hardcore bands, but rough times turned them inward.
“I needed a new outlet, so I got a ukulele. I wanted to start a punk collective, so I started writing music, but it somehow turned into a solo project,” Stove explains. “A couple dozen shows, a few weekend tours, and five different recordings of ‘Princess Peach’ later, Community Couch came into existence.”
On Monday nights, Community Couch — Stove’s band with bassist Glen Martinetto, drummer Eli Lopez and occasional singer/kazoo player Rowan Russell — practices at Lucky You, a Bay Pines tattoo shop that doubles as an all-ages, DIY concert venue. Posters taped inside the venue’s windows advertise acts like Joyeater, Off With Their Heads and Meow Twins. The 26-year-old Stove stands inside, confident in hand-cut jorts, a black T-shirt and dad hat. A pair of aviator-style prescription eyeglasses on their face serve as shiny windows to eyes that are eager to work through songs that Stove has been working on since the release of a 2016 cassette cheekily titled Fight Off Your Demos (a play on Fight Off Your Demons, which was a 2005 set of nine untitled demos by since-disgraced punk band Brand New).
“Just be nice.”
At first pass, Stove’s music feels cheeky, too. Fight Off Your Demos is stripped-down, ukulele-driven bedroom folk.
If You’re Listening, I’m Sorry for Everything and Eat. — two EPs that ended up among CL’s favorite local releases from 2017 — are less lo-fi than their predecessors, but go the same way as far as a general sound. Narrative-driven lyrics, often built around people, are meant to be about feelings. The words are specific enough to tell listeners exactly where Stove was in the moment, but ambiguous enough to make it relatable to more general life situations. The arrangements on all of Stove’s music are joyous, just like the big laughs and bigger belches they unleash sporadically throughout the course of the band practice.
Still, Stove, whose skin is covered nearly shoulder to shoe in tattoos, isn’t afraid to use lyrics to shed light on a lot of the sadness, insecurity and frustration bubbling inside. Take “T+,” which was written in the days after Tampa Pride 2016.
“Well, I’m all for pride, and I’m all for fighting the man, but if you’re so goddamned inclusive, why can’t you include ‘they/them?,’” Stove sings in describing feeling all alone and out of step on a crowded Seventh Avenue. “You added a pink stripe to your flag, but you can’t act like you added anyone at all.”
“I was super excited to go and be in a sea of people like myself,” Stove, who came out as gender-fluid before that parade, says. “ [I] took it as an opportunity to wear a dress or makeup in a public setting. Unfortunately, I got all the same glares and jeers that I would receive walking down Seventh any other day.”
Tampa Pride — and especially St. Pete Pride, which held its first TransPride March in 2017 — has started to come along since then. Stove gets that semantics, especially when it comes to personal identity, are very fickle, but they did spell it out plain as day in a recent Facebook post.
“Hello, my name is Stove… I am pansexual/bisexual, and non-monogamous. My pronouns are they/them, and I prefer femme-coded language. (Princess, mom, etc.),” they wrote. It can get complicated, however, even for Stove who is most comfortable identifying as a gender-fluid trans person.
“What that means to me could be totally different to someone else who uses the same language. For me, it sometimes means that I identify strongly as a woman, and other times, I identify strongly somewhere between that of a man and a woman. And this changes sometimes week-to-week, day-to-day, or even hour-to-hour,” Stove explains. Outside factors sometimes play into it, and oftentimes, they don’t at all. Stove does occasionally feel underrepresented, or like the butt of a joke in some circles, but understanding and embracing gender-fluidity is actually pretty simple according when common sense is deployed.
“If someone tells you their pronouns, use them. If someone tells you their name, don’t ask weird personal questions about it. If you see someone in the bathroom, mind your damn business and let them do their business, regardless of how they look,” Stove explains, adding that they’ve been lucky enough to find some very supportive friends, and some incredible social circles both locally and abroad.
“And if you see or hear your friends or family doing something outside these ideas, call them out on it. Remind them [to] just be nice. Your openness can help other people feel comfortable with who they are, and that’s pretty empowering.”
Empowerment is a relatively simple, universal feeling that can still find a home in a world that far from binary, and a humbled version of it manifests itself as Stove vividly describes 100-degree Clearwater days on “Liquid Sunshine” from Community Couch’s new EP.
“I’m trying my best to do the best I can in these trying times,” Stove sings. “I’m trying my best not to forget myself again, at least I’m trying this time.”
Trying — that’s actually all that Community Couch’s music asks listeners to do. While you won’t have to look too deeply to see them enjoying themselves on stage, you will have to dig to find out where those smiles are actually coming from.
