I did not record my first album until I was in my early thirties and already had three children! I picked a place called Tacher Studios from the phone book because the location was half way from where I lived and where my good friend and bass player, Dave Lopresti lived, so we could meet and jam. Read more...

For my next album, Pretending, instead of a collection of songs, I wanted to tell a story and feature the newer songs I had written, rather than reaching into my catalog of older songs. My marriage was not going well and the lyrics show an arc of love songs, then quickly of disappointment and disillusionment. Read more...

Years before recording started on my third album, First Love, I had picked the songs for the album. After recording mostly older songs on my first album, then going with new songs for my second, I realized that I had written many beautiful love songs when I was in my twenties that deserved to be recorded.
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Carolyn Moses is a wonderful and talented writer and when we reconnected and fell in love again, she wrote some great lyrics which I put music to, and I wrote some lyrics also about this powerful new start to our lives. These songs became the next kjband album, Matters of the Heart. Read more...

I spent Thanksgiving weekend in 2006 and 2007 in Rochester NY with my sister Barbara Johnston, who is an excellent drummer. She helped me record demos during these visits for two of the three albums I had written but not recorded – Lies and Best Kept Secret. Read more...

Carolyn and I kept writing songs together, especially during the time we were expecting our miracle child to be born (Adam). This album tells the story of life after the happily ever after of the Matters of the Heart album. Read more...

The songs on my seventh album, ‘Noise’, were written in a 14 month period starting at the end of 1998 through 1999. This makes it chronologically my fourth album, but lyrically it is the follow up to my second album, Pretending. I had drawn on songs from when I first started writing songs in 1981 for my first three albums. Read more...

Kjband’s eighth album, Best Kept Secret, is the last of the albums that were written but for which recording was put off in order to record newer compositions. The songs were written between 2002 and 2005. Chronologically, it is the 6th album written. It is (hopefully) also the last sad record. Read more...

Kjband – live is the ninth kjband album. The songs were recorded live in the studio in the spring of 2016, using minimal overdubs. The 20 songs are broken up into two 10 song sets. The songs are taken from all nine kjband studio albums, from the debut record, All I Want, released in 1998, to brand new songs from a yet unfinished new album.

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Kjband’s tenth album is called More Love Songs. This can be considered a companion piece to the third album, First Love, as these are all songs written in that same time period in the early 1980’s. There were so many good love songs written to Carolyn Moses during that time that deserved to be recorded and released. Read more...

Kjband’s eleventh album is called Portraits. Lyrically, it is the follow up to the 6th album, Real Life, finished in 2014. The song, Our Art, from that album, was written about Carolyn and my artistic drive to create, and had a lyric - ‘Together we paint portraits/ Of this real life that we frame’. This lyric was an inspiration, and we decided that our next record would be called Portrait. Read more...

Spilt Milk is kjband’s twelfth album. It is the follow-up to 2020’s Portraits. In 2020 during the pandemic lockdown, with working in the studio not an option, kjband songwriter Ken Johnston used his creative time instead on writing new songs. Originally conceived as a six song EP, after the six songs were well on their way in the recording process, Ken and his lyricist partner, Carolyn Moses, wrote three new songs. Read more...