There’s a kind of quiet resilience that runs through the music of Johnny Stanec — not loud or showy, but persistent, like headlights tracing a midnight road. On Blue, Green & Certain Shades of Orange, the first in a four-part EP cycle, the Youngstown, OH singer-songwriter continues to distill the heavy weight of modern life into something gently luminous.
Known for merging the melodic sensibilities of Britpop with the raw intimacy of Americana, Stanec’s sound exists in the liminal space between barroom storytelling and widescreen anthems. Think Tom Petty’s heartland grit filtered through the hazy melancholy of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, with just enough modern edge to keep things restless.
This new chapter — the first instalment in a larger songbook of four-track EPs — finds Stanec deepening his thematic fixations. Loneliness, disconnection, memory, hope — familiar ground for the songwriter, but newly rendered with production touches that gently push at the boundaries of his previous work. A track opens with the low murmur of strangers in conversation, like you’re seated in the corner of a crowded room you can’t quite belong to. The mood is immediate: observing without participating. Present, but peripheral.
The arrangements shift between acoustic confessional and full-band sway, suggesting the natural fluidity of isolation — how it can feel vast and cinematic in one breath, and small and personal in the next. Stanec’s voice carries a lived-in clarity, equal parts steady and weathered, shaped by hundreds of live shows and the quiet ache of writing in the long Ohio winters.
Written in the final stretch of 2024 and recorded through the stark stillness of early 2025, the songs bear the fingerprints of a year closing in on itself — reflective, fragmented, but forward-looking. Mixed and mastered by Josh Roman in West Middlesex, PA, there’s a closeness to the sonic palette that matches the lyrical intimacy: layered but never crowded, textured but never forced.
As the first entry in a larger sonic journal, Blue, Green & Certain Shades of Orange doesn’t announce itself loudly. It lingers. It listens. And in doing so, it reminds us that even quiet songs can speak volumes — especially when the world feels too loud to hear ourselves think.
