John Duff Creates a Thrilling Work of Musical Fiction
John Duff travels through a multitude of genres with his tongue-in-cheek concept album, "Greatest Hits Deluxe Edition."
Too much of modern pop music is missing the melody, according to John Duff.
“These songs are not designed to be performed by performers,” the singer-songwriter contends. “They’re designed to play in an algorithmic playlist that blends in with the next one and the next one and the next one, so that they can get every stream they possibly can.”
In a musical landscape where everything’s becoming homogenized, Duff says that “even the best singers aren’t getting a chance to sing, because they’re competing with mediocre singers, and the mediocre singers are doing better.”
But the Baltimore native, currently based in L.A., has been doing his part to keep the real music playing with a string of pithy, melodic pop tunes, like “Hokey Pokey” and “Somebody’s Daughter,” accompanied by provocative, often gay-themed videos that have amassed millions of views.
Usually featuring the gay artist and his chiseled physique in various states of undress, the videos cemented a brand that Duff admits started to feel confining. While he was eager to explore other sounds and eras, collaborators kept pushing for more trendy gay pop.
That is, until producers Eren Cannata and KOIL PreAmple, who collaborated with Duff previously on his dance track “Do It,” offered to ride with him wherever their creative impulses led them. Their adventure arrived at Duff’s latest full-length release: Greatest Hits Deluxe Edition.
A genre-spanning concept album, Greatest Hits is a collection of all-time greats by a fictional pop superstar with hits from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Inspired by the sounds of Motown, doo-wop, gospel, disco, musical theatre, and the Great American Songbook, Duff channels his character’s evolution from crooner to pop-rocker on tongue-in-cheek tracks like “Forgotten How to F*ck” and “Hoe Is Life,” featuring The Life Tony winner Lillias White.
“She really loved the lyrics of everything I do,” Duff says of Broadway powerhouse White, who also jumped on his 2021 single “High Heels” after hearing the song played over the phone. “And that means so much to me to have a singer’s singer say, ‘I want to sing that.’ It’s more validating than pretty much anything else that’s happened thus far.”
In addition to the vocal talent, Greatest Hits boasts an album full of real musicians, in the project’s concerted departure from an electronic, computerized approach to pop.
“Everything you hear was played by people,” he says, noting the “collaboration that comes with that. When this person hears [something] and says, ‘I’m going to harmonize with that,’ and ‘I’m going to go over here with this counter,’ and create something that a computer could never come up with. That’s what I want.”
The album opener, “Prove Me Wrong,” lays out the mission clearly, with Duff singing, “So tell me when did the beat start beating the melody?”
As Duff explains, “‘Prove Me Wrong’ came from, ‘What happened to songs with chords in them? Why did everything become one- and two-chord? When did we narrow it all down to an 808 bass and a drum loop?’ I mean, even go back to hip-hop in the ’90s and in the ’80s — they were sampling some of the most beautiful orchestrations and songs from the ’70s and ’60s, to still have that musical life in it.”
On Greatest Hits, that life is full of romance and reflection wrapped in sunny vocals-driven pop, dashed with Duff’s spicy sense of humor — as on “Housewife,” a big band number about trying to make a lady of a tramp.
“I think what’s funny is I went to school for musical theater, and I had a professor who said about these old George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin songs, ‘If you think there’s a sexual innuendo in this song, there is. Any lyric you ever read that could be construed as an innuendo, is. The writer certainly knew. And so use that information.'”
Duff’s next evolution is just around the corner. “It’s already done and it’s going to be coming soon,” he teases, offering no hints.
For now, he’s looking forward to performing Greatest Hits and other songs at upcoming end-of-the-year Pride events, like Pride Under the Pines, in the San Jacinto Mountains. And he seems pleased, if also a bit relieved, to finally have put out the years-in-the-making collection.
“It was warned against by many, many people in the industry,” he says. “Not because it wasn’t fantastic, but because nobody knew how to market it. Like I said, with the algorithmic streaming, how do you break into an algorithm of songs that came out fifty, sixty years ago? So, you know, we did it for the art. And now I can go back to doing things for me.”
Greatest Hits Deluxe Edition is available on Apple Music, Spotify, and all digital platforms.
Follow John Duff on Instagram at @iamjohnduff.
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