INTERVIEW: John FM on Returning to Tour After Three-Year Hiatus
Photos by Maggie Aulman
“If things get put in boxes, they die. The longer I can avoid a box, the longer it’s going to take for me to die.”
Three years after stepping back from touring, John FM returned to the road recently, including a stripped down, solo piano set supporting Elias Rønnenfelt and Evanora:Unlimited at Colony Woodstock on May 9.
Calling from Brooklyn on his day off of tour, the Detroit artist and I spoke about new music and inspirations. There was a church nearby him and occasionally bells would ring that made our conversation a beautiful musical composition in itself.
Since the release of American Spirit, a record that blended house music, protest singer-songwriting, hip-hop, and painfully personal storytelling, John FM has taken a step back from the public eye to focus on making a life and repositioning his music.
After his father passed away in 2022, he inherited his childhood home and suddenly found himself learning to manage a life and property in Detroit.
“I was learning how to be a homeowner very fast, when I wasn’t necessarily ready,” he says. “I was trying to stay afloat financially and figure out what the next direction of the record was and trying to make all the pieces fit.”
He was dealing with real life, day jobs, and grief — things that we often don’t always consider when we think about musicians. This was until November 2025 when his fiancée Jordan, who also joined the tour to sell merch, gave him a needed push to seriously work on his music again.
“[Jordan] basically asked me, ‘Do you want this or not?’” he laughs. “She made me sign a stack of checks to her. Every week I didn’t finish a demo, she was cashing one.”
This incentive pushed him back into making music, and gave him the motivation to experiment, write and create from the heart. The strategy was a success and as John FM started getting enough material for an album, he was contacted about the opportunity to join Rønnenfelt’s/Evanora’s tour.
John FM and Rønnenfelt have been friends for over 10 years after meeting in a Detroit club while Iceage was in town. While musically they have different styles, both artists share similar values of craft and lyrical resistance. It's beautiful to see their decade long friendship unfold on this tour.
“At first we didn’t really get along,” he recalls, “but after sharing a night out, that changed and over the years whenever Iceage came through Detroit, we connected more and more. So when my demos for a new record started floating around, Elias asked me to open.”
A lot has changed with them both since then. With their familiarity, John FM explains that Rønnenfelt isn’t shy of giving him pointers on his solo piano sets which are a relatively new style of performance for John FM. Before this run, he had only performed six solo shows in Europe in 2023.
“It’s good to have someone like that in my corner, who's seasoned in that arena of solo performance,” he says. “I'm really appreciative of that.”
That sense of artistic kinship has shaped the tour itself, with John FM describing the tour as “familial.”
“It's been a very enriching experience,” he says. “I didn't know I was going to be stuck in a sprinter van with a bunch of people that I’m really very fond of.
“Everyone performing is a kindred spirit in a way where we really do love the music and we also have a strong ideology about what music can be for crowds of this era. We’re not obsessed with celebrity. We’re all more focused on community-building.”
He refers to himself as “the third thing” — neither mainstream pop nor pure underground, but something between categories that acts as a bridge between both worlds.
“I think everything being stripped down makes everything more vulnerable and personable, and I think that's where I set myself apart on this tour. At the same time, I think everyone on this tour is this ‘third thing’ — there's the one thing, the other thing, and then the third, and I think that's where we're kind of matched up right now as far as sound and ethics.”
During recent performances, he noticed audience members laughing at him during certain moments of his set. Rather than retreating, he leaned directly into this discomfort.
“I’ll look right at them and start singing directly to them. Not to be confrontational, just to involve them further,” he says. “We're in this together. Whether or not you accept that you feel uncomfortable by laughing — trying to deny yourself of the vulnerabilities of yourself — I'm going to do my best to walk you through it because you're here and you're watching and you're obviously engaged enough to not move. I’m already as afraid as I’m going to be. You can't make me more afraid.”
To him, vulnerability is a discipline and a lifestyle that encourages presence and attunement. It is a sentiment that is as rooted in his music as it is when riding his motorcycle.
“When you're on a motorcycle, it’s you, the wind, and the engine beneath you,” he explains. “And that’s what being onstage alone feels like — it’s you, the crowd, the microphone, and the engine beneath you, which is the piano.
“You have to hear what the motor’s doing. You have to hear what you’re doing on stage when you’re touching those keys. You have to look at those crowds. You have to face every note that might be sour. You have to be attuned to every moment because that attention is what lets you survive.”
The dichotomy of total vulnerability and total awareness also informs his evolving relationship with the dancefloor. Though John FM is still passionate about the club culture in Detroit and believes in the power of the dancefloor as a space for community and protest, he admits he is growing disillusioned with today’s club culture due to his personal lifestyle choices of needing to be more sober.
“I'm not really club-focused at this moment, and that's a personal realization for myself, because being a DJ does not align with the important health decisions I’m trying to make for myself,” he explains, discussing how the DJ lifestyle often allowed him to drink too much. “There’s so much room for me to grow artistically. I think there's more to be explored and that's more exciting to me right now.”
His new record, still untitled, is a personal testament to growth. The project focuses on passing memories between 2019 and now, emphasizing the social impact of the qualities of life that we all explore daily in our own microcosms. John FM does not ignore broad themes, but his personal storytelling carries an emotional weight that communicates these larger lessons more impactfully to listeners.The ordinary interactions explored are emblematic of the ideology shaping both his music and cultural impact.
“I'm maturing into savoring the bitterness of life because the sun is so much sweeter because of it,” he says. “There's a lot with this new record that resembles that sentiment because one side is honoring some of the bitterness of yesterday and the other side is me coming out clean because of it.”
He tells me about a song inspired by a neighborhood gas station employee named Jimmy who treated every person from all walks of life with equal respect, and sadly died after being hit by a car.
“People like Jimmy really matter because it's those people that prop up everyone else's everyday life,” he says. “These people are the cornerstones of our world and deserve to be honored.
“When Jimmy passed, and I kept going to the store, I just kept thinking about how he was just such an imperative part of my life, even though he seemed to have such a minor role. That person really mattered to me, if no one else.”
He explains he also wants to highlight that “all of these really, really human things still happen in spite of the ills of capitalism and the ills of the current Western world. By holding on to those things we can attach ourselves to the personal freedoms that we still have control over.”
This mentality adds another layer to how he approaches his performances as well. He references James Brown’s way of treating the smallest person in the room like the biggest.
“I never know who might be signing my check one day,” he says. “Every life is worth the same”.
That view feels especially relevant at a time when many artists are attempting to navigate increasingly corporate music ecosystems while preserving sincerity. Part of this awareness also comes from Detroit’s musical history and the scenes that have supported him.
“Detroit is open format—there’s garage rock, funk, techno, jazz, soul, punk. Everything exists there all at once,” he says. “I think that is super important to open up global conversation about what music is in general.
“If things get put in boxes, they die. The longer I can avoid a box, the longer it’s going to take for me to die.”
This open format community is what he is trying to cultivate on the road and with the types of people he wants in his circle.
“Trump's a bitch. Free Palestine,” he says before we hang up. “I hope people find a little bit of peace and healing amidst all this chaos right now.”
Click here for a review of John FM’s set at Colony Woodstock on May 9.