I arrived in Matfield Green having not written a song in quite some time. It was the reason I had applied for the residency – between work and being a new parent, I just hadn’t found the time. The drive down from Iowa City was ridden with a combination of excitement for the opportunity, missing my little one already, and the dread that every artist faces at one time or another – what if nothing comes out?

When I turned south through Cottonwood Falls, everything opened up. The green Flint Hills rolled out on either side of me as I wove my way along winding 177. Silhouettes of horses on the hills, the exquisite quiet of that billboard-free stretch of highway (thanks William Least Heat-Moon). I pulled into Matfield Station and hauled my admittedly much-too-much cargo up the hill through smatterings of grasshoppers and within an hour of turning the handle on room number three, I had a song.

From the moment I made that southward turn, the weight was lifted. I was free to explore, both musically and on foot, a landscape that must be similar to what my native Iowa should be. Iowa is one of the most altered landscapes on earth. Formerly 80%(ish) tallgrass prairie, now 99.9% of that prairie is gone. I spent a year of my pandemic quarantine back at the University of Iowa studying for a Certificate in Sustainability and working on prairie restorations. I heard of the Flint Hills and tried to imagine them often, as I worked on a one acre plot of prairie here and a three acre plot there, almost always surrounded by houses and their dreadful lawns. I knew I had to get there at some point to see what an untethered prairie can look like, what it can mean for it to have always existed.

During my time back at UIowa, I started writing songs about what I was learning – the devastating effects of the way we treat our world, both ecological and human. I saw that the numbers were too big to be believed, and that human stories were needed to get the point across. Up and down the Flint Hills I felt that inspiration come back as I wandered the hills, smelled the prairie sage, kept my respectful distance from bison, and heard stories from people who live and work there, snapping polaroids along the way.

I was honored to play to an attentive and engaged audience at The Dusty Bookshelf in Manhattan and met so many wonderful people. I played the three songs I had completed and they reaffirmed that I was on the right track. It was over half way through the residency and I had become satisfied with the work I had done to that point, but meeting a crowd that understood the songs got the wheels turning again and the pen started scratching again.

I pulled out of Matfield Station 10 days later with five completed(ish) songs and the starts of a dozen others. Some about the Flint Hills in particular, others ideas that had been kicking around my head for years, waiting for their opportunity to pop out. I am eternally grateful for the time I was gifted in those hills. It has inspired me to, as difficult as it can be, carve out just an hour or two a week to write again, and I have been! The album I have been hacking away at is coming into focus and just a song or two away from the next step. 

Attached are several polaroids I took during my time at Matfield Station. I have no doubt they will end up as album art at some point. Thank you to the people of Matfield Green and the Tallgrass Artist Residency for your hospitality and space. I’ll never stop being inspired by the Flint Hills.

— Brian Johannesen 

Brian Johannesen is a singer-songwriter, landscape polaroid photographer, and talent buyer in Iowa City, IA. He has recorded five albums, including his latest, Holster Your Silver, which was released in January of 2020, shortly before the world changed. Once the pandemic hit, it derailed all the plans he had laid for the next year, and ultimately the trajectory of his life and career, as it did for so many. Brian decided to take a step back. He had been creating music and working in the industry since he was a teenager. He decided to pursue another passion – nature and sustainability. He had always been a National Parks buff, carving days out of his tours to visit as many as possible, taking polaroid photos of the landscapes and selling them at his merch table. He had also started to dive deep into the climate crisis, a passion that started back in 2007 when he saw Al Gore give his famous An Inconvenient Truth presentation as a freshman at Arizona State University. He decided to go back to school and earned a Certificate in Sustainability from the University of Iowa. As he studied, his worlds collided. He realized the most effective way to communicate the effects of the climate disaster was through telling the human stories of those impacted. Since then he has been gathering these stories, through travel and research, compiling them into a cohesive piece – a snapshot of a planet on the brink – like a polaroid, fuzzy, grainy, and uniquely its own.