Song-a-day YouTube artist is at hundreds of tunes

ST. PETER, Minn. (AP) - On Jan. 11, exactly 859 days ago, Zachary Scot Johnson sat down in front of the computer, picked up his guitar and pressed record.

"Hey everybody!" he said. "My name is Zachary Scot Johnson!"

He welcomed them to the "song-a-day" project.

"I'm going try to do a song every day for as long as I can manage to keep doing that," he said, running his hand over the strings of his guitar.

"This is the first one."

Johnson, who moved to St. Peter earlier this month, is a 32-year-old singer/songwriter from Racine, Wisconsin. His wife, Megan Flod Johnson, is the new program manager at the Children's Museum of Southern Minnesota.

The traveling performer has made a name for himself, he said, primarily due to the Internet.

With more than 30 million views and 9,652 subscribers, his hit YouTube channel "thesongadayproject," has landed him interviews with just about every major TV and radio network in the U.S. Over 50 guests have appeared on the channel, including Jeff Daniels, Noel Paul Stookey, Creed Bratton, Lisa Loeb, Mary Gauthier, Mary Black, David Wilcox, Ellis Paul and Lucero.

Some of his videos have well over 50,000 views, while others have closer to 300. One of the most popular is his cover of Elliott Smith's "Waltz No. 2," which Johnson said is "the saddest song ever written."

"I'm not just playing a song every day, I'm learning a song every day now," Johnson told The Free Press of Mankato (http://bit.ly/1yZLw6Z).

He blasted through just about every song in his repertoire only a few months into the project. That includes all of his own original work - though he performs mostly covers, Johnson writes an average of 20 to 25 songs of his own every year.

He plays piano, guitar, banjo, harmonica, violin, mandolin, viola, bass and more.

"This has been really good for my career, from a songwriting perspective too," Johnson said. "It fine tunes your craft a little bit. Of course, you have to make peace with the concept of everything, every song, not being the greatest thing you've ever done."

The first song Johnson recorded for the YouTube channel was a cover of Donovan's "Catch the Wind," one of his favorite to perform. Since then he's recorded entire albums worth of songs, by such artists as Bob Dylan, Kasey Musgraves, Bruce Springsteen and others.

The videos stick to their original format. They are recorded completely live, with absolutely no editing - with the exception of the channel's special two-year anniversary video featuring Emmy-award winner Jeff Daniels - and Johnson has yet to skip a day.

He props his iPhone up against a book or vase, presses record and shoots the videos from wherever he happens to be each day, either at home, in a hotel room, at a family member's house or backstage before a concert.

Many of them are shot in his living room. More than once, one of his dogs has wandered past the screen mid-song. And more than once, Johnson has performed while sick.

"I don't ever think about quitting," he said. "It's been so good for my career, I'd be an idiot to quit. ... It can be inconvenient sometimes."

The YouTube videos boost attendance at his concerts, he said. He currently books upward of 75 gigs a year and hopes to start performing locally within the next few months.

While the "song a day" project doesn't sell CDs, few people buy albums now anyway, he said. That's one reason he started the YouTube channel in the first place.

He's even considering releasing his next album on vinyl, just for the heck of it. He hopes to finish it this June, by which point he'll have hit 1,000 YouTube songs

"Maybe I'll stop when I get to 5,000 or 10,000 songs," he said. "It sounds a bit crazy, but I think it's possible."

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Online:

The Song A Day Project on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/thesongadayproject

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Information from: The Free Press, http://www.mankatofreepress.com