John Splithoff
Far From Here
John Splithoff was at a crossroads. The singer/songwriter had been living in New York City for ten years, scrapping and hustling on the local music scene. His 2018 single “Sing to You” was a Top Ten hit on the Adult Contemporary charts and helped him score a deal with a major label, but he had to figure out what came next.
“I just hit a wall,” he says. “I was stressing out in a lot of ways and feeling the city bearing down on me.”
So Splithoff made a big decision—actually, a series of big decisions. He traveled around the country, opening for various acts including Andy Grammer, Gabrielle Aplin, Ben Rector, MAX, QUINN XCII, Fletcher, and Toro y Moi, playing at Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo in 2018, recording his album All In throughout Covid lockdown in NYC. Then he got engaged and married his high school sweetheart in 2021 before he eventually moved to Los Angeles a few months later in 2022. He has continued touring non-stop since then, playing his own headlining shows and joining other acts as a guest, bringing his soulful genre bending style to high profile shows, domestically and internationally.
And from all of this change, exploration, confusion, and excitement came a rush of inspiration, which became the backbone of Splithoff’s new album Far From Here. “A lot of these songs are associated with a time and place that hold a lot of meaning to me,” he says. “I also noticed, within all that change, how my relationships ebbed and flowed—I felt closer to people I didn’t know as well, and I felt distant from people who I considered my best friends and family. So it’s been an eye opening path.”
The first song he wrote for the project was the last to be recorded—and then became the single selected to introduce the album. “I wrote ‘Tangled’ in Nashville, a week before moving to LA,” he explains. “I wrote it as I was packing things into moving boxes and my life just felt really messy. It has somewhat of an island feel, but it’s about intimacy and being wrapped up in the infatuation of somebody and how they make you feel.”
Concurrent with “Tangled,” though, Splithoff is also releasing “Magenta,” which he describes as “more personal, vulnerable, more complex lyrically—recounting memories and the passage of time within a relationship.” He notes that the eclectic sounds and emotional range that fill out the canvas of Far From Here—the sensibility captured in the album title—were intentional and important. “As I started to write, the overarching theme for the album came with it,” he says. “I felt the desire to write something that felt cohesive conceptually and resonated with all the movement and change I had been experiencing in my life.”
