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May 04, 2017 By Christopher Roberts Chromatics

Johnny Jewel and his band Chromatics were supposed to release a new full-length album, Dear Tommy, in 2015 (it was announced in December 2014). Despite several songs from the album being released, the album never saw the light of day, continually being promised as coming soon. Now the mystery has been partly solved. Jewel’s manager, Alexis Rivera, has revealed in a series of tweets that Jewel had a near-death experience in Hawaii on Christmas Day 2015 and afterwards he destroyed all copies of Dear Tommy in order to re-record it to better capture the sound he was going for. “Christmas day 2015, Johnny almost died in Hawaii. I don’t want to go into details, but I’m sure he’ll discuss it in interviews at some point,” Rivera wrote on Twitter. “When he came back home to California he destroyed all copies of Tommy. 15K CDs & 10K vinyl in the Italians warehouse in Glendale, all gone.”

“Is it weird to destroy & delete your album once it’s done? Fuck yes. It’s also financially insane. But it wasn’t the first time he’s done it,” wrote Rivera in another tweet. Apparently he did the same thing with Chromatics’ last album, 2012’s Kill For Love, but that wasn’t made public. And of course Kill For Love ended up being an acclaimed album.

All of Dear Tommy has been re-recorded and it will have the same songs and tracklist, but who knows when it will actually be out. All of the previous versions of Dear Tommy tracks have been removed from the Internet apart from “Shadow,” which is below. Chromatics and Jewel are appearing in the new season of Twin Peaks and a previous promotional photo featured broken copies of Dear Tommy and this explains why. Check out all the tweets below, via Pitchfork.

Christmas day 2015 Johnny almost died in Hawaii. I don’t want to go into details, but I’m sure he’ll discuss it in interviews at some point.

— Alexis Rivera (@echoparkrecords) May 3, 2017

When we announced “Twin Peaks” in March, you can see some of those broken Tommy records https://t.co/Ink9W8hI24

— Alexis Rivera (@echoparkrecords) May 3, 2017

March of 2011: Glass Candy was playing in Guadalajara & Johnny gave me a box of Kill For Love CDs. He wanted the album out later that month.

— Alexis Rivera (@echoparkrecords) May 3, 2017

Johnny destroyed the CDs & vinyl of that version of Kill For Love in April 2011. Publicly no one knew. But it kickstarted a creative streak

— Alexis Rivera (@echoparkrecords) May 3, 2017

He even referenced the other version of Kill For Love (and multiple changes) in an interview with @pitchfork in 2012 https://t.co/PZTySumQOU pic.twitter.com/8c7XBsS14l

— Alexis Rivera (@echoparkrecords) May 3, 2017

.@pitchfork As for Dear Tommy, now that we are getting closer to the release of the album, Johnny wanted the music from it to come down

— Alexis Rivera (@echoparkrecords) May 3, 2017

.@pitchfork “Dear Tommy” has the same titles, same lyrics, same track order, as when it was announced Dec of 2014. Nothing’s changed except it’s better

— Alexis Rivera (@echoparkrecords) May 3, 2017

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