Tickets for Johnson’s En Concert, In Hawaii shows go on sale Oct. 24, in-person only at the Hawaii Theatre box office [1130 Bethel St., Honolulu, (808) 528-0506]. Kokua Hawaii Foundation members will have the first chance to purchase tickets between 10 a.m. and 12 noon, before general public sales begin. Prices are $125, $100, $75 and $50, service fees included. Shows will begin at 8 p.m. both nights with a screening of En Concert, followed by a full acoustic set by Johnson and Gill.

During our phone call, Johnson discussed the upcoming Hawaii concerts, the En Concert film and CD, and his plans for his next studio album. We also asked why he's been giving away all of his tour proceeds to his non-profit foundations and whether Hawaii will always be home to him.

I got the sense reading Emmett’s En Concert director’s notes that the film kind of happened without some grand plan of, “Let’s put together a film of Jack Johnson’s summer tour or Europe.”

"Yeah. Whether he had some other ideas going on in his mind about how to trick me into doing it, that was better than to say, 'Let’s make a film where I follow you around and stuff.' So he just said, 'Hey, let’s just film the shows. That way we’ll just have them documented for down the line if we ever wanted to show our kids or put something out at some point.' He knows to always leave it very open-ended with me. (Laughs.) So he tricked me in that way, and came out and filmed them."

Did the project kind of sneak up on you while Emmett was filming it, before you could really do anything about it?

"No, no. It was very much after we were done with the tour. He would just say, 'Hey, I’ll show you some of the footage. See what you think. See if it’s worth doing something.' I liked it. Once I checked it out. He put together just some rough stuff of the performances and it all seemed worth doing something with."



Were you checking out the footage during the tour?

"No. Definitely not. I never listen to the shows or watch any footage on tour. I used to. It’s funny, the first tour we ever did, we were opening for Ben Harper. Ben was bigger at the time. So we were lucky enough that we had a real sound guy who was helping us out. … He would just record our set every night. And so, all of a sudden, at the end of the night, there’s a guy handing you a CD saying, 'Here’s your set from tonight.'

"We’d listen to it when we were driving in our car or something. And I didn’t really like it. It was just weird to think too much about it. Because then (after a show) you’d have a good feeling about the night (and) you’d listen back and hear some mistake you made and think, 'Aw, man!' … It didn’t seem positive. So after that I just never really listened to shows until after the tour was over.

"I haven’t watched this one (En Concert) that much. I just checked out a little bit. It was a hard thing because Emmett and I worked so much on surf films together. So it was a normal relationship that we worked together on films. But I just told him at some point, 'I don’t really want to be a part of the making of it. Just show it to me so I can make sure that there isn’t some interview part that I didn’t want in there, or something.' So he pretty much did this one. I just played the music."

That said, what do you like about the final cut of the film?

"It’s kind of a continuation of the filming from our surf films (Thicker Than Water, September Sessions). It definitely has a bit of a rambling, on-the-road feel. There’s not any kind of a grand message or anything. It doesn’t try to dig too deep into the personal lives of the people in the film. It’s more of a visual journey that shows a lot of the places we were at. It kind of shows what we’re doing. But very much in a dreamlike way. 

"There’s a movie called Jazz on a Summer’s Night, that I’ve always liked a lot. It shows performances from a lot of the great jazz musicians. In the middle of the songs, it just drifts off into showing some of the scenery around (where they were playing)—some real nice footage, whatever they got at the time. They just kind of blended it together in an abstract way. I think (En Concert) has a lot of that—just drifts into little parts that remind me of Thicker Than Water or September Sessions a little."




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