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Oh He Dead (who play the WXPN Free at Noon on Friday Nov. 1, 2024) are headed to their debut show on Valentine’s Day 2025 for a soulful love fest full of music! Their venue opening performance at Elkton Music Hall in 2023 is already the stuff of legend, so Arden is excited to finally be able to present the band.
“Anyone listening to Oh He Dead’s new album, “Ugly,” might find it hard to imagine that huge-voiced frontwoman CJ Johnson didn’t know she could sing when she started performing in musicals at a D.C. charter school. Her first role was in “Rent,” which updates “La Bohème” to New York’s AIDS-haunted East Village in the late 1980s.
“A bunch of ninth-graders doing ‘Rent’! That is outrageous,” Johnson recalls with a laugh.
“I had no intentions of singing after high school,” says the distinctively raspy vocalist. “One of my teachers heard me sing for the first time, and she was like, ‘What are you doing after you leave high school? Are you going to do something with your voice?’”
Johnson laughs again at a question about what her career plans had been. “Nobody’s ever asked me that,” she replies. “I was going to go to school for psychology and sexual health, and I was going to be a sex therapist.”
The former teacher awed by Johnson’s voice, Claire Newbegin, now manages the band. “She just really believed in me,” the singer says. “I didn’t see what she saw in me. Now I understand, but at the time I did not.”” – Mark Jenkins, Washington Post