Backstage at the Daisy Chain Fields festival in Irvine in August, Devon Johanningmeier was surrounded by legends. Among them was her friend Olivia Rodrigo, who booked Johanningmeier, who played the role of Devon Again, early on. Also hanging around backstage: Sarah McLachlan, Kathleen Hanna, Chappell Roan and Shirley Manson. It’s not something you really get used to when you’re 25.
“I looked at Stevie Nicks. I watched her move around,” Johanningmeier said, curled up like a cat on the living room couch for an interview on a rare, quiet afternoon in October before her tour began.
Did he introduce himself? “I couldn’t bring myself to do it,” he said. “This has already been an extremely emotional day. I can’t go talk to Stevie Nicks.”
He better learn how to do it. Devon Again is one of alt-pop’s hottest bands. Beyond just a few EPs, his complex, dream-logic electro-folk-rock has captivated his A-list peers. It opens a lengthy stretch of Rodrigo’s current arena tour, including 10 nights at the Intuit Dome in January, and he recently signed on to Roan producer Dan Nigro’s Interscope series.
“She has such a special energy and voice and is also an incredible human being. She jumped straight into Daisy Chain Fields at the 11th hour without even a second thought,” Rodrigo told The Times via email. “Her voice and aesthetic are exactly like her. Vulnerable, raw and beautiful.”
A better scenario could not have been written for a young artist, and Johanningmeier is acutely aware of the opportunity here. But the risks of the kind of fame that her friends in Daisy Chain Fields have earned, enjoyed and shunned are beginning to set in.
“It absolutely scares me. The more famous you are, the more people behind you who want and need you to do good,” Johanningmeier said. “My friends from high school have great lives and unique perspectives on how to make the world better. Wherever we talk, I say, ‘Oh, I’m a real person. I’m not just a product I sell.'”
“This absolutely scares me,” Johanningmeier said. “The more famous you become, the more people behind you who want and need you to do good.”
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
For now, Johanningmeier is still living the life of a typical twenty-something musician in Los Angeles. She has a few roommates in a small house in an artsy neighborhood on the east side, where her detergent blue ombre haircut and studded septum piercing are extremely strict. There’s a giant crocodile on his bed, and a giant sword hangs over the kitchen counter.
“I’m so lucky to live with really good friends because it’s a crazy thing to experience,” she said. “I remember crying about the Olivia tour at the end: ‘This is different. This is bigger than anything I’ve ever done in my career, and it’s a real thing that happened, not something that could have happened or would have been amazing if it had happened.'”
It’s a far cry from where Johanningmeier grew up in Colorado as a “typical angry and lonely teenager” who ran a Hayley Williams stan page and listened to metalcore bands like Bring Me the Horizon. In his youth, he briefly lived with his mother in a sober living home while her mother sought treatment. (“We are very close, he has always been super supportive and he really says that,” Johanningmeier said.)
At 18, Johanningmeier moved to Los Angeles, where her first apartment was a “co-living kind of thing” in East Hollywood — “There were 24 people in one house. Have you seen those airport pods?” he recalled. Her early music took off on TikTok during the pandemic, where she developed a sound that was slightly different from the aching songwriter fare and exuberant electro-pop that defined that era. The writing and production of Devon Again had an eye for strange, wild detail and an endearing sense of humor (one of the first EPs was simply titled “Pee.”).
With her 2025 EP “In Order,” she captured her breakthrough single “Cherry Cola” — with euphoric, explosive, Kerouac-esque love. “Loving you is like sipping syrup, sugar, sticky soda,” he sings. “Sugar coat me, I’m so lucky to know you.”
“This is a love song I wrote after a breakup. Every song I wrote made me so angry, made me overthink myself into a deep, dark hole,” he said. “This song was more like, ‘Oh my God, it feels so big and like I’m full of bees.’ I learned that if that feeling is happening, you shouldn’t kill the idea because you’re afraid.”
Johanningmeier said, “Every song I wrote made me very angry, making me overthink myself into a deep, dark hole.” “[‘Cherry Cola’] it was more like ‘Oh my God, it feels so big and like I was full of bees.’ “I’ve learned this: If this feeling is happening, don’t kill the idea because you’re afraid.”
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
The video is an absolute filth fest in Los Angeles; He pops a Cronenberg-worthy pimple, fights cops with his VR headset, and rides a “Gaymo” to meet his crush. But he can also write a story song rich in detail (“People Vs. Maryanne Sue”) and a painful melancholy at the same time. “Once Again” finds him screaming into the void through grief-soaked vocal treatments: “This is how I gotta pay for it / But at this point it’s pain porn,” he howls. “I’m yelling at the rain pouring down outside / ‘Come on, do it, I can take more.’”
This diversity won the favor of his primary collaborator, producer Jon Buscema, who crafted Cat Power’s blend of folk confessionals, triggered drum loops, and electroshock rock. “In the early days when I was writing ‘Head’ and ‘Deep,’ I felt like I was driving a race car,” Buscema said. “Devon has a very clear point of view, and he’s very emotional, and he’s just like himself. When you find the things that he really likes to talk about, it almost doesn’t matter what they are, because the bottom line of them is just him.”
Buscema has been working with Dan Nigro, the super-producer behind Rodrigo and Roan, who began building his Amusement Records imprint (which is now partnered with Interscope). No one has a better track record of helping young female artists express their emotional lives and find their balance writing-wise on a record, and then making that record a huge hit. Devon Again is the second artist signed to his own record label.
While Nigro takes on more of an A&R role with Devon Again, his support is a strong voucher. The last artist to embark on the Rodrigo arena tour under his guidance was, of course, Roan.
“It’s important for me to have a wide emotional range; to be able to dip in and out of music that feels sarcastic and fun, and then really go deep,” Nigro said of Devon Again’s catalogue. “But the one thing I’ve learned from the success of Olivia, Chappell and Conan Gray is that things are actually very different. There’s a different way it goes. It’s very important not to let either of them influence your view forward, because thinking you know the answer to how to do something will often distract you from the real answer.”
“I think the one thing I’ve learned from the success of Olivia, Chappell and Conan Gray is that things are actually very different,” said super producer Dan Nigro, who signed Devon Again to his own series. “Every path has a different path.”
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
While Devon Again completes his first album, which he has been working on for a long time (he hopes to release it next year), his new music is equally slippery, even at odds with the pop star he is very close to.
June’s single, “Snake the Drain,” took a Skynyrd-style bayou rock riff and brute-forced a hook on the factory floor in Nashville — “Words aren’t enough to bring me home to the dishes being done / It’s great to love you, but baby, love ain’t wasted.” Hearing this from a blue-haired, nose-ringed Los Angeles pop singer showed that she really could do anything.
“We were making so much music that felt like a boiling soup of sadness, and this is a very country song,” he said. “It’s interesting that I thought, ‘Yeah, I love this, this is me.'”
Johanningmeier may soon have everything he wants in music, but it won’t make fame any easier. Now he can still stop by the neighborhood bakery or the coffee shop where his roommates work without too much trouble. That will change after this Rodrigo arena tour and playing to nearly 200,000 people in full stands at the Intuit Dome.
“It’s so weird that it takes up so much of my brain space when I think about fame, visibility, money and power,” he said. “There was a period where I got really depressed thinking about it. When I started becoming friends with Olivia, I started to understand the possibility of my life going in that direction because, at its core, it can be a little dark and isolating.”
Rodrigo is confident that Devon Again can stay true to its vision through it all. “I need to watch some [Daisy Chain Fields] “I went backstage and I was so proud of it,” Rodrigo said. “I think the great thing about pop right now is that everyone is doing what they want to do.”
But social media scrutiny, parasocial fans, and the impossibility of living up to everyone’s hopes for you can dull your spirit. “When I watch famous people I know interact with the world, everyone pays attention to how you express something or how much you care,” Johanningmeier said. “Especially if you’re a woman, no matter how you act, people always have something to say. There’s really no room for you to have a bad day.”
“When I started becoming friends with Olivia, I began to understand the possibility of my life moving in this direction,” Johanningmeier said. “Because at its core it can be a little dark and isolating.”
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
Its makers experience this preemptive anxiety. “One of the biggest challenges of our lives right now is trying to make everyone happy but not losing ourselves in the process,” Buscema said. “One thing I learned about Devon over time was that he needed the space around him protected. He needed to feel good about himself in order to make good music.”
“I think the most important thing whenever you’re recording is knowing your boundaries, like, ‘I want to work, I want to be productive, and then I really want to take some time off,'” said Nigro, who has helped many artists navigate this crazy peak of fame. “Try to give people a space where they can feel free to make music. Keep distance. Then you can figure out what excited you about it to begin with.”
For Devon Again, we hope this will result in a debut album that fully captures the disillusionment and turbulent fragility of his generation. This could also mean making friends with people who made him fall in love with music.
“I was at a show recently and my roommate said, ‘Hayley Williams is standing behind you,'” Johanningmeier said. “I actually started crying. I couldn’t look at it. I’ve never been a fan of anything else that was so parasocial. Looking at it felt like I was looking at my 15-year-old self.”