Story
Songs as stories
“Telling the listener how it really is.”
Coral Johnston grew up in Florida, where she started writing songs on an acoustic guitar in her bedroom in high school. She writes songs as stories, often after time has given her some distance from what happened. The feelings are always true, even when a few details move around to serve the story. She treats the silence in a song as part of it, not a gap to fill.
She's now a commercial music senior at the University of North Texas in Denton. She met producer and multi-instrumentalist Brody Silver right after freshman orientation, and the two started recording her songs in a dorm closet. Since then she's released the Warm Enough EP (2025) and her debut album Familiar (November 2026), recorded with her band and a room full of Denton players on pedal steel, fiddle, mandolin, strings and woodwinds.
When she isn't playing, she's usually outside: camping and hiking in Big Bend, or speaking up for the Florida Everglades. This past summer she taught kids at a Florida youth camp about swamp ecology.
Drawn from her interviews with Jambaloo Live and the North Texas Daily, and her Spotify bio.
