With the instant access to music that's such a basic part of our lives today, it's almost impossible to visualize how radically different things were not that long ago. Take, for example, the tale of singer-songwriter Freedy Johnston (born 1961), who grew up in the tiny town of Kinsley, Kansas, and bought his first guitar at age 16 via a mail-order catalog. When he was 17, Johnston had to have a friend drive him to the nearest record store, which was 35 miles away, so he could buy an Elvis Costello record that he'd read about. But the two actions set him on his path, and by the early 1990s he was living in New York and had begun making acclaimed albums full of his character-driven songs, such as his 1992 breakthrough Can You Fly and 1993 major-label debut, This Perfect World, the latter home to the Billboard Hot 100 hit "Bad Reputation."
