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 performs as Devon Again, for an early-day slot. Also milling around backstage: Sarah McLachlan, Kathleen Hanna, Chappell Roan and Shirley Manson. Not something you really get used to by 25.
“I looked at Stevie Nicks. I watched her walk around,” Johanningmeier said, curled up like a cat on her living room couch, for an interview on a rare slow afternoon in October before her tour kicks off.
Did she introduce herself? “I couldn’t bring myself to do it,” she said. “This has already been too emotional of a day. I can’t go speak to Stevie Nicks.”
She’d better learn how to. Devon Again is one of the most hotly-tipped acts in alt-pop. Over just a smattering of EPs, her intricate, dream-logic electro-folk-rock has captivated A-list peers. She’s opening a long stretch of Rodrigo’s current arena tour, including 10 nights at the Intuit Dome in January, and just signed to Roan producer Dan Nigro’s Interscope imprint.
“She has such a specific energy and sound, and is also just an incredible person. She jumped right into Daisy Chain Fields in the 11th hour without even a second thought,” Rodrigo told The Times via email. “Her sound and aesthetic feel exactly like her. It’s vulnerable and raw and beautiful.”
You couldn’t script a better pedigree for a young artist, and Johanningmeier is extremely aware of the opportunity here. But the risks of fame — the kind her friends at Daisy Chain Fields have won, savored and recoiled from — is settling in too.
“It definitely frightens me. The more famous you are, the more people there are behind you who also want and need you to do good,” Johanningmeier said. “My friends from high school have such beautiful lives and unique perspectives on how to make the world better. Anytime where that’s we’re talking about, I’m like, ‘Ah, I’m a real person. I’m not just a product that I’m selling.’”
For now, Johanningmeier still lives a typical twentysomething musician’s life in L.A. She has a few roommates in a small house in an artsy east side neighborhood, where her detergent-blue ombré haircut and spiked septum piercing are de rigueur. She has a giant stuffed alligator on her bed and an enormous sword hanging over the kitchen counter.
“I’m so lucky that I live with really good friends, because this is a crazy thing to be experiencing,” she said. “I remember the eventual cry that I had about the Olivia tour, just being like, ‘This is different. This is bigger than anything I’ve ever done in my career so far, and it’s a real thing that’s happening, not a thing that could happen or would be cool if it did.’”
It’s a long way off from where Johanningmeier grew up in Colorado, as a “typical angsty and lonely teen” manning a Hayley Williams stan page and listening to metalcore bands like Bring Me the Horizon. As a youth, she lived briefly with her mother at a sober living home while her mom sought treatment. (“We’re super close, she’s always been super supportive and she really means it,” Johanningmeier said.)
Johanningmeier moved to L.A. at 18, where her first apartment was a “communal living type thing” in East Hollywood — “It was 24 people in a house. Have you seen those airport pods?” she recalled. Her early music took off on TikTok during the pandemic, where she honed a sound just askew of the pained songwriter fare and exuberant electro-pop that defined that era. Devon Again had an ear for strange, feral details in her writing and production, with an endearingly squicky sense of humor (one early EP was simply titled “Pee.”)
She caught her stride with 2025’s EP “In Order,” which sports her calling-card single “Cherry Cola” — an exultant, explosive, Kerouac-ian infatuation. “Loving you is just like sipping on straight syrup, sugar, sticky soda,” she sings. “Cover me in candy, I’m so lucky that I get to know you.”
“It’s a love song that I wrote after a breakup. Every other song that I wrote was making me so mad, just overthinking myself into a deep dark hole,” she said. “That song was more like ‘Oh my gosh, it just feels big and like I’m full of like bees.’ I learned that if that feeling is happening, don’t kill the idea because you’re scared of it.”
The video is an L.A. dirtbag delight — she pops a Cronenberg-worthy zit, fights cops in a VR headset and rides a “Gaymo” off to meet a crush. But she can write a detail-rich story-song (“People Vs. Maryanne Sue”) and lacerating melancholy too. “Overagain” finds her yelling into the void through grief-smeared vocal treatments: “This is how I oughta pay for it / But at this point, it’s pain porn,” she howls. “Outside screaming at the rain pouring / ‘Come on, do it, I can take more.’”
That range won over producer Jon Buscema, her primary collaborator who wrangles her mix of Cat Power folk confessionals, tripped-out drum loops and electroshocked rock. “In the early days, writing ‘Head’ and ‘Deep,’ it felt like I was driving a race car,” Buscema said. “Devon has such a clear perspective and she’s so emotional and so just like herself. When you find those things that really like speak, it almost doesn’t matter what they are because the essence of them is just her.”
Buscema works with Dan Nigro, the super-producer behind Rodrigo and Roan, who was beginning to build out his imprint Amusement Records (which is now partnered with Interscope). No one has a better track record of helping young women artists articulate their emotional lives and writerly poise on record, and then making that record a smash hit. Devon Again is the second artist he signed to his label.
While Nigro is taking more of an A&R role with Devon Again, his endorsement is a powerful vouch. The last emerging artist under his guidance who opened for an Rodrigo arena tour was, of course, Roan.
“Having a big emotional range is important to me — being able to weave in and out of music that feels sarcastic and fun, and then getting really deep,” Nigro said of Devon Again’s catalog. “But the one thing that I learned from the success of Olivia and Chappell and Conan Gray is that everything is actually so different. Every trajectory has a different path. It’s quite important to not let either one of them influence how you view going forward, because thinking you know the answer of how to do something usually inhibits you from the actual answer.”
While Devon Again finishes her long-simmering debut album — she hopes to have it out next year — her new music is just as slippery, even confrontational to the pop stardom she’s so close to.
June’s single “Snake the Drain” took a Skynyrd-style bayou rock riff and manhandled a hook off the Nashville factory floor — “Words don’t make me come home to the dishes done / Loving you is great, but baby, love don’t snake the drain.” Hearing that from a blue-haired L.A. pop singer with a nose ring showed she really can do anything.
“We were making so much music that felt like a swirling stew of sadness, and this is such a country song,” she said. “It’s interesting that I was like, ‘Yes, I love this, it’s mine.’”
Johanningmeier may soon get everything she’s wanted in music, but that won’t make fame any easier. Right now, she can still pop by the neighborhood bakery or the coffeeshop where her roommates work without much fuss. After this Rodrigo arena tour, and playing to around 200,000 people over the full stand at Intuit Dome, that will change.
“It’s so weird that it takes up so much of my brain space, thinking about fame and visibility and money and power,” she said. “I had a point of time where I was really depressed thinking about it. When I started becoming friends with Olivia, I started to understand the possibility of my life moving in that direction, because at its core, it can be kind of dark and isolating.”
Rodrigo is confident Devon Again can stay true to her vision in spite of all that. “I got to watch some of that [Daisy Chain Fields] set backstage and was so proud of her,” Rodrigo said. “I think what’s so great about pop right now is everyone is doing what they want to do.”
Yet the social-media scrutiny, the parasocial fans and the impossibility of meeting everyone’s hopes for you — they can curdle your spirit. “Watching people I know who are famous interact with the world, everyone is paying attention to how you phrase something, or how caring you are,” Johanningmeier said. “Especially if you’re a woman, people always have s— to say, regardless of how you’re acting. There’s not really leeway to have a bad day.”
Her producers get that preemptive anxiety. “It’s one of the biggest struggles of our lives right now, trying to make everyone happy but not lose ourselves in the process,” Buscema said. “Something I learned about Devon over time is that she needs the space around her protected. She needs to feel good to make good music.”
“I think the most important thing, whenever you’re making a record, is knowing your limits, like ‘I want to work, I want to be productive, and then actually take some time off,’” said Nigro, who helped several artists navigate this cusp of insane fame. “Try to give people space to feel free in in making music. Take distance. Then you can understand what made you excited about it in the beginning.”
For Devon Again, that hopefully will yield a debut album that fully captures her generation’s campy disenchantment and roiling vulnerability. It might also mean befriending the people that made her fall in love with music in the first place.
“I was at a show recently and my roommate was like, ‘Hayley Williams is standing behind you,’” Johanningmeier said. “I actually started crying. I couldn’t look at her. I’ve never been a fan of anything else in that way, where it’s so parasocial. When I was looking at her, it felt like I was looking at my 15-year-old self.”
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