These are well-crafted songs filled with hooks, engaging lyrics and memorable instrumentation. A perfect accompaniment for a variety of activities--from commuting on the subway with your iPod to hanging around the house to a road trip. I can't wait to see the band live.

I'm not as skilled with the written word as the previous reviewers, but I'll give it a go. I love this album. I love listening to it in the car, I love listening to it while cooking, and I love singing it to myself (sometimes without even knowing I'm doing it). & Me utilizes a huge array of instruments and sounds to take you from the isles of Greece and Hawaii, back to an intimate DC lounge, and then shoots you around the world again. The energy is palpable and the songwriting is truly unique. I loved every second of it and can't wait to hear what comes out on the next album!

With this debut record, Johnston has done what not many artists are not able to do: express the joy of creating, and capture its very essence. Many records feel painfully crafted and re-crafted to fit an artist’s image of what “it” is supposed to be. Jeff doesn’t seem to be occupied with any of that (not to say his craft is lacking, it’s not), instead he is more concerned with doing “it.” Find 34-minutes of your time, preferably on a bright sunny day in the green of the country somewhere, and play this little record. You won’t be disappointed.

Jeff Johnston has been known for some time now in the underbelly that is the DC music scene as something of a modern-day Renaissance Man. Artist, painter, sculptor, musician. Saints Relations, his debut album, does nothing to dispel that title. Bringing together an eclectic compendium of music styles and instruments that clash and gel and float wonderfully around the ears, he has here sowed the seeds of such an assured beginning that belays the very definition of debut. It’s a mature sound, a mature artist at work, and each track is crafted so that the music is interconnected in one’s subconscious. A story is told without having to resort to hackneyed clichés, and it is one that you want to hear again and again. ‘Family on Archer’ may well be the best example of the stylistic genre that Mr Johnston is single-handedly painting. The music wails, twists and turns, hanging almost in the wind -- you’re just not sure of the direction that it will head next. And that is good. So often we are faced with cookie cutter, heard-it-all-before efforts from popinjays and pretenders at large, but this is special if only for the fact that it is exactly what we have wanted to hear, we just didn’t know what to ask for. It’s what the repeat function was made for. Saints Relations is brief: but never before has 34 minutes been so endlessly satisfying. This is not a work to be pigeonholed and filed away; it is an album to be heard and experienced. So do so.