Welcome to the world, of Daniel Johnston.

Daniel Johnston, a singer-songwriter and visual artist whose childlike, haunted songs brought him acclaim as one of America’s most gifted outsiders. Throughout his life, Johnston suffered from mental illness, yet in the spirit of hope, this helped his work become even more profound in his continuing artistic journey throughout his lifetime. In a career filled with stops and starts, Mr. Johnston became something of a man-child celebrity of the artistic underground, earning the admiration of rock stars like Kurt Cobain and Tom Waits as well as comparisons to William Blake. Johnston became known by fellow musicians and the music press with songs, like “Speeding Motorcycle” and “Don’t Play Cards with Satan,” that had a poignant clarity yet showed glimpses of a fractured mind. Well-known for his strange, cartoonish art that decorated his tapes and were featured in his visual art works, Johnston repeated various images often that were always etched in his mind. One, “Hi, How Are You,” featured a froglike alien; the image became his signature. Winning acclaim for both his music and visual art, his cartoon drawings were even included in the Whitney Biennial exhibition in 2006 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.