Amanda Sudano and Abner Ramirez, the husband and wife duo JOHNNYSWIM, have an undeniable connection, with music at the root of it. “The music is a symptom of us supposed to be together,” Ramirez tells American Songwriter. “It happens to be a vocabulary we both share, an output from our souls that helps us connect to each other.”
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Long before they came together as a duo, both Sudano and Ramirez had been steeped in music since childhood. Raised in Jacksonville, Florida, Ramirez recalls being mystified, at the age of seven, by a guest singer at church one Sunday morning. “He was amazing. It was like my world was rocked,” he says. Insistent on buying the singer’s cassette tape, Ramirez and his mother went to the merch table after the performance when he turned to her and said, “It’s so crazy that he’s got to go back to work tomorrow,” to which she replied, “‘No son, this is his job.’” “I said, ‘That’s going to be my job, too,’” the future singer-songwriter proclaimed. “That was truly the beginning.”
As the daughter of legendary Donna Summer and hit songwriter Bruce Sudano, music has been a part of Sudano’s life since birth. Between her parents constantly writing and touring together to family gatherings where music was the centerpiece, Sudano’s innate talent was nurtured from an early age.
“I was completely inundated with music all throughout my life,” she says, describing herself as “the most shy person in my family.” Sudano often requested CDs for every birthday and holiday and spent hours-on-end listening to music, obsessing over the lyrics. “From the time I was little, my parents would write songs with us. It was always an outlet that I felt really connected to,” she says. Sudano still vividly remembers the moment she felt called to play music professionally with her headphones on while driving in the car with her parents. “‘I think this is supposed to be what I do in life,’” she recalls saying. “It was terrifying to me. I used to pray, ‘God, can you give me the desire to do something else?’ I knew I loved [music]; it just didn’t seem to go with my introversion.”
Despite her stage fright, Sudano couldn’t deny her passion for music and soon started honing her songwriting. She experienced another epiphany in adulthood, realizing she would regret not pursuing music solely out of fear. “I know that if later on in life, regardless of what I do and how successful I am at anything else, [there] will always be a part of me that thinks, ‘I really wanted to do that. That was the thing I really wanted,’” she says. “I was like, ’I just have to climb the mountain one foot at a time.’”
Much like his future wife, Ramirez began writing songs as a child. He got to hone his talent even further when he transferred to Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in his junior year of high school, which opened his mind to the possibility that he could incorporate “practical application” to his passion for music.His emerging skills were also nurtured by his parents, who emigrated to the United States from Cuba and passed their tenacious spirit onto their son.
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“When I think about my parents’ encouragement, it was laser-focused. ‘If you can make a life out of something you’re passionate about, then you can count yourself blessed,’” he says of their advice. “Songwriting was always a part of the story.” Sudano’s famous parents took a more hands-on approach to their daughter’s growing interest in songwriting. She’d often ride her bike outside the stable-turned-studio on the family’s farm while her parents were recording. Her father would even pull her into the vocal booth to write or prompt her to write a song about the weather. “It became part of my journaling of how I express myself, to myself,” she says of songwriting.
The story of how the couple met echoes the lyrics in “Alchemy” off their new album When the War is Over. We just belong / It’s chemical / Of course I would find you / Of course you would find me too / We’re alchemy, Sudano sings on the opening track. Ramirez recalls seeing Sudano for the first time at a church service in Nashville, proclaiming to himself as he watched her walk away, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.”
“The day I saw Amanda changed my life,” he says. “When I saw Amanda, I felt the things I knew that needed to change in my life. I realized I’m not the person that I want to be. It affected everything.”
Sudano also remembers seeing Ramirez at church on that fateful day, yet the two didn’t officially meet until four years later when Ramirez invited her to one of his shows. “I remember looking at my friend going, ‘I think I want to marry him or write songs with him,’” she says.
What started as a casual songwriting partnership soon blossomed into a romantic relationship, the couple married in 2009 and have since welcomed three children. JOHNNYSWIM released their debut self-titled EP in 2008, followed by four studio albums. “We have a vacuum for honesty and sincere songwriting,” Ramirez says. “The job is only complete if we wrote something sincerely that truly reflected the sentiment in us that we were trying to get out. We realized that we both approached songwriting in that way, that the honesty, above all, has to be real. The songwriting was never a means to an end; it was a journey unto itself. We both approached it that way.”
When the War is Over, the duo’s fifth full-length studio album, released in February 2025, came out of a dark period in the couple’s journey. Sudano says that when getting back into the flow of life after the pandemic, she noticed her typically “optimistic” husband was dealing with an “unshakeable darkness” daily. But just as Ramirez was overcoming his first experience with depression, Sudano was suddenly facing her own health struggles. When the War is Over captures how they navigated the intense changes as a couple and became stronger for it.
“The title of our album was really a diary entry of me going, ‘When we’re out of the season, I’m not going to know how to be a normal person anymore. I feel like I’m so locked into this struggle that we’ve had that I don’t even know how to be normal anymore,’” Sudano says, describing it as a “midlife crisis album.” “This album was very therapeutic to write because we were processing so much. We didn’t have as much of a songwriter filter on this album.”
Over the course of 11 songs, one can hear their deep connection in the glowing harmonies as they explore topics ranging from comparing oneself to others (“Frank Gehry”) to Ramirez honoring his parents’ immigration journey on “Cuando Salí De Cuba.” One of the most personal tracks is “She Checks the Weather.” Sudano admits that she could “barely move” on the day it was written, the lyrics acknowledging how she had to hide her pain as she sings When they shower her with love / She just feels pressure / ‘Cause she knows they all want her to get better / So she staggers to her feet / Let the tears stain her cheeks again.
“So often in the writing of this, because I physically didn’t feel well, it felt like I was giving everything I had, and it was not quite enough,” she says. “To see that the people that needed [the song] really appreciated having it was such a life-giving thing for me. It was very empowering.”
Another personal moment arrives on “Psilocybin,” a piano ballad that finds the couple looking back on this difficult season, committed to one another despite the changes they go through as individuals. If you change, I’m changing too / If you change, I change with you, Sudano sings in the defining chorus.
“I think a great fear I had in my first experience with depression was that I would become somebody that I wasn’t and that she would lose interest,” Ramirez says. The song acknowledges, If he’s not the man I married, I won’t be the woman he married either. We’re going to change together. “There’s a sense of freedom in this album,” he adds. “I feel like it’s the most honest album we’ve ever written because so much has been revealed to us about ourselves and our journey and our fears and triumphs and struggles, and we gave it in every song. It wasn’t ever about being great; it was about being honest, and in that we succeeded.”
Knowing the struggles that shaped this album, JOHNNYSWIM hopes the songs provide a sense of healing for listeners going through their own strife. “I hope that people will hear the things that they need if they feel alone or depressed or are going through a health issue, that they can listen and go, ‘This is the thing that can make me feel like I’m not alone’ and bring some light to what they’re going through in a way that makes them be able to understand and process it themselves,” Sudano says. “I hope that the process of us having therapy through writing this can be therapeutic for them.”
Ramirez draws a comparison to when he and his sister took an aerial silks class for the first time and the difficulty he had pulling himself up to the point where he quit after the second failed attempt. That’s when he heard his sister’s voice encouraging him to try again. “I yanked myself up, and there was this dopamine hit of triumph, of getting past this hurdle that seconds before felt impossible,” he says. “I hope this album can be that [for] somebody that needs to push past this one thing. Maybe it’s the confidence that tomorrow can be better than today. Maybe it’s the hope that whatever terrible feeling you’re feeling right now isn’t going to last forever. I hope it helps somebody.”
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