Amanda Sudano didn’t expect to break down in a public bathroom stall. But that’s where she found herself—half a world away from home, fresh off the release of a song that felt more like a diary entry than a single.
“We were out seeing a show, and I just left and cried in the bathroom stall for like 20 minutes,” she said. “I didn’t know I was going to feel so much releasing that. That’s never happened to me before.”
The song was “She Checks the Weather,” a sparse, chorus-less track about Sudano’s battle with chronic illness on their latest album, When the War Is Over. She and her husband, Abner Ramirez—who together make up Johnnyswim—had written it on a heavy day, the kind where all you can do is name the feeling and hope the act of naming makes it bearable.
They didn’t anticipate what would happen when it went live. The song struck a nerve, and suddenly, their inboxes were flooded with stories—strangers describing their own grief, trauma and chronic pain in vivid detail.
“The comments were beautiful, but they were also overwhelming,” Sudano said. “People were saying, ‘I’ve never had words for my chronic illness, or this deep trauma I’ve carried, and now I do.’ And then they would tell me all the details—their losses, their diagnoses, the things they hadn’t shared with anyone else.”
Ramirez saw what it was doing to her.
“I told her, ‘Babe, you need to stop reading the comments for a day,’” he said. “It’s an honor, but we can’t carry everyone’s stories well if we don’t pace ourselves.”
That kind of emotional weight wasn’t new. It had been building for years.
“This album started in a season where Abner was dealing with depression for the first time,” Sudano said. “Which is horrible for him, obviously—but also horrible for the people watching. You feel helpless.”
Just as Ramirez began to slowly recover, Sudano’s health collapsed. What began as vague fatigue and discomfort turned into something far more consuming.
“There was a lot of sadness and isolation,” she said. “We both went through so much at the same time, just in different ways.”
They didn’t set out to write a concept album. But songwriting became the only way they knew to survive.
“One of the things we’ve learned, sometimes uncomfortably, is that we discover how we really feel about things through songwriting,” Ramirez said. “We don’t always have the language for trauma or grief until we write a song about it.”
They’d experienced that in hindsight—playing old songs and realizing they’d been writing about something they hadn’t yet lived. This time, they knew what they were facing.
“We’d sit down to write and go, ‘OK, this is the thing. We need to talk about this,’” he said. “It wasn’t about making something perfect. It was about survival.”
Sudano added, “This album is probably the most diary-entry of any we’ve done. It wasn’t crafted. It was just honest.”
As vulnerable as it was to write those songs, it was even more intense to share them. And it made them realize how often people carry silent pain.
That’s something Ramirez wants to challenge, especially in faith spaces.
“Find a therapist,” he said. “And I don’t mean try one session. I mean really find someone you trust and can communicate with.”
He grew up Southern Baptist, where therapy was often misunderstood or stigmatized.
“In the church, it’s like, if you go to therapy, it’s because you don’t trust Jesus enough,” he said. “So you bury stuff. But man, when you squeeze a ketchup bottle—doesn’t matter how far down it is—the ketchup’s going to come out.”
That pressure, that buried fear, doesn’t disappear. It waits.
“Especially when the feeling has lasted for years, it’s easy to think, ‘This is just who I am now. This is how it will always feel,’” Sudano said. “But that’s not true.”
For her, healing didn’t begin with a solution. It began with courage—the courage to look directly at what scared her most.
“In my mind and heart, there’s nothing I have to be afraid to approach in myself,” she said. “If I’m afraid of dying—which I was when I was really sick—I need to bring light into that space. Sit with it. Ask why it’s scary. And not be afraid it’s going to drown me. Because it won’t. It’s just a thought.”
During that time, she found comfort in the writing of Kate Bowler, particularly No Cure for Being Human.
“I could hold both things,” she said. “That my life is beautiful and I have an amazing husband and wonderful kids… and also, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever walked through.”
Instead of erasing the tension, she lived inside it. And in doing so, found something sacred.
“There’s a different side of the Holy Spirit when you’re in a dark place,” she said. “You realize the humanness of God—the empathy. The part of God that says, ‘Yeah, this sucks. And I’m here in it with you.’”
Ramirez agreed. “The darkest corner of your thoughts is lovable,” he said. “There’s nothing too dark, too ferocious, too broken that is unapproachable. You are loved. Exactly as you are.”
Even the album’s title came from this place of uncertainty. They nearly called it “Psilocybin,” after the medicinal mushroom Sudano was encouraged to microdose postpartum to help reset harmful thought loops. Her midwife described the effect like snowfall on a hill—covering the deep grooves your mind keeps sliding into, so new tracks are possible.
But it was a journal entry Sudano wrote during her illness that gave the record its real name: “When the War Is Over.”
“I realized I had been not feeling well for so long that I didn’t remember what ‘normal Amanda’ felt like,” she said. “Even if I woke up healed, I don’t know if I’d remember how to be normal again.”
The title wasn’t a declaration. It was a question.
“When we’re out of the season, how do we get back to ourselves?” she said. “What’s new? What’s gone forever?”
There’s no resolution in the lyrics. Just the process of processing. But sometimes, that’s enough.
And maybe it’s no coincidence that the next project Ramirez and Sudano are tackling is all about time, change and the things we never get back. They’re co-creating a stage adaptation of “One Day,” the beloved novel-turned-Netflix hit, for London’s West End. It’s a love story, yes, but also a meditation on grief and the unpredictability of life—something they now understand in a completely new way.
“It’s the hardest creative work we’ve ever done,” Ramirez said.
It also makes perfect sense. After all they’ve walked through, they’re no longer afraid of the dark. They know what it feels like to sit with it. And they know what it means to keep creating anyway.
They’re still here. And that’s the story.
