When Daniel Johnston was about 19, he spent a lot of time making things in his parents’ West Virginia basement. He would draw creatures, film Super 8 movies, write lyrics, or sit at a piano and hit the record button on his boombox. Johnston—who died this week at his family’s home in Waller, Texas, at age 58—made a lot of tapes. Each self-recorded effort came stuffed with around 20 new songs, many of them lyrically dense gems that require multiple listens to parse through their abundance of absurdity and emotional weight.

On his first cassette, 1981’s Songs of Pain, he warbled through his heartache about a girl named Laurie. She was in a relationship with a mortician, and on the album’s opening track, “Grievances,” Johnston talked about crawling into a casket after seeing her at a funeral. (His discography is full of songs about this same woman.) Songs of Pain also found him singing about masturbation and includes some intense recordings of his mother screaming at him spliced in. It was the first entry in a discography that built his cult legend—a tape by an odd young man beautifully pounding on a piano and wailing about how he’s a lazy quitter.

After Johnston moved out of his parents’ basement, he set up shop in his brother’s house. He put his makeshift recording equipment on an exercise bench and worked on what would become the DIY touchstones Yip/Jump Music and Hi, How Are You. Not long after, he joined the carnival and started selling corn dogs on the road. He was attacked by a stranger during a stop in Austin, and the city became his adopted home.

Johnston became a fixture in Austin—the artist who had a day job cleaning tables at McDonald’s. He handed out tapes, started opening for local bands, got positive write-ups in The Austin Chronicle, and then, in 1985, he appeared on the MTV show The Cutting Edge. Suddenly he found his rise to fame chronicled on the channel he used to obsessively watch. There he is onstage, occasionally glancing excitedly into the camera while playing the guitar with the adequate sloppiness of a beginner. He sang “I Live My Broken Dreams,” a song about putting all of his stuff in a trash bag and joining the carnival, with an earnestness that felt holy.

Johnston wrote so many iconic songs that the rough, home-recorded quality of his tapes couldn’t get in the way of his undeniable enthusiasm. It’s easy to see why so many artists looked to him as a template for how to create art without the support or infrastructure of the music industry. Before being a bedroom auteur was a viable way to record music, he did everything himself. He was endlessly creative with the little that he had, and because he got his songs in front of local musicians and journalists and audiences, he made building a career in music feel possible.