Continually open to interpretation, Robert Shelton, Bob Dylan’s biographer, suggested that ‘Visions of Johanna’ was a record of a fractured consciousness. It remains one of Dylan’s most popular songs who turns 80 in May and its impact hasn’t dwindled, so much so that Johanna Samuels parents decided to name her after the song.
On 14th May, Todmorden-based, UK Independent label Basin Rock (Jim Ghedi, Alex Maas, Julie Byrne) will release Samuels’ album Excelesior! While the song for which she is named after may be challenging to decipher, Samuels draws a clear ring around companionship as a theme of this new offering.
As Dylan sang… ‘We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it’…Samuels embraces friendship by exploring the depths of her relationships and does so in more than words. Joining her on this album are Courtney Marie Andrews, Hannah Cohen, Lomelda’s Hannah Read, A.O. Gerber, Louise Florence and Olivia Kaplan…
“I made the record mostly with men and that’s a space I find myself in constantly in music,” Samuels says. “So it was a very important and special part of the record to have these different womxn that held me up. I really looked up to all the womxn that sang on the record.”
Watch her new video for lead single Nature’s Way below, a number of those artists, along with family members and other friends, appear in the video. A defiantly upbeat track, exploring how easy it is to take empathetic nature for granted and how the loudest person is so often the most celebrated as she sings: “I’ve got a funny thing about saying what I want aloud / You push it so far down below / It’s here with its hands around my throat.”
Nature’s Way is a glowing introduction to Johanna Samuels and is also our Song of the Day:
The album takes its name from the signature that Samuels’ grandpa would use before he sadly passed away last December. “He was a very important person to me and he helped raise me,” Johanna explains. “He signed all of his letters and emails ‘Excelsior!’, including the exclamation point. It means ‘ever upward’ and that’s what I wish for everyone: to grow from listening with more empathy and from hearing each other out. I hope this record makes people want to be gentler with each other and themselves.”
Excelsior! is released 14th May 2021 on Basin Rock
Preorders:
https://www.basinrock.co.uk/records/excelsior/
https://johannasamuels.bandcamp.com/album/excelsior