Josienne Clarke has announced her new album A Small Unknowable Thing which finds her taking complete control of her songwriting, arranging, producing, release schedule and musical direction. The gutsy lead single ‘Sit Out‘ is brimming with defiance and has certainly whetted our appetite. Sit Out is also our Song of the Day.
It’s accompanied by a great fun video featuring some familiar faces.
Says Josienne of the video… ‘I had a joke idea of a video early on, for me to hold fake auditions for a guitarist, each applicant being more of a ridiculous cliche than the previous. With me being the last, auditioning myself and then giving myself the job. It’s a bit over the top and silly but the sentiment is a solid one, that I decide to back my own guitar playing, not cos it’s the most accomplished but because it’s good enough and it suits me best! I made it with my husband, Alec Bowman Clarke who is a videographer and he stars in it as the 3rd and most terrible auditionee. We’ve made many music videos together and have even reused some props from previous videos like the ‘Josienne’ signature cardboard, fake Marshall stack from 2019’s Slender, Sad & Sentimental.’
The video stars Man Skirt as Guitar #1, Kieran Milne as Guitar #2, Alec Bowman_Clarke as Guitar #3, Josienne Clarke as Guitar #4 & Josienne Clarke as herself.
Turn it up!
This has been quite a journey to this release which you can read more about on Josienne’s website here and it holds lots of promise, built on a strong conviction – “It’s an empowered narrative, not a weak and vulnerable one,” Clarke says of the album. “It was a conscious decision to walk away from my career as it was and there’s a positive message on this record: there’s a lot of reclaiming the narrative.”
The accompanying story behind the album states: While the themes might feel familiar to her many fans, the musical journey will not, with Clarke taking in a wide range of new and diverse influences across the album’s 14 tracks – from Adrianne Lenker’s ‘Hours Were The Birds’, IDLES’ ‘Colossus’, Radiohead’s ‘Airbag’ to Phoebe Bridgers ‘Garden Song’, The Beastie Boys’ ‘Remote Control’ and Sandy Denny’s ‘Listen, Listen’ and more, the album’s touchstones span a vast musical collage of anger and hope.
“What I’ve been doing throughout my career is pushing the boundaries of the production aesthetic with each project,” says Clarke. “You might pick up one album and then you hear something really kind of folky and acoustic and then you listen to this one and almost every single guitar in it has some slight level of distortion on it. I didn’t want this one to be soft, acoustic, folky and gentle. I didn’t feel gentle, I didn’t feel soft: there is a lot of anger in there.” Letting rip about her treatment – and that of other women – in the industry clearly comes from a place of pain, but her decision to believe in her abilities, to walk away from the path others wanted her to follow, to demand equality is one that has paid dividends. Clarke sounds the most content she’s ever been in her career.
A Small Unknowable Thing, Clarke’s second solo album will be released on August 13th via her own label, Corduroy Punk Records.
Pre-order: https://ffm.to/unknowable