Josienne Clarke announces her new album Onliness (songs of solitude & singularity) and shares the music video for The Tangled Tree, one of her earliest compositions and also our Song of the Day.
Josienne Clarke’s last album was released in 2021; Danny Neill said of ‘A Small Unknowable Thing’, “the songs are so direct, showing an immediacy born of frustration and inspiration. Unshackled creative freedom screams out of every song…ripe with raw artistic expression combined with music of surefire melodic and dramatic purpose.” 2022 was by no means barren. Instead, Clarke delivered two contrasting EPs. Peter Shaw commented on I Promised You Light that it marked a turning point “…bursting with possibilities of the next steps for one of the most captivating and affecting musical artists around right now.” While her latest EP, Now & Then, presented a selection of covers of songs by Sandy Denny, Radiohead, Sharon Van Etten and Nick Drake. As Bob Fish commented, it was a surprise offering but equally stunning.
This week, Josienne Clarke announced her new album Onliness (songs of solitude & singularity). The album, which is due for release on April 14th, 2023, finds her visiting songs from her back catalogue, a combination of fan favourites and hidden gems that have, until now, never had the spotlight she felt they deserved. The LP takes its title from a word Josienne thought she’d invented, only later to find it already exists. Onliness: the fact or condition of being alone. “It means both solitude and singularity; being one of a kind, but also alone in the sense that you are apart from other things,” Josienne says of the title’s meaning. “So, it has both a positive connotation and a really melancholic one–and I feel like that fits every song that I’ve ever written.”
The first single is a reworked and re-recorded version of one of her earliest compositions, ‘The Tangled Tree’.
The accompanying video is by Alec Bowman_Clarke, whose photography and film work I’ve admired for some time. He’s something of a master in capturing mood, as he demonstrates so well here; filmed in black and white, the low angles he uses throughout this music video create a captivating sequence that lends itself so well to the melancholic weight of the song.
The Tangled Tree is also our Song of the Day; Josienne wrote the song back in 2004: “I wrote that song so long ago, I always liked the guitar part I’d written. I never felt like a great guitarist, but it was mine, and I lost that over the years when I stopped playing it,” she explains. “Now I’ve put it on an electric guitar with some distortion at the edges, and I’m playing it exactly how I want to play it. Going back and reclaiming that, and playing it myself, felt like it captures the spirit of this whole project.”
Of her new album, Josienne says:
“Artists are constantly required to create new content; this content is consumed in the short term and forgotten about. When a big label owns the masters of your songs forever, you earn little to nothing from those recordings; it’s not surprising that an artist would have to explore re-recording from a financial standpoint alone. I’ve found that it’s no longer financially viable for me not to revisit material; even being a prolific songwriter it’s just not sustainable for me in the long term.
But there is also a creative argument to reworking material. Great songs can wear a variety of interpretations, and perhaps the idea of one definitive recording is a bit rigid and reductive. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy has been revisiting his own songs, reworking and re-presenting them wonderfully over and again throughout his career. Anais Mitchell’s XOA is on constant rotation in my house, and I love the reframing of songs I know from her other projects in that stripped-back simplified setting. So it’s not a new idea or one that’s exclusive to me, but it’s a much more creative endeavour with much more for the listener to gain than a consumerist driven ‘best of’ compilation.”
Pre-Order Onliness – https://ffm.to/onliness