‘Both Sides Now’
Night River Presents a rare live cover version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ @ The Hydeaway Frome.
New Album ‘Parenthesis, I’ out May 10th
Josienne Clarke has announced her new album Parenthesis, I will be released on May 10th via Corduroy Punk Records. The Scotland-based critically acclaimed artist also shared the album’s lead single ‘Most Of All‘, a confessional arpeggiated folk ballad that condenses her life story into five verses.
“It is a licking of wounds and counting of blessings, taking stock and setting straight in my head,” she says. “It’s one of those songs where I’m a bit exposed and I almost can’t bring myself to share it. Several times I nearly took it off the tracklist, but experience has taught me, those ones end up being among my audience’s favorite songs.” The version that did make it onto the LP is the original demo she recorded: just her voice and guitar, lo-fi and honest.
The track is out now alongside an Alec Bowman_Clarke-directed video that’s equal parts candid and cinematic. “Inspired by Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation and tour diaries where you see a bit of each show, I wanted to explore what happens when Josienne isn’t on-stage–behind the scenes of a life and career, dancing tenderly together like an elderly couple at a salsa class who have grown sick of the sight of each other but will remain together until they die,” explains Bowman_Clarke.
Throughout her career, Josienne Clarke has been both a Rough Trade-signed artist and a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-winner, two opposing poles that neatly sum up her inability to be pigeonholed. After the success of her 2019 solo record, In All Weather, and the indie-infused A Small Unknowable Thing in 2021, she released the EP I Promised You Light and the covers EEP Now & Then in 2022. In 2023 she released Onliness (songs of solitude and singularity) – a moment of personal reclamation, which saw her re-recording songs from her back catalogue. Now, she stands on the cusp of a new era with Parenthesis, I. Shimmering, warm, intimate, and profoundly heart-wrenching.
The album is a masterful journey through Clarke’s personal and musical evolution. On Parenthesis, I, she draws influence from folk greats Nick Drake and Sandy Denny, as well as more contemporary artists like Julia jacklin, Courtney Marie Andrews, Anaïs Mitchell and Lucy Dacus. “It encompasses all of my musical influences. You can hear flavours and textures from all the records I’ve put out in the last 5 years. After an interval I am presenting myself to the world, reworked, remade, anew” says Clarke, who produces all of her records, and also plays guitar, saxophone, clarinet and recorders throughout.
Parenthesis, I delves into the weighty themes of miscarriage and suicide interwoven with moments of resilience, joy and contentment. As Clarke aptly states, “The songs and their themes are immensely personal to me, but more importantly, these themes may be relatable to others.” With lives characterised by complexity, nuanced feelings, and the slow, arduous process of growth, Parenthesis, I encapsulates Clarke’s journey to resolution, seeking and finding a safe path of her own.
London and Glasgow Launches Announced
Tickets go on sale this Friday (12.01.24)
2024 Tour Dates Announced
Over The Fourth Wall…
As I embark upon the journey of a new album cycle this week I’m doing something I’ve never previously done. I’m letting some of you inside the process. I’ve launched a Patreon where, for a subscription, you can see and hear what I’m making, where and how I’m making it and with whom. I’m extremely grateful to all the people who have already subscribed, you’ll be coming with me to the studio next week as I record demos of my new songs.
There are new photos up on my Patreon already, Alec and I did a little photoshoot this week especially for my Patreon page. The cover shot is one of them but you’ll need to subscribe to see the full majesty of the concept.
You can subscribe here
This is an exclusive experience for the real JC Superfan, with secret first looks and more importantly listens. Your monthly subscriptions will help me mitigate some of the huge outlay necessary in recording, manufacturing and promoting an album independently in the current music industry.
The rest of my socials will be used as normal, everyone gets to see a bit of what I’m up to and of course everyone gets to hear it when its released!
Thanks for supporting me in whatever way you do…
Jx
Autumn Tour Booking now
You can get your tickets for Josienne’s Autumn UK Tour on the her live page now …
‘The Birds’
Here is the second single released from forthcoming album ‘Onliness (songs of solitude & singularity)’ Out 14.4.23. The song is streamable across platforms and the Official Video directed by Alec Bowman_Clarke is watchable on Youtube. (please subscribe to my channel to help me earn money from views) Preorder your copy of the album from all good record shops instore & Online here. Below is some info and a direct link to the video.
“The turning of a season, the first frost of winter, its tingling brightness, melancholy & longing. The birds are making strange patterns in the sky, a signal that our days will soon be short. Glassy winterlight lost in the blink of an eye & darkness stretching across long nights.
I wrote it back in 2008, its guitar part blurry to mirror the cloudy movement of the birds, their weird patterns in & out of time & sync, in strange shapes & formations.
I play piano on it which is rare for me but it’s bright glassy timbre fitted perfectly for the track. I love it as an instrument but I rarely play it on my music as I have the services of keyboard experts like Matt Robinson but I recorded the piano myself just to give an idea of the kind of part I was thinking and Matt liked it and said we should keep mine, so we did. “
Onliness (songs of solitude & singularity)
Available to pre-order now here ffm.to/onliness
Today, indie-folk artist Josienne Clarke has announced her new album Onliness (songs of solitude & singularity) will be released on April 14th, 2023. On her new album, Clarke revisits songs from her back catalogue, a combination of fan favourites as well as hidden gems that have, until now, never had the spotlight she felt they deserved. The first single, out today, is a reworked and re-recorded version of one of her earliest compositions, ‘The Tangled Tree’.
Following the release of her 2021 album – A Small Unknowable Thing – Josienne began thinking about the idea of reclamation. Cutting her teeth in an industry that so often works against the artist it’s supposed to support – and with a lingering idea in the wake of Taylor Swift’s ‘Taylor’s Version’ project – Josienne began revisiting the songs in her back catalogue that felt buried somehow, for myriad reasons. She took some of those songs and started playing around with them, viewing them from the place she was now, in charge of every little detail, free to do what she truly wanted with them.
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.”
Released in the Spring of 2023, some five years after she left her contract with Rough Trade, Onliness is both a wholesome project and a spellbinding work in its own right. Opening with one of her earliest compositions – ‘The Tangled Tree’ – and closed by a brand-new song, it presents a career retrospective viewed through a new lens and is comprised of reworked versions of fan favourites and hidden gems from a back catalogue that always glimmered even when the noise around it was at its most imposing.
‘The Tangled Tree’ is a song Josienne wrote back in 2004 and one that she considers very important. “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.”
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.”
Now & Then
Indie-folk artist Josienne Clarke has released Now & Then, a surprise ‘extended E.P’ of covers via her own label, Corduroy Punk Records. Now & Then is a diverse collection, with covers of traditional folk songs like ‘Reynardine’ and ‘The Month of January’ sprinkled amongst Josienne’s take on Radiohead’s ‘Nude’ and Sharon Van Etten’s ‘You Shadow’.
Of her new release, Clarke says:
“The last few years I’ve gone through a process of change as an artist and what better way to orient yourself as a singer and a songwriter than through songs and the work of songwriters you deeply admire.
Perhaps this seems like an odd collection of songs to release now and/or to have alongside one another but these are all songs that I’ve been singing live or have secretly held a notion of how I’d interpret them when I gave myself the chance. Each one deeply melancholic in a way that particularly speaks to me, as a singer, songwriter and an admirer of lyricism in songcraft.
The song from which the EEP’s title is taken is a rare-ish Sandy Denny demo, as far as I’m aware only a rough early recording of it exists, the song feels almost beautifully unfinished, a rare one of her tunes that never quite got the attention it deserved. It has this poignant and resigned melancholy that I’ve always been drawn to in her lyrics. Now and then, the present and the past are two different places and states of being. The lyrics seek to reconcile the two and the peace comes from letting them exist apart from one another.”
In addition to covers of songs by artists like Sandy Denny, Radiohead and Sharon Van Etten, listeners of Now and Then will also find a reworked version of Clarke’s own song ‘Undo’, a track which originally featured on 2017’s Such A Sky, a collaborative EP Clarke released with Mercury nominated jazz pianist Kit Downes. “I included a reworking of my own song ‘Undo’ because in the same way, my own songs have various lives and this song felt timely, during a period of change and upheaval,” she explains.
In 2021, Clarke released A Small Unknowable Thing, an emotionally charged album bubbling with courage and defiance (which earned four-star reviews from the likes of The Financial Times and MOJO). The album was her second solo album and the first she’d released as an entirely independent artist. In January 2022, Clarke released I Promised You Light, a follow up EP designed to offer up some of the positive lessons she has learnt over the years.
“This new EEP is not a statement of intent,” she says. It does not signal a return or a new direction of travel, it’s not necessarily the shape of things to come. It is simply the opportunity to sing you some songs I love, set in the way I see, hear and feel them today. As a songwriter myself I think the real beauty of songs is that they can have so many lives in various arrangements and incarnations, they come and go, and the songs live on. So I’ve sung these ones Now and I may sing them again, Then in another way, at another time. Isn’t that the privilege of songs and of being able to sing them?”
Watch her sing them and more for one night only at The Union Chapel on April 15th 2023
For all media enquiries, please contact Ellie Ball: ellie@someonegreatpr.com
Josienne Clarke Announces New EP ‘I Promised You Light’ Out February 4th 2022
When award-winning singer, songwriter and producer Josienne Clarke was performing at a show prior to lockdown, a moment meeting a fan afterwards remained fixed in her memory. “There was this one woman who came up to me at the merch table in tears. She was a fan pleading with me to write something in the style of how I write, but more positive,” Clarke recalls, saying that while the fan had been visibly touched by her emotive, melancholic songs, she was craving something more joyous. The fan told Clarke she was going through her own difficult time. “She wanted something with hope, something with a bit of light in it,” Clarke recalls.
This is where Clarke’s new EP, I Promised You Light was born. After the release of critically acclaimed album A Small Unknowable Thing this year (which earned four-star reviews from the likes of The Financial Times and MOJO), Clarke set about her next project with the words of her fan front-and-centre. “It stayed with me,” Clarke says of her message. “It made me really think: do I need to try and frame things more positively? Maybe I haven’t been able to in the past because I’m still working through things – my work is very autobiographical and cathartic – but I’m only now just finding more positive threads through new experiences and what I’ve learned over this last year.”
Clarke has certainly worked through a lot. Rejecting a male-dominated system where women in music are discouraged to voice an opinion, retain artistic control and produce music, in 2020 Clarke ripped everything up and started again. She went solo and for the first time, Clarke was in complete control of everything from her songwriting to arranging and production – and she even released on her own label, Corduroy Punk. The result, after years of being told women couldn’t do all those things in a patriarchal industry, was an album variously described as “the sound of an artist in full bloom”, “a remarkable, impeccable collection” and “her finest work to date.”
Clarke says the experience gave her confidence to try a new direction on her latest EP. “Once I got all of that out of my system,” she says of the anger she expelled on her last album, “once I had a bit of time for reflection, I started writing again. I’m looking at life in not such an angry way. I’ve had my cathartic being cross with everything moment, and now I can look back on that time a little bit more reflectively and perhaps more constructively,” she explains.
Indeed, the EP begins with ‘Where the Light Comes In’ a song that speaks directly to the fan who wanted more positivity and hope. The titular track is a nod to Leonard Cohen and repeats “Who am I to give you something to live for?” which Clarke says came out of her self-doubt wondering if she was the right person to give positive advice. “I was like, look at my life – it’s an absolute bin-fire at times! What wisdom do you think I have to impart?” Clarke says with a laugh. But she does know from first-hand experience as someone who came out of a place of darkness after years of struggling in a situation from which she wanted to escape.
Clarke says on top of the personal struggles people face day-to-day, it’s also hard to find positivity at a time when we’re surrounded with so much negativity in society. “We’re careering towards climate collapse, there’s a pandemic, the government are awful. In this context, I can’t just frame everything positively because we can’t just take away that negativity. But it’s about how you make a positive from it, I think. It’s me saying, ‘Well yes, there’s this really dark and difficult stuff but that is the stuff of life. Everything looks impossible at times but there’s a balance with the light of things too. We have to look towards those lighter moments and find the hope, as hard as it can be sometimes.”
The delicately optimistic song sees Clarke’s songwriting at its most uplifting: “The still of the night lies calm in the palm of your hand / Truth that you took too hard you will understand / Love that you gave in vain comes back round again. That’s where the light…remains,” she poignantly sings. In the darker moments we face, Clarke says in the song, “But here’s a thought for if you ever lose your way.”
The next track, ‘Driving At Night’, saw Clarke going directly back to a time she lost her own way. “It’s essentially a song about escaping,” Clarke says, explaining it was about driving away from the last ever gig she performed as part of a duo. “After that gig, I literally drove for hours across Europe. I wanted as much physical space between me and my previous career as possible at that point. The feeling of release of having finished that final gig was huge, as was the exciting air of possibility that came about having left behind a thing that was so difficult for me for a long time. It was like a literal lift: I felt everything would suddenly be easier now.”
You can hear the relief in Clarke’s voice on a track that soars with hope and the song’s propulsive force reflects the momentum Clarke felt on that journey – both physical and metaphorical. “There was a time when I didn’t want to think about that time at all,” she admits. “But I can look back on it now feeling nothing but relief, a kind of ‘thank fuck that’s not happening anymore.’ It’s a song about looking back from a much calmer, safer position and realising that journey was the catalyst, the start of all the good things that followed.”
The song’s message she says, is simple: “it’s – just leave,” she laughs. “It’s alright to leave because all this other great stuff awaits you if you just walk away.” Clarke explains that it was also inspired by the “insurmountable structures which surround people,” which may prevent them from leaving something that is having a negative impact on their lives. The song is full of fire-like imagery too – of burning things in order to start again. “Sometimes you do have to set fire to the whole fucking thing and start again – and that is what ‘Driving At Night’ is all about.”
The EP feels deeply personal, with Clarke stripping back her sound and putting her vocals – which BBC6 Music DJ Cerys Matthews described as one that can “trickle back over centuries” – at the forefront of her music. “The vocals are really up front, and you can even hear my tongue moving in my mouth at one point,” Clarke laughs. “It’s meant to be an intimate confessional, really close-up,” she explains, saying it was needed on a work that is urging listeners to find the positives in the dark moments. “Many of the songs could be sung as much to me as by me,” she says, explaining that she wanted to convey the vulnerability she felt in those tougher moments to her listeners.
The EP’s fourth track, ‘Workhorse’, is the first with this particular type of percussion and one of the most experimental of Clarke’s career to date, with Sharon Van Etten and Sylvan Esso being the song’s musical touchstones. “This is the most joyous on there to me,” Clarke says of the song which she describes as a “weird dance acoustic mess.” The song’s video sees Clarke learning to roller-skating at a silent disco to emphasise the sheer joy of the track. “It’s just me in a massive room with loads of disco lights with silent disco headphones on just messing about to my own positivity anthem,” she smiles.
Of the track’s experimentation, Clarke says she has been “slightly flirting with synths and electronic sounds more” and using “less acoustic music” in an about turn from her usual style. “I don’t intend to renounce my acoustic roots at all, but I feel like the old set-up in the industry was quite keen to tell me what type of music I could and couldn’t make,” Clarke explains, saying she was told by one male label boss that she had to stick to a singular style. “I was like, ‘why do you get to decide?! I feel like ‘Workhorse’ is an example of me trying something different, trying something without someone telling me I can’t, which is often the case when you’re a woman in this industry,” Clarke says. “This is like: ‘What if I could do whatever I wanted? What would that sound like? That sound is this track,” Clarke says assuredly, mirroring the confidence of a track that is sure to become a standout of her career.
“Like a lot of young women in this industry, I started out believing everything that everyone told me. I did what I was told and I took the advice really openly. I assumed these old dudes knew what they were talking about,”
“Like a lot of young women in this industry, I started out believing everything that everyone told me. I did what I was told and I took the advice really openly. I assumed these old dudes knew what they were talking about,” Clarke says, referring to those male industry bosses she came across, “because they’d been in the industry for years and so must know more than me. The humility that only young women have. I had to go through a long process of realising maybe all of that was bullshit and I could in fact do whatever I wanted. And this EP is also about that, about not being afraid to try new and different – and sometimes frightening – things.”
These experiments took place over a four-day period in London, where, for the first time since lockdown, Clarke was able to get into Hackney Road Studios in London with her band. Clarke says after producing her last virtually from afar, she went into this feeling more certain. “I was more confident this time because I’d done it before and it worked. I felt able to experiment more and just getting to work in a room with other musicians again after lockdown buoyed me further I think…I’d missed that!” Clarke says laying the EP down in the studio was the culmination of what was “an incredible, joyous project, from start to end.” She continues: “I’ve probably enjoyed writing this one more than anything I’ve done.”
The EP’s closing track, ‘I Promised You Light’, is the culmination of that joy. “It’s me saying it actually will all be alright,” Clarke explains. The track, which was inspired by the likes of Courtney Marie Andrews and Julia Jacklin, is the zenith of the optimism found throughout this entire project. “I thought, ‘What would I say to someone like me who came into the position I was in two years ago?’” she reflects, thinking of her time unhappy in a musical partnership, label situation and an industry that treated women as less-than.
“I thought, what advice would I give to me? Forget all the framing it beautifully and poetically: what do people really need to be told in their darkest, lowest moments? And they need to be told it gets better, it will be alright. And it will,” she says determinedly. “And I know it sounds trite, but it will,” she continues, knowing from her own painful personal experience that it is possible to come out the other side – as hard as it might seem.
“I thought back to the merch table,” Clarke says, “and the woman who was crying in front of me. What does she really need to be told at that point? What’s the one thing she needs to hear? She needs to be told that it’s going to be okay and she asked me to put a song in my collection that does that – so this is what that closing song is about. And I hope it brings her, or anyone else who needs it, a few seconds of comfort.”
Clarke has already started work on her next project. Will it be a direct continuation from this? Not necessarily, she says. “I feel like this EP is a little experiment, a thing that stands on its own. I think I will try to take some of the things that I’ve learned from this into my next project. It’s not going to be a case of me never writing a melancholic song again because obviously I will, but maybe I’ll try to balance the message more, because now I can write from a position where I can see both the light and the dark – I can see them both in an equal, more balanced measure. This EP is really the documentation of that realisation.”
The main thing she’s learnt, Clarke says, is to not be afraid of failure when going into something new – of starting over. “I can take less fear into whatever I do now. I can just try things and instead of thinking about succeeding or failing I can exist in an in-between space where it’s okay to just create, to put songs out into the world and not worry about all the fear and the bullshit I was conditioned to think as a young woman in this industry. I can just exist in whatever form I want to and I don’t have to constantly earn my right to exist personally or professionally any more.”
“I can just be…with both the darkness and the light.”
Josienne Clarke announces new album
‘A Small Unknowable Thing’ and shares
defiant new single ‘Sit Out’
| For the first time since her early beginnings, Josienne Clarke is flying solo. No label, no musical partner, no producer. Clarke is in complete control of her songwriting, arranging, producing, release schedule and musical direction. A Small Unknowable Thing, Clarke’s second solo album will be released on August 13th via her own label, Corduroy Punk Records. Today she has shared the first taste of her new album and new sound in the form of defiant new single. ‘Sit out’ is frustration and defiance in sonic form. “All you stand for / Makes me want to sit out” she sings over thick, driving guitars and an almost Beastie Boys-esque drum beat. The heaviest moment on the album, ‘Sit Out’ sees Clarke fully let rip. |
| Despite writing a plethora of critically acclaimed songs, winning a BBC Folk Award, opening for Robert Plant on his European tour, playing prominent slots on some of the UK’s biggest festivals and even taking a leading role in The National Theatre’s revival of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (after being personally chosen by Cerys Matthews no less), Clarke felt daily self-doubt as a result of an industry that variously gas-lit, put-down, questioned and othered. It’s an experience the vast majority of women making music today can identify with. A Small Unknowable Thing is, at least in part, about recognising there are still existing structures to keep women in their place – but it’s also about having the courage to break those structures down too. “I realised that I had to be so explicit in explaining how much I’d done in order to get credit for it,” Clarke explains. “I started saying ‘No, actually, I did all of this, can we put my name on this thing?’ It’s really resisted – it’s as if I’m being an arrogant megalomaniac for wanting the credit for stuff that I did. Now, I just do it all by myself. If there isn’t another name on it, then there can’t be a misappropriation.” After leaving her label, musical partnership and home (Clarke moved to a small village on the outskirts of Glasgow with her husband), she started afresh. Gradually, as she slowly began to write and record once more, the album’s narrative arc emerged and Clarke found herself again. “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.” Like Clarke’s other albums, A Small Unknowable Thing also travels from despair to hope. 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. |
Josienne Clarke 