Josienne Clarke
Josienne Clarke announces new album Onliness (songs of solitude & singularity) due April 14th via Corduroy Punk, revisiting songs from her back catalogue, a combination of fan favourites & hidden gems the first single is a reworked and re-recorded version of one of her earliest compositions ‘The Tangled Tree’.
Photography Credit: Alec Bowman
Following the release of previous 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 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.”
Coming some five years since she left her contract with Rough Trade, Onliness opens with one of her earliest compositions ‘The Tangled Tree’, originally written in 2004, Josienne comments: “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. “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.”
