Description
Release: 14-04-2023
British folk singer/songwriter Josienne Clarke viewed her 2021 album – “A Small Unknowable Thing” – as ‘a leap into the abyss’. Finally free from the industry structure that had been built around her over the preceding decade and more, she released the album via her own label, Corduroy Punk Records, and handled every aspect of the album’s writing, recording, and release herself, on her own terms. The whole process was a reckoning – with her past and herself. A line in the sand between where she was now, and the shackles she’d been trying to free herself from for so long. Taking matters into her own hands was, in retrospect, a risk that paid off. Free from her previous role as one-half of a duo (with Ben Walker) and losing the genre constraints she was quickly and lazily placed within, she came out of that chapter emboldened – but still not truly free. From her current home on Scotland’s Isle Of Bute, Josienne began thinking about the idea of reclamation. She began revisiting the songs in her back catalogue that felt buried somehow; that had never had the spotlight she felt they deserved, 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. Once she started re-recording, she couldn’t stop; the ideas blossomed, and soon what she had wasn’t just an idea but something beautifully significant in and of itself. Five years after she left her contract with the Rough Trade-label, Josienne Clarke releases “Onliness: Songs Of Solitude And Singularity”; both a wholesome project and a spellbinding work in its own right – 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, but are reclaimed in some way now!
Tracklist:
- 01. The Tangled Tree
- 02. Only Me Only
- 03. It Would Not Be a Rose
- 04. Ghost Light
- 05. Silverline
- 06. Bells Ring
- 07. Something Familiar
- 08. The Birds
- 09. Homemade Heartache
- 10. Chicago
- 11. T Need
- 12. Bathed In Light
- 13. Anyone But Me
- 14. I Never Learned French
- 15. Done
- 16. Workhorse
- 17. Words Were Never the Answer (New Song!)
