A Small Unknowable Thing Josienne Clarke

• 1 Super Recogniser 03:33
• 2 Like This 01:39
• 3 Never Lie 02:48
• 4 Chains 02:18
• 5 If It's Not 01:30
• 6 Sit Out 02:47
• 7 Sting My Heart 01:43
• 8 The Collector 03:03
• 9 Tiny Bit Of Life 03:56
• 10 A Letter On A Page 02:27
• 11 Deep Cut 01:53
• 12 Out Loud 02:52
• 13 Repaid 02:35
• 14 Unbound 03:18
• Total Runtime 36:22

Info for A Small Unknowable Thing

Josienne Clarke releases her new album A Small Unknowable Thing. For the first time since her early beginnings, 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. While the themes might feel familiar to her fans, the musical journey will not, with Clarke taking in a wide range of new and diverse influences across the album – from Adrianne Lenker’s ‘Hours Were The Birds’, IDLES’ ‘Colossus’, Radiohead’s ‘Airbag’ to Phoebe Bridgers ‘Garden Song’ and more, the album’s touchstones span a vast musical collage of anger and hope. Lead 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.

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, vocals, guitars, harmonium, saxophone
Dave Hamblett, drums
Matt Robinson, keyboards
Alec Bowman_Clarke, bass
Mary Ann Kennedy, harp

Josienne Clarke
When Josienne signed to the illustrious independent music champions Rough Trade Records, its founder Geoff Travis told The Guardian that she writes,“songs that rearrange your internal emotional landscape… reinventing the popular song structure.” With a rare gift for poetic melancholy, Josienne’s songs have also been described as “extraordinary” (Mojo), “gently exquisite” (The Observer) and “full of depth” (The Telegraph). While the world music bible Songlines said, “Clarke’s dark,complex imagery in the lyrics pushes the songs into rich metaphorical territory, one of the heart and of self-enquiry.” American Songwriter magazine named Josienne one of the best songwriters of 2016.

Having been awed by a live performance at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, 6 Music DJ Cerys Matthews arranged for Josienne to act and sing in The National Theatre’s revival of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good. In addition to performing on the Olivier stage each night – in a role specially created for her – Josienne contributed two of her own songs to the play. In their review of the acclaimed production, The Financial Times said, “Josienne Clarke sings like a haunted angel.”It marked the start of a continued relationship with the National Theatre, which has included composing songs for a new adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen, with acclaimed young playwright Zoe Cooper.

With an elegant, nuanced and emotionally affecting singing style (Cerys Matthews described her as having a voice that can “trickle back over centuries”) Josienne has frequently been compared to the great Sandy Denny, but present too are elements of Nina Simone and Gillian Welch; all three are important influences on her work.

Expanding beyond the folk music for which she was first known, Josienne has partnered with rising star jazz pianist Kit Downes to release the Such A Sky EP. And her friendship with London-based Scottish singer songwriter Samantha Whates has bloomed into new group Pica Pica, whose debut album will be released by Rough Trade. fRoots magazine has already described the band’s sound as “originally exciting”.

In the last two years, Josienne has supported the great Richard Thompson on a dream-come-true tour of the UK and opened for the legendary Robert Plant across Europe. The summer of 2018 saw her perform with guitarist Ben Walker at some of the UK’s best-loved festivals, including Latitude, Larmer Tree and End Of The Road. She even found herself in demand as a writer and broadcaster, contributing to Standard Issue magazine and appearing on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb to discuss her pet subject melancholy, alongside poet Simon Armitage.

With several new records and theatrical productions to look forward to in 2019, Josienne Clarke remains one of the most impressive, accomplished and downright heart-breaking singers, lyricists and composers we’ve got.

This album contains no booklet.