Josienne Clarke - Far From Nowhere (2025) [Hi-Res]

After many years making records, in the studio with additional musicians, I decided it was now time to make my ‘Nebraska’, for many reasons, recording cost being a major one. I spoke to my friend Murray Collier, an engineer and producer who records with and owns analogue recording equipment about the idea of taking a tape machine to a secluded location for a week. I had 13 songs, but I hadn't started to work on arrangements for them, at this stage they were simply voice and guitar. We decided the best idea was to take a few instruments, my raw song ideas, and a tape machine into the woods and release whatever we came up with over the course of a week. Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’, of course, is an iconic and perfect minimal tape recording born out of seclusion. Other great albums borne of similar circumstances are Bon Iver's 'For Emma, Forever Ago' and Adrienne Lenker's 'Songs', but in an age where anything can be made to sound like anything, it felt fitting that Alec Bowman_Clarke would bring his camera with him and film the whole thing, if only to prove that it had actually happened.

Making music today, for me, often feels like an exercise in retreat. A retreat from the hopes and dreams I might once have had about an illustrious and lucrative career. My retreat from an industry structure that slowly suffocates the spirit of artists, starving them of the self-esteem that comes from remuneration for a job well done. So, retreating to a cabin in the woods to make my album made some sense to me.

Ironically, I retreated to a cabin, hidden in the woods to make an album, and amidst that seclusion I stopped hiding in many ways I have on records previously. I was no longer hiding my guitar playing for all its flair and its faults, nor the falter and huskiness of my singing voice in all its fallible human mortality. I wasn’t hiding from the unperfected recording of a fresh song idea without a pre-destined production plan. Nor was I hiding from my fear of commercial failure or the internet’s ambivalence to my artistic endeavour.
I left behind any remaining aspiration of a formalised financial career structure and took nothing but the raw ingredients of my artistry into the woods with me.
And this is what I found...