Name: Josienne Clarke
Occupation: Singer, songwriter
Nationality: British
Current release: Josienne Clarke's new album Far From Nowhere is out via Corduroy Punk.

If you enjoyed these thoughts by Josienne Clarke and would like to know more about her music and upcoming live dates, visit her official website. She is also on Instagram, Facebook, or bandcamp for recent updates and music.

For a deeper dive, we recommend our earlier Josienne Clarke interview and our conversation with her about her creative process. 



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in writing lyrics or poetry? How and when did you start writing?

From such a young age I was drawn to melancholic songwriting, ballads, quiet little songs, like whispered confessions.

I taught myself to play Janis Ian’s ‘At Seventeen’ on my dad’s guitar from one of his songbooks.



I think I would have been in my mid-teens when I began to experiment writing songs myself.

The first attempts were terrible as you’d expect, but you have to start somewhere and by my early 20s I’d written “The Tangled Tree,” which I still consider to be one of my best songs.



Entering new worlds and escapism through music and literature have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to writing?

I think the appeal of poetry and songwriting to me was a chance to express thoughts and feelings I perhaps wasn’t able to in my day to day life. It’s a wonderful sensation to find a poem or song that articulates a thought or feeling you hadn’t been able to quite put your finger on.

I guess that experience was so intoxicating that I began to try and do that myself. There’s something so liberating about finding the exact perfect combination of words and melody to express your internal experience with concision, accuracy and poetic beauty. I think of it like an alchemy of an almost mathematical precision and wild unknowable magic.

I wrote the song “Magic Somehow” about those classic songs that balance perfectly the realistic earthly know-how and otherworldly sorcery.  



What were some of the artists and albums which inspired you early on purely on the strength of their lyrics? What moves you in the lyrics of other artists?

Sandy Denny and Nick Drake are both artists I found in my teens and whilst they are both great melody writers I could happily read their words purely as poetry.

For example Denny’s “Fotheringay” is about Mary Queen of Scot’s imprisonment in Fotheringhay castle but rather than it being a historical tale it’s just the internal emotional narrative of it’s heroine.



Built out of a highly concise, 2:30 of beautiful imagery of “the dwindling sun” and “all the young’s birds flown,” it washes over you like an entire novel in one little song.

An artist I found a few years later is Canadian singer-songwriter Amelia Curran. Every line of her songs is poetic and dense with meaning and careful wordcraft.



I guess I’m most moved by honesty in lyric writing, when that is combined with vivid imagery and poetic skill its thrilling.

Have there been song lyrics which actually made you change (aspects of) your life? If so, what do you think, leant them that power?

There was a time I was listening to Martha Wainwright’s “BMFA” about once a day, but that was a while ago now! Its chorus:

I will not pretend/I will not put on a smile/ I will not say I’m alright for you / when all I wanted was to be good /To do everything in truth/ To do everything in truth

It felt like it gave me permission to be more sympathetic with myself.



There are definitely a few songs like that I feel I’ve leant heavily on in moments when I felt misunderstood and they gave me a sense of connection I was lacking in my life at the time. I think songs really have the power to do that.

I wrote about this in one the songs on my new album Far From Nowhere, “In The Dark Of The Night,” how these little songs can find you in the dark and be a little spark of light.



Some songs will sit up with you through a restless night and hold your hand till dawn.

Do you tend to start writing with what will be the first line of the finished lyrics? The chorus? At a random point? What are the words that set the process in motion?

It is often the first line that comes to me, that is not intentional it’s just where a lot of my songs start from in the ideas process.

The opening line is the seed from which the rest of the song will grow. The opening song on the new album is one of those:

“a butterfly flutters it wings / you already know the answer”

Which references the butterfly effect, metaphorically, meaning a small act can potentially have a larger outcome, that may never be known or quantified.



This song is sort of instructional, and it was me instructing myself on how to think about creating art when it all feels a bit pointless. It was a helpful exercise to write it and as I went on I got clearer about what the creation of art is for and the meaning and purpose it brings us beyond its commercial potential. When you think of human expression in these broader terms whether it gets enough streams on Spotify seems like a hilariously irrelevant consideration.

By the time I’d finished the song I was a lot clearer on what I was trying to achieve with this album and so it had to be first on the record. It sets the tone for the rest of the songs.

I'd love to know how you think the meaning or effect of an individual song is enhanced, clarified or possibly contradicted by the EPs, or albums it is part of. Does the song, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

I like to feel an album is connected by a theme, I find that this happens quite naturally when you write albums like I do.

Each one can be sampled as a specific moment in my life when I was concerned with certain ideas, emotions or questions.  

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard of singing someone else's songs versus your own?

I think now, having been doing this for a while, I do get a sense when writing what a line will feel like to sing and it does need to fit comfortably.

When approaching cover versions or traditional folk songs I feel there’s a process of assimilation that has to happen. I need to find the way to place someone else’s words within my own voice.

It's why I can't cover any song, they need to fit you. 



I would love to know a little about the feedback you've received from listeners or critics about what they thought some of your songs are about – have there been “misunderstandings” or did you perhaps even gain new “insights?”

Once you put a song out, its meaning sort of doesn’t belong to just you anymore and I love hearing how people interpret them.

Someone did approach me at a show recently and ask if a song was about a mutual acquaintance we had and that was a pretty fascinating conversation!