In 2023, Johanna Warren released an album of live recordings of old songs and said she was "mostly retiring" from music. A couple years later, she returned with her The Night Of The Wind EP. She's shared some songs since then, including last month's "Islamorada." Now, the singer-songwriter is announcing her new LP Frog In The Belly Of A Snake.
"I've been on a bit of a mission these last few years to resuscitate within myself a spontaneous, uncomplicated way of making art for pleasure, like children do," Warren explains. "My high school friend Leora [Fuller] and I recently reconnected out of the blue, and we got to reminiscing about all the weird art we used to make for fun/to stave off the doldrums of suburban adolescence. I remembered this one film in particular and just had an inkling it could make a good music video for 'Automatic.' When I put the song over the footage, the way the two things lined up was spooky."
Much of the tracking for Frog In The Belly Of A Snake was done live to tape at Big Jelly Studios in the UK with CJ Jones on drums and Tom Sansbury on bass while Warren was completing her last record, 2022's Lessons For Mutants. In the press release, Warren expounds on her previous decision to take a break from music: "My body was staging a protest," she says. "A riot. And rightly so. It had been petitioning me for years to make some serious changes, and I let it get to a point where it stopped asking nicely and started throwing Molotov cocktails in the streets."
Watch the endearing video for "Automatic" below.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Web"
02 "The Current"
03 "Circular Logic"
04 "Automatic"
05 "Invocation"
06 "A Power Greater"
07 "Islamorada"
08 "Wildcrafted"
09 "Silver Light"
10 "Voice Of Reason"
11 "Frog In The Belly Of A Snake"
12 "Bathwater Baby"
13 "New Friend Blues"
14 "Feeding Me Feeding You"
Frog In The Belly Of A Snake is out 1/29 on Soul Selects. Pre-order it here.