In 2023, Johanna Warren issued an album that captured live performances of songs from her past, signaling that she was “mostly retiring” from the music scene. A couple of years later, she resurfaced with the EP The Night Of The Wind. Since then, she has shared a handful of tracks, including the recent release “Islamorada” from last month. Today, the singer-songwriter announces a new full-length record, 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 started reminiscing about all the quirky art we used to create for fun to fend off the dullness of suburban adolescence. I remembered this one film in particular and just had a sense it could serve as a great music video for ‘Automatic.’ When I paired the song with the footage, the alignment of the two was uncanny.”
Much of the tracking for Frog In The Belly Of A Snake was recorded live to tape at Big Jelly Studios in the UK, with CJ Jones on drums and Tom Sansbury on bass while Warren was finishing her prior album, 2022’s Lessons For Mutants. In the press release, Warren elaborates on her previous choice to step away from music: “My body was staging a protest,” she says. “A riot. And rightly so. It had been begging me for years to make some serious changes, and I allowed it to reach 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.
