Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane - Lost In The Cedar Wood

Johnny Flynn’s much-anticipated fifth album, co-written with his friend Robert Macfarlane.

+ Dinked Edition 114
+ Dark green vinyl
+ Bonus 7” with 2 exclusive tracks
+ Signed, numbered print
+ Pull-out poster
+ Limited pressing of 1000
+ One per customer

‘Lost In The Cedar Wood’, Johnny Flynn’s much-anticipated fifth album, is co-written with his friend Robert Macfarlane. Johnny and Robert began work on the album in the first weeks of the pandemic, wanting to make music that sang of those dangerous, disorienting spring days; when birdsong was brighter –– and the sense of bewilderment more powerful –– than any of us had known before. They drew inspiration in part from The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of world literature; an epic poem from Ancient Mesopotamia that contains the earliest version of the Flood Myth. To Johnny and Robert, Gilgamesh resonated eerily with the present moment –– and it catalysed their song-writing. For Gilgamesh is a story of friendship, love, loss, grief, bad governance and good dreaming; of natural disaster and environmental crisis. It also contains the first recorded act of human destruction of the natural world: when Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to the Sacred Cedar Wood, slay the guardian spirit of the forest, and cut down the trees with their axes, thereby bringing catastrophe upon themselves. Johnny and Robert wrote the album between March 2020 and February 2021, during a year in which we all wandered unsure of our path, lost in the cedar wood. The songs were composed in large part as a correspondence, through a back-and-forth of notebook pages, voice-recordings and WhatsApp-messages, at a time when lockdowns made meeting in person impossible. The first eight songs were recorded in an off-grid cottage deep in a Hampshire forest, with the sounds of chainsaws felling trees drifting in through the windows along with the birdsong. The result is an album at once urgent and ancient, which fuses poetry, landscape, myth and music into something unique. These are songs that ring with hope, love and sadness –– and one need not know anything about The Epic of Gilgamesh to be touched by them.

The first single, to be released on March 31st 2021, is called ‘Gods and Monsters’. It’s inspired in part by the pioneering Victorian Assyriologist George Smith, who died in Aleppo in 1876, stranded in a cholera epidemic, heartbroken and writing feverishly to his wife and six children back in England. It’s a song about false dreams and true love, about what it means to long for ‘the lights on the other side’, and how to tell a ‘story without ending’. From ‘Ten Degrees of Strange’, about outrunning grief, through to the closing elegy ‘Ferryman’, by way of story-songs such as ‘Nether’ and ‘Flood in the Desert’, the uplifting ‘Home and Dry’, and the rising joy of ‘The World to Come’, Lost In The Cedar Wood is a consistently surprising and moving album, produced in lockdown by Charlie Andrew (AltJ, Marika Hackman).