(2020) Josiah Johnson - Every Feeling On A Loop


Review:
ust prior to the release of their Warner Bros. debut, the Head and the Heart co-founder Josiah Johnson took a leave of absence from his longtime band. Struggling with addiction and fighting to face his demons, the singer/songwriter watched from the sidelines as Signs of Light hit #5 on the pop charts and his bandmates toured the world without him. Johnson did eventually get sober, though he did not resume his role in the Head and the Heart, opting instead to document his soul journey with Every Feeling On a Loop, his first solo album. As any songwriter well knows, periods of tumult and personal upheaval lead to reflection which when nurtured begets material of a particularly authentic nature. Working with Lucius member Peter Lalish who brought his own stable of musicians into the project, Johnson turned his reflections into a dramatic twelve song set that shares some of the indie folk exuberance of his previous band, but chases new muses as well. Tonally, the album’s pendulum swings back and forth from rickety catharsis to strident chamber pop exultations as strings and horns shade life-affirming cuts like “False Alarms” and “Nobody Knows.” On the more delicate end are songs like “Rise Up,” in which Johnson’s ambling baritone urges inner transformation, or the sweetly hopeful closer, “Solve Problems,” played entirely solo with just guitar and vocal. Along the way are curious snippets of dialogue, one of which, “Grandma,” consists presumably of Johnson’s grandmother offering a sweetly-affecting pep talk over an ambient soundscape. At its best, this debut is a joyful testament to coming out the other side of trauma, though at times, some of the arrangements rely a little too heavily on repetition, taking the album’s title quite literally. Still, it’s nice to hear Johnson step out on his own and deliver a meaningful set of songs.





Tracklist:
01. False Alarms
02. Woman In A Man's Life
03. Nobody Knows
04. I Wish I Had
05. Rise Up
06. I Had A Choice
07. Waiting On You
08. Hey Kid
09. Same Old Brick
10. Grandma
11. World's Not Gonna End
12. Solve Problems


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits