"Country Mile" - Sortie le 14 octobre

En concert le 15 novembre à la Flèche d'Or 

Johnny Flynn’s forthcoming third record ‘Country Mile’ will be released on 30th September through Transgressive Records. It follows 2008’s ‘A Larum’ and 2010’s ‘Been Listening’.
Johnny and long-time collaborator / best friend Adam Beach (The Sussex Wit) chose a very different process to the workmanlike five weeks in a studio of previous albums. They produced it themselves; Johnny called it 'demoing with intent'. His thing about demos is that you usually prefer them to the finished thing. So they did their recordings in a number of different studios, in New York and London over the last two years. Those fresh, first drafts have become the finished album. Flynn adds that he can't even remember writing many of the songs this time round – "Normally I have loads of notebooks, but this just kind of happened.”
The theme for the album is one of journeying, with the way as a teacher: a ‘Country Mile’ being an indefinite distance. The allegory is a through line for the record with each song making up the different elements of a life seen as one journey. They stand as a map or constellation; the ‘journey’ under observation includes those of the Earth, the Moon, the Sun and the stars.
The title and opening track ‘Country Mile’ sets up the idea of striking out and taking off: “…nose to the road and I’m painfully free”. ‘After Eliot’, which is loosely inspired by T.S Eliot, mourns a misencounter, a reflection on a relationship where the two people didn’t see the same thing happening at the same time.

‘The Lady Is Risen’, which will be the first single, sees Flynn muse on the idea of divine love and its influence on relationships, a sentiment Flynn feels strongly connected to. The music for the song was written years apart from the lyrics and references old Southern soul records. ‘Murmuration’ - the collective noun for a flock of starlings, evokes images of escapism, flying with the birds and saints. It’s a song you’d sing to get through a difficult time and owes a debt to Hank Williams, one of Flynn’s hero’s.

‘Fol-de-rol’ is a song referencing Flynn’s love of South American folk music, but also Chicha; psychedelic Peruvian music from the 60’s/70’s. ‘Einstein’s Idea’ is a lullaby written for Flynn’s two-year-old son Gabriel. It’s an attempt to explain the theory of relativity to a child, musing on the space between things, their attraction of those things to one another, and whether that space in fact binds us together. “The gap in between them is nothing to us / Our eyes cut the distance, as loving eyes must / From me unto you son, from dust unto dust”. ‘Tinker’s Trail’ is the tale of somebody who’s travelled their whole life and is beginning to get tired, they’ve gone so far they don’t know if they’re “going to tomorrow or … headed home”.

Album closer and the last song to be written ‘Time Unremembered’ is perhaps about a journey beyond this life – it conjures images of someone lost and reflects on the physical constraints of this life.

Softly spoken, Johnny Flynn is a somewhat unlikely star. Yet this multi-talented enigma that fronts Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit and has appeared in many of our country's most exciting, recent theatrical events: The Heretic and The Low Road at The Royal Court, Jerusalem, plus last summer’s Shakespeare double-bill at the Globe and in the West End, Richard III and Twelfth Night (also starring Mark Rylance), has the whole world at his feet.

After a two-year hiatus from the live circuit, Johnny Flynn and The Sussex Wit announce an October headline tour, which includes London’s Hackney Empire.

The 2013 international touring plot is featured overleaf, with further dates to be added soon.

Tracks: 1) Country Mile, 2) After Eliot, 3) The Lady Is Risen, 4) Murmuration, 5) Gypsy Hymn, 6) Fol-de-rol, 7) Einstein's Idea, 8) Tinker's Trail, 9) Bottom of the Sea Blues, 10) Time Unremembered.