‘Ten Degrees of Strange’, the lead single from Johnny Flynn’s much-anticipated fifth album, Lost In The Cedar Wood, co-written with his friend Robert Macfarlane, will be released on April 20th 2021.
Lost In The Cedar Wood, written by Johnny and Robert over the course of the past year, is an album at once urgent and ancient, uplifting and unsettling, which draws inspiration in part from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written story in literature, and in part from the bewildering year through which we have all just lived, when the whole world has wandered ‘lost in the cedar wood’.
'Worry and loss have pursued us all during the pandemic, following hard on our heels –– always there at the turn of the path, in the corner of the eye, at the end of the day. We wrote 'Ten Degrees of Strange' right at the end of 2020: the last song completed for an album started as the virus first struck and the world began to warp. Like all the songs, this one was written in part as a lockdown correspondence, with lines and verses and snippets of music sent back and forth over months.'
‘Ten Degrees of Strange’ is a song about trying to outrun anxiety, seeking joy and strength in landscape and movement.
Award-winning animator Lynn Tomlinson is making the accompanying film for ‘Ten Degrees of Strange’, using a unique clay-on-glass animation technique. Johnny says, “We fell in love with Lynn’s work after coming across it by chance. Clay runs as a motif through the album – the material of making and re-making, and of the tablets of Gilgamesh as the base element of creation in Mesopotamian story telling.”
Lost In The Cedar Wood is released worldwide digitally on May 14th 2021 on Transgressive Records, with physical copies to follow in October.
