In her own words, Josienne Clarke viewed her 2021 album – A Small Unknowable Thing – as a leap into the abyss. Finally free from the industry structure that had been built around her over the preceding decade and more, she released the album via her own label, Corduroy Punk Records, and handled every aspect of the album’s writing, recording, and release herself, on her own terms. Free from her previous role as one-half of a duo and losing the genre constraints she was quickly and lazily placed within, she came out of that chapter emboldened – but still not truly free.

From her home on Scotland’s Isle of Bute, Josienne began thinking about the idea of reclamation. Cutting her teeth in an industry that so often works against the artist it’s supposed to support – and with a lingering idea in the wake of Taylor Swift’s ‘Taylor’s Version’ project – Josienne began revisiting the songs in her back catalogue that felt buried somehow; that had never had the spotlight she felt they deserved, for myriad reasons. 

Onliness is both a wholesome project and a spellbinding work in its own right. Opening with one of her earliest compositions – ‘The Tangled Tree’ – and closed by a brand-new song, it presents a career retrospective viewed through a new lens. The album is comprised of reworked versions of fan favourites and hidden gems from a back catalogue that always glimmered, but this time they’re entirely hers, carrying everything from booming drums to intimate acoustic guitars, with Josienne’s powerful yet, at times, fragile voice whispering and screaming straight into the listeners ear.

“It’s a mixture of songs that were singles, that I wanted to reclaim in some way, and then other songs, some really great songs, that never got the attention I think they deserved,” Josienne explains. “Artists are constantly required to create new content, this content is consumed in the short term and forgotten about,” she continues, speaking of her other motivation for the record. “When a big label owns the masters of your songs forever you earn little to nothing from those recordings, it’s not surprising that an artist would have to explore re-recording from a financial standpoint alone. I’ve found that it’s no longer financially viable for me not to revisit material, even being a prolific songwriter it’s just not sustainable for me in the long term.” 

Throughout the process, Josienne was clear that she wanted the album to work on its own terms, that it could stand tall as a brand new chapter even to those unfamiliar with the initial recordings. She also wanted to approach each new recording as a singular exercise, to follow the instincts that she’s honed over the past few years, adding synths, electric guitars and found sounds to the recordings. “Great songs can wear a variety of interpretations and perhaps the idea of one definitive recording is a bit rigid and reductive,” she says. “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy has been revisiting his own songs, reworking and re-presenting them wonderfully over and again throughout his career. Anais Mitchell’s XOA is on constant rotation in my house and I love the reframing of songs I know from her other projects in that stripped back simplified setting. So it’s not a new idea, or one that’s exclusive to me, but it’s a much more creative endeavour with much more for the listener to gain than a consumerist driven ‘best of’ compilation.”

Onliness opens with ‘The Tangled Tree’, a song Josienne wrote back in 2004 and one that she considers very important. “I wrote that song so long ago, I always liked the guitar part I’d written. I never felt like a great guitarist, but it was mine, and I lost that over the years when I stopped playing it,” she explains. “Now I’ve put it on an electric guitar with some distortion at the edges, and I’m playing it exactly how I want to play it. Going back and reclaiming that, and playing it myself, felt like it captures the spirit of this whole project.” 

Elsewhere, ‘Anyone But Me’, a study in possessiveness, taken from 2013’s Fire & Fortune LP, doubles down on the paranoia that permeates throughout and presents an even more frenetic three-minutes than its original take, while ‘Homemade Heartache’ showcases Josienne’s softer side; a woozy country ballad that appeared briefly on an EP a few years ago. “I used to joke that I wanted to sell it to let Emmylou Harris or Dolly Parton,” Josienne confesses, “but I always saw the potential in it, even if initially it was a little bit too country for me.” 

Onliness concludes with a brand-new song, ‘Words Were Never Answer’. Set against an acoustic guitar, Josienne’s words are sharply enunciated as she sings of the power in letting go, despite all the words you have that you still might want to say. “I introduce this song as the sum total of everything that I’ve learned in my forty years of life” she explains. “Many times, I’ve tried to explain things to people that are never going to understand, and I’ve learned that there’s a moment to stop explaining, to stop talking, to stop using words.” 
Onliness is a striking collection of songs, a real overview of an artist who has beautifully traversed their own path, no matter how rocky it became. The album takes its title from a word Josienne thought she’d invented, only later to find it already exists. Onliness: the fact or condition of being alone. “It means both solitude and singularity; being one of a kind, but also alone in the sense that you are apart from other things,” Josienne says of the title’s meaning. “So, it has both a positive connotation and a really melancholic one – and I feel like that fits every song that I’ve ever written.”