Lost In The Cedar Wood

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Also singing on the album is Flynn’s nine-year-old son Gabriel. That inclusion was important to Flynn – not just because Gabriel is a promising young musician, but because parenting was such an intrinsic part of Flynn’s life, and even his creative process, in the past year. Rob was sending me articles about the pandemic being created by deforestation,” says Flynn, “but we were also talking about all the literature that people were reading with a new interest or perspective – Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, or Shakespeare’s King Lear.” Thinking of Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, based on the Orpheus myth, they wondered what other stories might be worth exploring. Flynn looks at Macfarlane and laughs: “And you said ‘There’s always Gilgamesh’ – as if that was too obvious.” It is not lost on Flynn and Macfarlane, for instance, that Gilgamesh is a story of close male friendship – even if, as Macfarlane jokingly points out, one of the characters dies horribly and the other’s a brutal despot. You can picture them together, Flynn and Macfarlane, on their much-prized walks through the English countryside, talking of this and that, and coming up with their next creative ideas. Cairns, Dan. "Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn on their album Lost in the Cedar Wood". ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 27 July 2021. I didn’t go into it with my eyes closed,” he says now. “But I hoped people would take it for how it was intended. It was supposed to be this tiny independent film about a young artist, who just happened to be David Bowie, trying to find his voice, which I thought was a valid story to tell. It got judged for what it wasn’t rather than what it was. I was unhappy with some of the marketing around it. As the trailers were coming out, I could see mistakes being made and I felt sad that it wasn’t going to be seen. I’m still proud of it. These things are your babies. You put everything into them, and you want people to see the best in them.”

There are always other babies. On its way is The Outfit, a period crime drama with Mark Rylance, his stage co-star from plays including Jerusalem. Then there is The Score, a heist movie with Will Poulter in which the characters burst into song. Flynn’s own songs, to be precise. He’s thrilled with that one, he says, and generally happy to watch himself. “I’m always interested to see how it turns out. You think: ‘I was sure that bit was gonna be shit but it’s good.’ Or: ‘My hair looks better than I thought it would.’” It was intense,” adds Flynn, “worrying about three kids, but the lovely thing about having them at home was getting to really go into every aspect of their thought process and their day.” Johnny Flynn has plenty to say about destiny, or at least the idea that things sometimes find their way into the right set of hands at the right time. It might be the handwritten songbook he inherited from his mother as a child – where radio hits by Neil Diamond mingled with traditional folk songs – or the Tokai S-type that weaves its way throughout his new record after he stumbled across it in his brother-in-law’s attic. “The origin of it is unknown, lost,” he says. “I’m sure that fate will intervene and force my hand to leave it with somebody else at some point.” 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.

Flynn’s first LP alongside his band The Sussex Wit, 2008’s A Larum, emerged from a folk morass in London that he had a small hand in cultivating. After seeing the anti-folk movement up close in New York he and a group of like-minded musicians attempted to foster a similar vibe, coinciding with the rise of tourmates Mumford & Sons and old friend Laura Marling. If it wasn’t a scene, it was certainly a happening of sorts. Dig up an old photo from that era and you might see the same guitar slung about his shoulders as you would today: a 1934 National Trojan. This vintage Martin 00 is on loan from playwright and screenwriter Jez Butterworth National anthems Efforts were made to allow found sounds such as these to refract across the songs, and once recording had shifted to the Old Workshop in London producer Charlie Andrew was keen to maintain this unvarnished spirit. “It’s good to create the right situation to make something,” Flynn observes. “Studios are often very sterile environments. I like records when you can hear the conditions they were made in, like The Basement Tapes or Music From Big Pink, where the story of them setting up the studio and living in this house is as much a part of the atmosphere as the sound.” The Tokai S-type that features on Flynn’s new album was found in his brother-in-law’s atticBecause that’s the real question behind this album: what have we learned from humanity’s most recent crisis, and how will it change us? When Gilgamesh loses Enkidu as a result of their sacrilegious actions, he begins a new quest for the secret of eternal life. It’s no spoiler to reveal that he doesn’t find it: appreciating what he already has is more to the point.

Lost In The Cedar Wood, Johnny Flynn’s much-anticipated fifth album, co-written with his friend Robert Macfarlane.Join us on the ad-free creative social network Vero , as we get under the skin of global cultural happenings. Follow Clash Magazine as we skip merrily between clubs, concerts, interviews and photo shoots. My 12-year-old son can’t stop talking about compasses and shapes and patterns’: detail from a Nepalese mandala. Photograph: Werli Francois/Alamy Despite this heavy material, Lost in the Cedar Wood is an uplifting experience, full of beauty. These come not just in the poetic nature of the lyrics, but in the album’s warm instrumentation and in the friendly openness of Flynn’s voice. This beauty comes in moments too – whether it is in fragments of a lyric, or on the chorus of Nether, when Flynn is joined by his ten year old son Gabriel in a poignant duet. There are gaps in the source material that they have filled with melodies and short-form treatises on a work that has already had voluminous amounts of ink spilled over it. Flynn views songs, self-contained and expressive in a singular way, as a worthy vehicle for the challenge. “Songs are not books, or novels,” he says. “There’s a magic that is exclusive to them. A song isn’t an epic, but it can contain a whole universe.”