The bio of Los Angeles-based songwriter Lottie Johnston describes how her songs fall into one of three rough styles. A) “Deeply emotional and personal love stories”; B) “nonsensical whimsy with fictional characters with maybe too much reverb”; and C) “short lil’ instrumentals that remind you of joyful birds on a sunny day.” With its reflective emotion, inherent intimacy and eye for detail, her new album Dogs, Cats, Worms, Trees, Birds, and Beasts might live up to this tongue-in-cheek description, though in reality the borders between the categories are almost entirely permeable.
Take opener ‘Glo Wrm’, a perfect introduction to the record’s mood with its slow, spacious folk style. A song which unfurls with an understated quality which suggests both control and melancholy, delving into natural wonders and brighter fictions while always anchored by a sense of longing. What results is something between daydream and incantation, the lyrics delivered with a patient hope as though the correct sequence of words might evoke the love for which the narrator pines.
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The mood and tone shifts in surprising rhythms, sometimes within a single song, but Lottie Johnston uses this natural and dreamlike imagery to speak of desires and regrets. With its moody verses and warm chorus, ‘Tom’ exists as a collage of real-world troubles and comforting imaginings, while ‘In The Throes’ channels the contemplative calm of a summer evening complete with subtle field recording backing. ‘Summers’ is no less striking in its tender charm, a track of bruised love and surviving fondness, the past as something to retreat to, for better or for worse.
Other songs offer a different kind of escape, blurring the line between the past and the landscape in which it unfolded. Like the ‘The Rockies’, which plays as a folk love letter to a place before slowly merging into another nostalgic memory. “Oh I’m singing to the Rockies, calling to Montana’s open sky,” Johnston sings. “I am the kid you brought me up to be but I never really got to say goodbye.” And the rest of the track serves as just that, painting a picture of a childhood spent digging for fossils and eating by the river.
This idea that places exists beyond daily strife is perhaps best captured on ‘Lucid’. A song inspired by Orca Island in Washington, which brings to life the joy of being removed from society, and the magnetic force such locations hold. “There’s a place where the spirit goes / where it’s safe from the city’s choke / and it calls,” Johnston sings in the opening lines, “where the wind makes the sea’s skin crawl / silver chill and the golden fog / Where we’re lost in the wild, wild green / but we’re closer to home than we’ve ever been before.” Be it channelling the pull of fond memories, deep held longings or the secluded natural world, the music of Lottie Johnston becomes a place of its own, sheltered from life’s stresses and strains.
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Dogs, Cats, Worms, Trees, Birds, and Beasts is out now and available from the Lottie Johnston Bandcamp page.