PRESS QUOTES
“New singer Carly Johnson is a revelation—versatile, tuneful, and with an emotional range that floats from first-person intimate to brassy belting with the greatest of ease.” - Jacob Duncan, Liberation Prophecy
“...the sort of voice that can rile listeners into fiery elation, or ease them into a blue velvet-lined dream.” - Lara Kinne, LEO Weekly
“The power and scope of her voice takes on epic proportions. She can burn like fire just as easily as she can flow and crash like water.” – TOPS Magazine
BIO
A dorm-room conversation changed Carly Johnson’s life. She was in her first year at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, studying jazz vocal performance, and despite her powerhouse voice, she couldn’t help feeling envious of her roommate Charlotte Littlehales’ writing chops. “She was a songwriter,” Johnson recalls. “I was always taken aback by that. I was like, ‘That’s so cool—I wish I could do that.’ And she just looked at me and said: ‘Carly. You can play the piano, and you can sing. You can do it. You just have to try.’”
Fifteen years and hundreds of gigs later, Johnson—now a celebrated Louisville-based singer who’s performed nationally and in Europe with her eight-piece band—has done more than try: Her debut solo album of original music, more than four years in the making, comes out this December on sonaBLAST! Records. It’s a stunningly soulful collection fusing her musical education with her reverence for rock, soul, and pop music, and it was co-written with her old roommate and now trusted collaborator: Charlotte Littlehales.
A mainstay in the Louisville music scene, Johnson has had the honor of performing with numerous greats, including Jacob Duncan and his folk-fusion band Liberation Prophecy, My Morning Jacket, Houndmouth, and Norah Jones, but this self-titled album reflects the actualization of her own vision—and the fulfillment of a dream. “Jazz was paying the bills and keeping my vocal chops in shape,” she says, referencing her years performing in clubs as a jazz vocal/guitar duo with guitarist Craig Wagner, “but my end game was that I always wanted to do my own album of original music.”
Naturally, it’s an old-school soul album, reflecting the R&B that Johnson fell in love with; rousing backup singers and blistering horns underline the arrangements, but the spotlight never strays too far from Johnson’s mesmerizing wail, a voice that, as Louisville Magazine noted, “will surge into a river, drowning the crowd… in sweetness.” The overarching sound draws on more than a half century of soul history, spanning from swaying blue-eyed soul (“Get Alone with You”) and stirring balladry (“Burn Your Fears”) to Amy Winehouse-style vocal workouts (“Eternally Hopeful”) and throwbacks to the horn-splattered Memphis Sound of Stax’s heyday (“Demons,” “I Don’t Care (Zirophux)”). There’s even a duet with alt-country songwriter and Louisville legend/national treasure Will Oldham (a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy), whom Johnson met by chance back in 2013 (and who once guest-fronted her Heart cover band, I Heart Heart, in spectacular fashion).
Johnson’s own influences are suitably eclectic, from the Aerosmith concert she attended in second grade (“I was way too young,” she laughs) and her early schooling of the Beatles to ’90s sensation New Kids On The Block to Whitney Houston, whose transcendent voice mesmerized her a few years later. “My biggest game-changer vocally was when I heard Whitney Houston,” Johnson raves. “It was the Bodyguard soundtrack that did it for me. I would sing when no one was in the house.”
Back then, Johnson loved singing when she was alone, but was terrified to sing in front of others. She began piano lessons in kindergarten and was exposed to music early and often, thanks to her father’s job as a radio DJ and her mother’s love of music (she was actually named after singer Carly Simon). Later in elementary school, she took up the saxophone, relishing a large instrument that she could hide behind. In high school, her voice felt increasingly undeniable, and she forced herself to join the choir. An encouraging teacher made her try out for solos, despite her near-crippling stage fright. “I started to get a little more courage, and I did the high school talent show,” Johnson says. “That’s when I was like, ‘I know this is what I want to do for a living.’ I knew that my whole life—I was just very scared.”
Expanding her musical boundaries, she soon fell in love with Heart (foreshadowing her Heart tribute band) and Etta James, which led her to jazz; infatuations with Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan soon followed. “When I found out that I could do jazz as a major in college, I was like: ‘OK. Let’s do this,’” Johnson says. These days, black-and-white postcards of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone adorn the wall of Johnson’s Louisville home, testaments to the premodern jazz and blues influences that infuse her music.
After college, Johnson spent years performing as a duo with her “partner-in-crime,” critically acclaimed guitarist Craig Wagner. (The two released a standards album, It’s Pretty Standard, in 2014, and even received the 2014 Louisville Music Award for Jazz Artist of the Year.) That’s not to mention a stint in the jazz-folk fusion band Liberation Prophecy and occasional performances with the Louisville Orchestra.
But she always harbored dreams of putting her original songs to tape. In 2015, that dream began to swim into focus, thanks to an unexpected encounter in a dark corner of a downtown bar in Louisville. Her performance there caught the ear of playwright and TV writer Rolin Jones, who approached Johnson on the spot, asked about her aspirations, and said, “I know this sounds like a line, but I’d love to help you.” Jones’ Los Angeles-based production company, New Neighborhood, quickly arranged to support Johnson’s first album of original music.
Johnson reached out to Littlehales, her old college roommate and most trusted collaborator: “I asked, ‘Do you want to write a record together? Because I feel like we work really well together.’” Jones’ company helped finance Johnson’s trips to visit Littlehales in San Diego for marathon songwriting sessions. “She’d block off time from work, and we’d just sit down and write music together,” Johnson says. The album was largely recorded in a week at Louisville’s La La Land studio in late 2016 with sound engineer Erik Wofford, followed by some backup vocal overdubs and more than a year of mixing and mastering at his studio Cacophony Recorders in Austin, TX. A lifetime later, it’s finally ready for the world to hear.
Johnson’s songs are suffused with a deep well of reverence for family and friends and others who’ve left an impression along the way. She wrote “Demons,” an invigorating anthem with the handclap breakdown to prove it, for a close family member who needed to hear that their past trauma doesn’t define them, while “For You” was inspired by the story of her husband hesitantly choosing to love again after being badly burned from previous relationships.
But nowhere is this quality clearer than on the record’s emotional climax, “Burn Your Fears.” It’s a swelling ballad that Johnson wrote for a dear friend, Marisa Wittebort, after she was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer at 30. Shortly after that diagnosis, Wittebort wrote down her greatest fears on tiny pieces of paper and threw them into a bonfire in the backyard with her family.
“I wrote the song as an anthem for her,” Johnson explains. “It’s about facing something incredibly difficult in your life, allowing yourself to completely embrace and feel every emotion it brings your way, and deciding to choose to find beauty and live your life fully in a different way than you had planned.” Wittebort was able to hear the song before she tragically passed away in November 2019. “She truly loved it,” Johnson says.
Lastly, of course, her debut album Carly Johnson honors one of the longest friendships and creative partnerships in Johnson’s life: that of her and Charlotte Littlehales. “I’m proud that this record was written by women and that Charlotte and I played a really large role in the arrangements and the production,” the singer says. “As long as this journey has taken for us to finally get to this album release… sometimes I think things are just born when they’re meant to be born. And finally—here we are.”
– Zach Schonfeld
SELF-TITLED FULL LENGTH DEBUT ALBUM OUT 12/4/20.
CLICK TO ORDER NOW.
