Johnny Flynn, Robert Macfarlane - The Moon Also Rises (2023)

The Moon Also Rises –– Johnny Flynn’s sixth album, and the second co-written with his friend Robert Macfarlane –– will be released on 10 November 2023.

The Moon Also Rises gathers songs that Johnny and Robert have written together since finishing their first joint album, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021). At its heart are the oldest themes of all: death and renewal, darkness and light. The first five tracks are songs of burial, shadows and memory, while the final four are songs of awakening, light and love. The album turns around a central song, ‘The Sun Also Rises’, which stands with a foot in both dark and light.

This is an album that’s been walked into being. Tracks have shaped tracks: many of the songs here began life or took form while Johnny and Robert followed paths together, including those that run over the wooded South Downs, and those following the banks of the River Lea, the grimy river which flows south from near Robert’s home in Cambridge to near Johnny’s home in east London.

The result is an album which fuses poetry, story, landscape, history, nature and myth into a series of rich, strange songlines that criss-cross time and place, joining winter to spring, ancient to present and birth to death. As the Sun sets, so the Moon rises as its echo; as one light dies, another, altogether different light is born.

The first single (released today), is called ‘Uncanny Valley’. It was written fast, in only a couple of days, and it’s a song for our times of wildfires and extreme weather, AI and pandemics; a song for an era that’s eerie and out-of-kilter, when we all feel lost in the uncanny valley.

The Moon Also Rises is a hugely varied, surprising and moving album. It was partly recorded in an old Methodist chapel –– now the home of Johnny and Rob’s friends, Cosmo and Flora Sheldrake.

TRACKLIST

1. Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane - Uncanny Valley
2. Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane - Song with no Name
3. Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane - Burial Blessing
4. Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane - No Matter the Weight
5. Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane - Coins for the Eyes
6. Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane - The Sun also Rises
7. Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane - The Wild Hunt
8. Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane - Through the Misty with You
9. Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane - Year-Long Winter
10. Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane - River, Mountain and Love