With her new solo acoustic album, Carissa Johnson wants to take you to church — over, and over, and over again.
A living document of her recent time on the road, the Boston rock stalwart’s new record A Hundred Restless Thoughts (released today, December 20) strings together live performances from across the country, almost exclusively recorded in houses of worship.
While frequent collaborator Vanessa Silberman recorded the tunes, each excerpt from A Hundred Restless Thoughts features only Johnson in her unplugged prime.
“Now felt like the right time to release an acoustic CD because I’ve been doing so much acoustic touring and solo traveling,” Johnson told Vanyaland. “I felt like I wanted to give listeners something both about that experience, and something that was more along the lines of that experience. Since I do a lot of solo acoustic shows I wanted to be able to have something representative of that live show, rather than the full band stuff. It came together really naturally too, and the timing just felt right. Once it was all done it just sort of felt like it appeared in my hands, even though a real lot of time and emotion went into this one.”
Despite the fact that Johnson’s musical lore in Boston runs deep (recall the glory of Talk Talk Talk? Her epic claim to the 2017 Rock And Roll Rumble crown? That current stint at The Jungle?), A Hundred Restless Thoughts strips all that brawn away and (temporarily) trades in The Cure-Alls for the hush of hymnals.
“The church recording experience was something entirely new for me. I have always wanted to record in a church, even just part of a song, that had been on my bucket list, and when this idea came up I just ran with it,” she adds. “Just being in an empty church is quite a feeling, and hearing the music echo and reverberate against the walls is a very nice feeling. In order to get permission to record at the churches, we just e-mailed some around the towns we were in and had some family reach out to the churches they go to, to see which ones would allow it. Most were excited and very easy going and helpful about it. Others wouldn’t allow a non-Christian artist to play there, but that was a pretty rare response. Every track except for track three was recorded in a church, also excluding some post-production, which was done outside of the churches.”
As a collection, the album offers a new performance perspective from Johnson, who hasn’t released an acoustic album since 2015 when she debuted as a solo artist.
“I think as a performer I have my way of delivering the songs, and that holds true to the electric performance as well as the acoustic one, and I try to bring the same high energy for both,” she says. “The acoustic shows sometimes feel more tame just because there’s not the same amount of electricity going on, but it’s nice to have a balance, and when I have too much of one setting I start to miss the other.”