Johanna Warren

With a gentle, lilting voice and melancholic demeanor to her songwriting, singer/songwriter Johanna Warren emerged with her acoustic solo debut, the wispy Fates, in 2013. Through albums that dealt with topics like loss and ill-fated relationships, she gradually strengthened her sound, bringing together elements of meditative folk and ’90s alt-rock by 2020’s Chaotic Good and her sixth full-length, 2022′s Lessons for Mutants.
As a college student, Warren formed Brooklyn indie folk band sTickLipS, which also featured Jonathan Nocera on electric guitar, Chris St. Hillaire on bass, and Jim Bertini on drums. The group released It Is Like a Horse It Is Not Like Two Foxes in 2009, following it with Zemi in 2012. The next year, Warren earned a spot singing backup as a member of Iron & Wine’s touring band, which included an appearance on late-night TV’s Conan in May 2013. That October, she released her solo debut, the all-acoustic Fates. It was recorded with engineer/mixer Bella Blasko.
In 2014, Warren’s backing vocals appeared on Natalie Merchant’s eponymous release, and she toured with Andrea Tomasi, performing with her during her set. Collaborating again with Blasko and relocated to Portland, Warren incorporated even more of her complex time signatures and nontraditional chord progressions on her sophomore album, Numun. Dedicated to the moon and nature’s cycles, it was released by the Conor Oberst-founded Team Love Records in 2015. Two companion albums about a rocky relationship with a Gemini, Gemini I and Gemini II, followed in 2016 and 2018, respectively. They incorporated electric and electronic timbres while also delving into occult symbolism. Wax Nine and Carpark Records issued deluxe editions of both albums that included bonus tracks and instrumental versions of each set.
Warren’s fifth solo long-player, the self-produced Chaotic Good, made further strides toward grungier textures, with Warren sometimes pushing her vocals beyond her typically ethereal folk style. Featuring performances by former sTickLipS bandmates St. Hillaire and Bertini, it arrived on Wax Nine/Carpark Records in 2020. She did voice work for the Netflix animated series The Midnight Gospel and premiered original songs (written with J. Landon Marcus) from a musical version of Euripides’ The Bacchae before a similar mix of folk and rock took shape on 2022′s Lessons for Mutants. While its earliest components were tracked in sessions for Chaotic Good, most of the album was recorded live to two-inch tape with a band at her new base in rural Wales. ~ Marcy Donelson