Trading the bustling streets of LA for a more natural scene, Johanna Warren found herself calling rural Wales home when crafting newest album Lessons For Mutants. Buzz’s Emma Way spoke to Warren ahead of a UK tour.

Since self-releasing her debut album Fates in 2013, wanderer, healer and multi-purpose creator Johanna Warren has done some relentless touring for multiple projects and album cycles, including a short stint as one of Iron & Wine’s backing vocalists. Most recently, she’s been based in the mid-Wales countryside, a setting that has spawned her fifth and latest album Lessons For Mutants. She’s found her love of herbalism, plants and foraging bloom, as well as a newfound domesticity.

I speak to Warren at 6pm UK time, but Santa Barbara light is flooding through my laptop screen, as Johanna appears under the shade of a eucalyptus tree. Not long after making the weighty decision to cancel the rest of her US tour, she tells me what touring is for her. At 33, Warren has been touring since she was at least 18, sharing stages with the likes of Mitski, Julie Byrne and Marissa Nadler. Now, after doing the whole DIY thing, she might be done with sleeping on people’s floors.

“People will say, ‘oh, you’re so well-travelled!’ but not really. I saw the green room… and the coffee shop down the block from the green room.” But after unexpectedly spending lockdown in rural Wales, you might expect Warren to be done with that type of lifestyle altogether – yet there’s still an energy to be expressed.

“I’m in a place of deep assessment and recalibration,” she says, envisioning a future for herself where she can mould a touring schedule around her, instead of the other way around. “I could play one venue show, then a hospital, school, prison, a clinic and be there for a week and have days off to do community service or something, be more involved in the communities that you’re visiting instead of just blowing in, saying what you got to say and then peacing out.” She recalls a pre-COVID gig at an Oregon mental health hospital: the comfort of bringing music into people’s lives when they were unable to access it themselves. “Bringing stuff to them where they could really benefit from it was a revelation.”

Lessons For Mutants’ genesis dates back as far as 2018, but was released in October 2022. It exchanges moments between Johanna’s striking yells on Piscean Lover to the confessional precise nature of Hi Res. During its recording, Warren’s personal life turned on its head. Without work, on a new continent in a new relationship, her music found a switch from digital to analogue recording euphoric.

“I’ve been thinking about it as an equivalent to face filters. You can keep tweaking this image, and it might come out looking perfectly symmetrical – but it’s not your face anymore! The best bits [of a song] can be where somebody’s just a hair flat or a bit late, or it feels like it’s about to fall apart and then it doesn’t. That’s really exciting – just to recommit to realness,” she enthuses, describing tracking herself and her band using two-inch tape.

 “I’d rather be lonely and empowered, than on a cross or devoured by those who would take a tooth for a tooth,” Warren sings on Tooth For A Tooth, a mid-album piano ballad on Lessons. With an ongoing theme of collective metamorphosis, Johanna evokes X-Men imagery throughout the LP: the good and the evil inside of us, a metaphor she uses herself. “I guess the Lessons For Mutants thing is how to find that moving centre inside yourself that can both be adaptable and fluid, but also firm and fixed – in some essential sense of presence, or belonging, that nothing and no-one can take away from you by changing the external circumstances.”

Johanna Warren, Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Thurs 17 Nov.

Tickets: £12. Info: here

words EMMA WAY