Imagine a small, draughty house just up from the sea. In the yard, light cuts across a simple garden. Inside, there’s a daybed for afternoon naps, big windows where you can watch the sky shift or rain drip down the glass. There are photographs on the walls: birds, trees, children. Against a far wall stands an old, upright piano that holds a stack of loose pages, a lukewarm mug of tea. A woman is playing her love for her children and her life, her heart-heaviness, a loving-kindness prayer for an aching world. She would, as the saying goes, prefer to light a candle than curse the darkness.
This is the energetic quality of Kim June Johnson’s exquisite new album, “Songs For a Quiet Day”. The ten songs in this collection—some small, delightful piano pieces, others like poems set to music—gently invite the listener into various interactions with quiet; the quiet of waking at dawn, the quiet of children no longer being small, the quiet of a winter day spent inside with the dog, the quiet after a London air raid, the quiet of light and shadow, trees and seasons.
While Johnson carries the songs on piano and guitar and gentle layers of synth, organ and banjo evoke a tender cherishing, the addition of lush string arrangements by composer Adrian Dolan nest the songs at times, in a kind of cinematic nostalgia.
Oh To Love What Is Lovely, with a reference to a line by the poet Mary Oliver, gives voice to the undeniable impermanence of things, with gardens and children as the focal point. I Wish I Had Woken With the Dawn is a brief, gorgeous reminder to live each day consciously instead of spending our hours on “so many things that mean nothing”. Song for Evelyn tells the story of a friendship with a flower-loving neighbour who shares her seeds. Even the cleverly-named piano instrumentals sing praises to oft-overlooked events like picking blackberries, swimming on the first warm day of summer and watching tree shadows blow on the walls.
Overall, the listener is blessed with a heart-lifting reminder that our days, like gardens, like seasons, like sunrises, are fleeting, so we’d better wake up and savour them.
Recorded and co-produced with Corwin Fox at Hidden Well Studio (Cumberland, BC), Songs For a Quiet Day will be released on June 1, 2025 on all digital platforms.
