Photograph by: Richard Fleischman

As a creator and a performer of new music, Julie Johnson’s work walks the line between composition and songwriting, art music and popular music, between genres as seemingly different as classical and blues. Hearing something operatic in “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” Leadbelly’s stark treatment of potent love, tragedy, and despair, led her to create an arrangement of the song based on music from Carmen; her piece “The Removed” and her arrangement of an old North Woods shanty boy (logging camp) song, “The Little Auplaine,” are as much chamber music as they are folk songs, and yet she plays them in bars as well as concert halls; and her orchestration of Bob Dylan’s little-known “Winterlude” for guitar, vocals, flute, mandolin, and bass clarinet defies categorization. Uniting all of her work is a soulful, haunting quality combined with her technical strength, her skills at improvisation, and her abiding and passionate curiosity for many different types of music.

THE NEW JULIE JOHNSON & THE NO-ACCOUNTS ALBUM, THE BANKS OF THE LITTLE AUPLAINE, IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE & DOWNLOAD AT:  CDBABY