This incredibly vibey song “I Try,” by the talented singer and songwriter Kacey Johansing, is definitely going to leave you stuck on repeat for a long time! This song is one of the best Pop songs we have heard in a while! The tune is so catchy and the production work is polished and professional. The song comes with a great music video that definitely will give you a better experience while you are listening and put you in the mood. We have enjoyed listening to Johansing’s vocals until the last second and we are totally stuck on her vocals. She has a talent when it comes to songwriting, her lyrics are original and well written and her vocal performance is so beautiful. This song was a great experience for our team and we are very excited to see where Johansing’s career will go within the next few months.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Kacey Johansing was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and raised in the mountain towns of Colorado. After leaving Berklee College of Music in Boston, Johansing relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she spent a decade creating a community of musicians, artists and filmmakers, co-founded the duo Yesway, and released three solo albums. She has toured internationally and shared the stage with such acts as Kings of Convenience, Angel Olsen, Chris Cohen and Little Wings, and has collaborated with members of My Morning Jacket, Real Estate, Hand Habbits, The Fruit Bats and The Range of Light Wilderness. Johansing lives and works in Los Angeles.
“The Hiding” is set for release June 2 on Night Bloom Records, a label Johansing founded with Real Estate’s Alex Bleeker and longtime-friend and songwriter Jeff Manson.
“It seems great opportunities come in blessings as well as tragedies,” Kacey Johansing sings on the title track of her third album, “The Hiding”. After the breakup of her band Yesway, and an abrupt falling out with her closest musical collaborator, Johansing set out to record a new batch of songs that resulted from the sea change in which she had now found herself.
Instead of drawing from her regular band, Johansing pulled from a wider cast of players that she’d come to know in the community of musicians throughout California and the West Coast. The resulting sound is one based wholly and unabashedly in pop. Nods to Christine McVie and Fleetwood Mac can be heard, but Johansing brings these sounds to a modern stage, blending her ethereal vocals with effervescent synthesizer washes and reverberating open-tuned guitar.
Recorded at Panoramic House in Stinson Beach, where Kacey worked as caretaker, as well as at home in Bolinas, on a ridge above the cloud layer in Big Sur, and at a friend’s studio in Portland, the album also serves as a document of Kacey’s time spent traveling in search of the sound she was after. After finishing initial tracking, and still reeling from the heartbreak of losing her musical community, Johansing found a necessary move was in order.
Landing somewhat-blindly in Los Angeles, she continued to work on the album and hold it close. The end result is “The Hiding”, a tone poem about loss, growth and “leaving the insular beauty of a tight-knit community,” as Johansing describes it. The release of “The Hiding” comes at a time when Johansing is deeply longing to emerge from her extended absence and reconnect with her desire to create and share her music.
Kacey Johansing will release her new album “No Better Time” on November 20 via Night Bloom Records. The album is an exploration of love and how one accepts it into his/her/their life. It asks how can someone allow love when the past is full of trauma. Can we become someone new and leave behind our former selves? Can place allow us that freedom? How does one find the strength to try again?
Across 11 songs Johansing wrestles to find the answers, her unmistakable vocals always leading the way. Anchored by powerful performances pulled from three days of live tracking with her band all in the same room, the album is bounding and energetic at its core. First takes were prioritized and perfection was rarely the goal. Rather, capturing an emotion and honesty from herself and the players was the rule of the day. The album pulls from Johansing’s love of classic pop—it’s her LA record—the place where she now resides and initially struggled to understand. Joan Didion said, “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” Kacey saw that and chose to tap into the creative buzz happening all around her—at small clubs and while dipping in and out of playing in friends’ bands, including in between tours as a member of Hand Habits. The resulting “No Better Time” is the sound of letting go and faithfully falling into step with a new way. There are vibraphones and swooping strings, grand pianos and doubled acoustic guitars, washes of tape delay and woodwinds—but it is the songs that continue to set Johansing apart. Here she unveils her strongest set yet.
Produced by Johansing and multi-instrumentalist Tim Ramsey (Vetiver, Fruit Bats), engineered by Tyler Karmen (DIIV, Alvvays) and mixed by Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith, Cat Power), the album includes contributions from Todd Dahlhoff (Feist, Devendra Banhart), Trevor Beld Jimenez (Parting Lines) and Amir Yaghmai (Julian Casablancas + The Voidz).
