THOMANN: Who asked the other one out first? We had this amazing synchronicity in our interests, so it felt kind of destined that we would meet. JOHNNY FLYNN: And at that time, I was reading Rob’s books and writing songs inspired by the landscapes that he was exploring and the lens that he was seeing things through.
So, walking and writing and Johnny’s music had been a creative part of my life long before I met him. I nearly fell into a crevasse in the Swiss Alps because “The Ghost of O’Donahue” was going through my mind, as it had done for years as a real walking song, a track to make tracks to, when I should have been thinking of my footsteps, and then boof! I went through a snow bridge and fortunately got out with a few cuts and bruises. ROBERT MACFARLANE: I was listening to Johnny’s music when I was writing The Old Ways-he’s there, in the acknowledgments. What is the origin story of your friendship? MEG THOMANN: Together, you created an album based on humanity’s oldest recorded story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is an origin story in a way. Here, the pair discuss the origins of their friendship, the forces that conspired to bring them together, and the books that have defined them along the way. The resulting album, Lost in the Cedar Wood, recalls humanity’s oldest story, written in the 3rd Millenium BC, and our most timeless themes-our species’ dual capacity for love and friendship, as well as greed and destruction.
So, when Macfarlane, in the early days of the pandemic, suggested a collaboration based on The Epic of Gilgamesh, Flynn was in. Before he found success onstage, Flynn originally planned on a career as an English teacher, which is apparent in his band’s lyrics, peppered as they are with references to Yeats, Shakespeare, folktales, and ancient myths.
Vrai journal intime series#
Long before they met, Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit, the folk-rock band Flynn founded more than a decade ago, provided Macfarlane with “tracks to make tracks to.” Flynn appears in the acknowledgements of 2012’s The Old Ways in which Macfarlane guesses he had “walked perhaps 7,000 or 8,000 miles on footpaths so far” in his life, and Flynn’s music has continued to provide the author with a walking soundtrack, even though he jokes that it once almost led to his demise when, too busy concentrating on Flynn’s music, he almost fell into a Alpine crevasse.įlynn, who will be appearing as Dickie Greenleaf in the upcoming Showtime series Ripley based on Patricia Highsmith’s thriller, has always centered storytelling in his craft. The progenitor of our modern-day “weird” originally meant something closer to fate or destiny, with a little twist of the supernatural-a perfect description of the forces that bond them.
That’s why the Old English word wyrd might be the best term to describe the origins of his beautiful friendship and subsequent collaboration with actor and musician Johnny Flynn. Robert Macfarlane, high chieftan of logofiles everywhere, has dedicated entire books, including 2015’s Landmarks and 2017’s The Lost Words, which he co-authored with Jackie Morris, to preserving words and their original meanings.
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