Johanna Samuels is a singer-songwriter from New York and Los Angeles whose work sits in folk, pop rock, singer-songwriter, indie and indie pop territory. She grows up listening to Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Paul Simon, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Van Morrison and The Band, and she also develops an interest in melody-driven contemporary songwriters such as Elliott Smith, Ben Kweller, Jon Brion and Aimee Mann.

Career

Samuels begins writing and collaborating with friends in her hometown of Los Angeles while putting together her first two projects, A Little Bit of Both and Lemonade. Both releases are made largely as demo collections, recorded and produced on her laptop.

After moving back to Brooklyn, she decides to make a more polished recording and creates Giant Fantasy Life. The album is recorded at a friend’s studio on Sundays over the course of much of a year. Its title comes from a line in one of Elliott Smith’s songs.

Songwriting themes

The songs on Giant Fantasy Life focus on the tension between the physical world and the world of thought, and on the difficulty of bringing those two into balance. Samuels describes the mind as a “giant fantasy life.”