Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane Lost In The Cedar Wood LP

British singer/songwriter/poet/actor Johnny Flynn and best-selling, multi-award-winning nature author (and fellow at Cambridge University) Robert Macfarlane began work on Lost In The Cedar Wood in the first weeks of the pandemic, wanting to make music that sang of those dangerous, disorienting spring days; when birdsong was brighter - and the sense of bewilderment more powerful - than any of us had known before.

They drew inspiration in part from The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of world literature; an epic poem from Ancient Mesopotamia that contains the earliest version of the Flood Myth. To Johnny and Robert, Gilgamesh resonated eerily with the present moment - and it catalyzed their song-writing. For Gilgamesh is a story of friendship, love, loss, grief, bad governance and good dreaming; of natural disaster and environmental crisis. It also contains the first recorded act of human destruction of the natural world: when Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to the Sacred Cedar Wood, slay the guardian spirit of the forest, and cut down the trees with their axes, thereby bringing catastrophe upon themselves.

Johnny and Robert wrote the album between March 2020 and February 2021, during a year in which we all wandered unsure of our path, lost in the cedar wood. The songs were composed in large part as a correspondence, through a back-and-forth of notebook pages, voice-recordings and WhatsApp-messages, at a time when lockdowns made meeting in person impossible. The first eight songs were recorded in an off-grid cottage deep in a Hampshire forest, with the sounds of chainsaws felling trees drifting in through the windows along with the birdsong.

The result is an album at once urgent and ancient, which fuses poetry, landscape, myth and music into something unique. These are songs that ring with hope, love and sadness - and one need not know anything about The Epic of Gilgamesh to be touched by them.

Of course trad-folk's golden boy and one of the UK's preeminent nature writers are pals. This lockdown project between Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane is the Countryfile of collabs: a cosy, verdant thing that feels as restorative as a breath of fresh woodland air. And, if you listen closely enough, you might just learn something... 'Lost In The Cedar Wood' is the joyful sound of spotting sunshine in the darkest of times.

References to myth and legend may be unimportant to some listeners. But Johnny Flynn's consistently simple melodies and simply, his sheer musicality, are evidence of an artist in his prime. 'Lost In The Cedar Wood' could be the most important album to listen to right now.