Kevin Bronson on June 17th, 2016

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Like the best and most earnest of singer-songwriters, Johanna Samuels transforms her internal conversations into pop euphoria, her lush, piano-driven arrangements framing her often-piquant narratives. A native New Yorker who grew up in L.A. and later moved back to New York, Samuels has stationed herself again in Southern California — a back-and-forth that informs the songs on her new EP, “Home & Dry: Told a Lie.” Out next Friday and produced by Sean O’Brien, the EP follows her 2014 full-length, “Double Bind,” and its five songs were written between coasts. “I wanted to explore the concept of home: both leaving home and homecoming — each have the potential to make you feel displaced and open at the same time,” she says. “I wrote a couple of the songs in New York, where I’d been living for the past 10 years in anticipation of moving back to Los Angeles, the city I grew up in. Once I was back, it felt like the rest of the songs started writing themselves.” The woozy single “The Beast” seems obliquely to be about a burden — the compulsion to tell one’s own tale, because, as she sings, “How will I know myself / unless I tell the story over?”

||| Stream: “The Beast”

||| Also: Stream “Into the Throes”

||| Live: Johanna Samuels celebrates her EP release with a show at the Satellite on June 21, joined by Anna Ash and Emerson Star. Tickets.