Last Sunday, Briony and I saw Emmy the Great play a gig at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, backed by four female backup singers and an all-female string quartet (I mention the gender because she kept mentioning it - it was significant because the gig was part of a festival marking International Women's Day.
It being an era of digital record-keeping, there is some pretty good smartphone video footage of the gig on this youtube channel.
For the record, 'Emmy the Great' seems to refer to the band, rather than to Emma-Lee Moss (the singer/songwriter) - well, obviously it does refer to her, but in the same way as 'the Jimi Hendrix Experience', which was a band, not an individual. I think it's a really unfortunate name - it has the air of something you wrote down on a Battle of the Bands signup sheet because you'd been arguing over names for weeks, and you were about to miss the deadline.
My favourite Emmy the Great song is 'Paper Forest (in the Afterglow of Rapture)', off her latest album, Virtue. Partly, I like it because its written with a lyrical rhythm that I used to write in back when I was in a band in high school (Bah-dah-dah-dah-Bah-dah-dah-dah-Bah-dah-dah-dah-Bah). Unfortunately my lyrics tended to be, almost literally, gibberish. The only instance I can recall word-for-word was a short verse within a song written by the guitarist (the bassist had a verse too - our songwriting had a kind of Wu-tang Clan 'everybody take a verse' egalitarianism). Here's my bit:
If the tractor is attractive ride it like it was the one
Because the ashes still are glowing even when the fire's done
And if nowhere's where we're going then you know you better run
and now my soul's on fire and it's burning like the sun
Looking back on it, I can't find any way to read the first line other than as an invitation to have sex with farm machinery. What on earth was I thinking? The answer, I believe, is that I was thinking that 'tractor' and 'attractive' have an appealing consonance. I find this line exceptionally embarrassing, but there's stuff to like in the passage too - I like the tight internal rhyme between 'glowing' and 'going', and the way that 'soul's on fire' slows to eighth notes, breaking up what has been a steady sixteenth-note flow. But that's all to do with sound and rhythm. On the level of meaning, there's less to love - the first and second lines are connected by a 'because', but I defy anyone to find a reason that one should ride a tractor because ashes are still glowing. The third line is a sort of grunge-era stab at a Wildean epigram, and finally, maybe I've just been living in England too long, but 'my soul's on fire' seems like an awfully bold claim to make, especially from someone rapping in a deep, deadpan monotone.
Which brings me to my final note in this tangential reminiscence - the song was a dark and downtempo - trip-hop as played on guitar, bass, soprano saxophone, and conga drum (we didn't know any kit drummers with experimental enough tastes to join the band). This leads me to puzzle a bit over influences. I think I must have bought Tricky's Pre-Millenium Tension by this point, or I have absolutely no idea where this sound would have come from (the other big influence, I believe (chronology is a bit fuzzy) is the Killah Priest track off of a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion remix album). Though I don't think anybody would've picked up on these influences from hearing us play - we had a pretty distinctive sound. There's something to be said for the idea that originality comes from trying and failing to mimic your influences. My Dad first presented this idea to me after he'd read that the Beatles wrote 'Got to Get You Into My Life' in an attempt to write a 'Motown number'. If you listen to the tune with this knowledge, you can hear the Motown influence, but it's definitely NOT a Motown song. For more on the complicated relationship between originality and imitation, have a read of Jonathan Lethem's The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism
This brings me back to Emmy the Great, who are intensely (and wittily) imitative and referential, though they never sound like anyone but themselves. The first song Briony and I heard that really blew our minds was 'Hallelujah', which is about listening to Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' (interestingly Moss specifies that it's the 'original Leonard Cohen version' - I would've assumed she'd prefer Jeff Buckley's version to Cohen's dry, synthy original).
In general, Moss's lyrics are pretty oblique (more so on Virtue than on her first album, First Love), but they have the quality of entering a conversation midway through, rather than of somebody stringing words together more at less at random for the sake of their sound - which, apart from being my preferred approach to songwriting, also characterises a great deal of songwriting (especially in America).
Another great thing about Moss's songwriting is that she's interested the act of writing itself. There are two couplets in 'Paper Forest' which, together, are my favourite lyrics about writing in any song that I can think of. First, early in the song, she sings the following:
It's like these days I have to write down almost every thought I've held,
So scared I am becoming of forgetting how it felt,
Then, later in the song, she sings
It's like the way I have to write down almost everything I see,
So that the record does obscure the thing the record used to be,
I used to write fairly compulsively in a journal - not as often as I felt I ought (it wasn't necessarily a daily thing) but a lot more often than most people - and I did it for precisely these two, apparently contradictory reasons: to make sure I didn't forget how my life felt, and to rewrite my life in the terms I wanted - which is to say, translated by my literary and musical influences. Thus, quite a lot of my high school journals are written as if they were being kept by the least dissolute member of Jack Kerouac's circle. In University, I tried on Joan Didion's matter-of-factness, and picked up the genial curiosity and off-the-cuff analysis of Henry Allen, a Washington Post writer who taught one of the first seminars (and possibly the best) I ever had. Actually, it goes deeper than this, because something doesn't just become 'my version of events' when I write it down, the very act of perception is an act of interpretation (for evidence of this, walk around anywhere, and I mean anywhere, with the James Bond theme playing through headphones). And yet, there's something more deliberate when you actually write things down - it is an attempt to refashion the world, as well as to record it.
Having said all that, 'Paper Forest' has much more to it than those two couplets - in fact, for the most part it isn't a song about writing. You should listen to it - here it is: