Emily Burns – 'Curse'
Songstress extraordinaire Emily Burns picks a fight with love on new single ‘Curse’.
If you have ever felt like an outsider to love, if you have ever wondered how people manage to fall in and out of love so easily when it takes you a century and a half, this song is for you.
Wrapped into a beautifully emotive melody of tender piano elevated by soft electronic elements, Emily expresses her own personal frustrations - “The world’s gone mad, isn’t it sad, I’m the only one who understands: Everybody’s underneath a curse, it’s so absurd. Lucky it doesn’t work on me.” Her crystal-clear vocals and poetic lyricism are laced with a perfect mix of defeat, resentment and wonder at a concept that defies all logic. It’s beautiful and heart-breaking while “normalising” an otherwise alienating experience. Sharing this song with the world, I’m sure, took buckets of courage but I’m just as certain that it’s going to help a lot of people make sense of their own relationship with love.
Talking about ‘Curse’, Emily says: “It’s one of the most honest and vulnerable songs I’ve ever written. I wrote it about how everyone else seems to be able to fall in and out of love all the time, and it feels as though I’m an outsider, looking in. As if love is this transcendental world that only I don’t know how to access. I decided to use the word ‘Curse’ as a metaphor…making out that love is evil and that I don’t actually want to find it.”
Words by Laura Freyaldenhoven