Artist Of The Week #244 - Emmeline
This week’s Artist of the Week is lyrical polymath Emmeline who has just unveiled her new EP ‘Small-Town Girls and Soft Summer Nights’ - which also includes her latest new single ‘Dust’ featuring Kojey Radical.
Created alongside collaborator and producer Fraser T. Smith, ‘Dust’ was written with Kojey Radical in mind. “We wanted to make a song that was bold and playful, and that captured the spirit of the EP, with themes of theatricality and the legacy of a life on the stage.” notes Emmeline.
“We used musical nods to Peter Pan and Frank Sinatra, whilst I wrote with references to Shakespeare and classic Hollywood; it’s a song about ageing and wish fulfilment, and how great art rarely fades to dust. When Kojey came into the studio to hear what we had been making, he blessed us by gracing the concept with his own meditations on performativity. The end result was beyond our wildest dreams of how fittingly he could inhabit our world with his own lyrical and vocal prowess.”
Emmeline trained with the Royal Exchange in Manchester and The National Youth Theatre in London before joining spoken word collective Young Identity in 2017 and, unbeknown to her family, began to perform at poetry events, eventually having to reveal her secret passion for performing when she won SLAMbassadors - a national slam poetry competition. From here it became apparent that she was performing lyrics, without the music to pair with her words so when she found herself in a chance conversation at a gig with famed producer Fraser T. Smith, she boldly plucked up the courage to ask him for feedback on some demos, to which he replied with a beat. Within weeks the pair built a collaborative partnership, and Smith had offered to sign her to his label 70Hz Recordings.
She took a moment to talk to us about how the EP came together.
Hey there Emmeline - how are you? So your EP is out now - how does it feel to have it out there in the world?
I'm great! Thrilled to have this project out in the world. There always feels like a tipping point with music when something has been yours for so long, and suddenly it's a shared entity, I love that and I'm ready for people to find new meaning in it outside of my own head.
It is called ‘Small-Town Girls and Soft Summer Nights’ - what is the meaning behind that?
It's actually a reference to the Frank Sinatra song 'It Was A Very Good Year', which is a melancholic but deeply nostalgic take on growing up. I was listening to that song off one of my Grandad's old records (a Grandad I actually never met) and I heard the line 'it was a very good year for small-town girls and soft summer nights' and i thought it so perfectly encapsulated the assumed romance of growing up in a small village. At the time I was thinking a lot about leaving home, having just moved to London from West Yorkshire.
Where was it recorded? Any behind the scenes stories from the creative process you are happy to share with us?
There's a nice story which essentially led to the project being made: I was talking to my producer (Fraser T. Smith) about the feeling of being able to see your childhood and childhood home only with clarity having left it. I was experiencing nostalgia for my youth for one of the first times in my life, but also remembering the feeling of wanting to be an adult. He sent me a beat after that conversation which so perfectly encapsulated all the emotion I had been experiencing. I was in my childhood bedroom when I first heard it, and it was there where I wrote the titular track 'Small-Town Girl'.
What are the key themes and influences on the EP?
Wish fulfilment; teenage fantasy; suburbia; the legacy of art; youth vs. experience; reality vs.memory.
If the EP could be the soundtrack to any film - which one would it be and why?
Lady Bird, most definitely. That film was really on my mind when I was thinking about this EP. Greta Gerwig (its director) always talked about how the film tracked some of her own memories of growing up in Sacramento as a teenager. She moved away from home, always believing that the grass would be greener, but then was drawn back to it artistically. It's something Joan Didion writes a lot about in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which in turn inspired Gerwig. Essentially what I'm saying is that these women speak deeply and nostalgically about their childhoods and the complex relationship they have with making them fictional and fantastical beyond their experience of growing up there, something I can totally relate to.
Do you have a favorite lyric on the EP - if so, which one and why?
I like the line 'It was a very good year for village girls in sea green tights' - it's a reference to my first ever acting role as Peter Pan in a school play, where I was forced to wear a green body suit that made me look like a little stick insect.
Now the EP is out there - what next?
I want to be prolific in my work, so the answer in general is more: more music, more live shows, more lyrics. I'm supporting The Streets in September which I'm giddy about, so I suppose that's the first thing I have my eye on.
