Welcome to this week’s Launch Box featuring Emmy the Great
If you like: Laura Marling, Daughter, First Aid Kit
Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and a Chinese mother, Emma-Lee Moss – known by her stage name Emmy the great – was interested in music from a young age. She used to go by train to her nearest Tower Records to buy the only non-Chinese music they had, and as a result developed a liking for bands like Weezer, and The Smashing Pumpkins. A British citizen through her father, she returned with her family to London at the age of 12.
She started making music after encouragement from The Get Up Kids while at Fuji Rock Festival as part of Joe Strummer’s entourage. She first emerged under the name Emmy the Great in 2006, when she released a series of free demos over the internet. She says the moniker came about when she “wanted to be a backing singer and wanted to have something to hand to people… ‘Emmy’ is a name they called me at university, which I hated, and ‘the Great’ I added on because I hated ‘Emmy’ so much.”
Her debut single, Secret Circus, was released in April 2006. She began writing her debut album, First Love, in “dilapidated studios” owned by The Earlies in rural Lancashire and was released in February 2009 and spawned the singles First Love and We Almost Had A Baby.
Her second album, Virtue, was released in June 2011. With cover art that includes toy dinosaurs and a sinister-looking Virgin Mary, the album establishes its central themes and ideas visually before anyone plays a note. Influenced heavily by a broken engagement with her atheist fiance, who underwent a religious conversion and left her to become a Christian missionary. “Trellick Tower” is thought to have been especially inspired by this.
Following the release of her 2011 album, Virtue, Emma-Lee Moss set on a vagabond voyage toggling between touring and personal travel from her home of London to Salt Lake City, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles, before finally landing at her new home base in New York. Out of that course came the four tracks that comprise her EP S, where Moss distances herself from the motif of heartbreak, a subject that anchored so much of her previous work, and instead reflects more on the existential changes around her.
Opening track “Swimming Pool” showcases much of the polished production explored on her second album, only this track takes it up several levels. The swirling synths eddy in the distance and the flange of guitar lends the track an immersive quality it’s hard to escape from. Moss’ lyrics are, as ever, at the forefront as she reflects on her own balances of emotion in light of what is, quite possibly, a short lived holiday romance. It’s a shimmering track that is at once melancholic and optimistic.
Her narratives hit some philosophical nails on the head, especially when it comes to the hot topic of digital anxiety. Moss’ electric inclinations in 2015’s EP lay out a promising foundation for her forthcoming full-length album. Her third album Second Love is due March 11. Recorded during her moves between London, Los Angeles, and New York, the work as a whole expresses themes of changing landscapes and isolation. Emmy states of her inspiration:
I’ve always felt that records are supposed to be “records” of your life when you made them. The entire album from ‘Swimming Pool’ to the final mix took around three years, and in this time my life progressed in previously unimaginable ways. I lived in three cities, I was single, I fell in love, made friends, new life came into my family and I found out what it is to be a stranger and to begin again.
Her latest single, “Part of Me,” is an uplifting challenge to her biting isolation. Over ever-changing piano chords and quiet bass, Emmy’s gentle vocals sing of togetherness: “You are a part of me, your heart is a part of me.”
Stream “Part of Me” below, and pre-order Second Love here.