Emmy the Great - Interview

Immediately I fail to ingratiate myself with Emmy the Great. She is smiling and more than willing to talk, but press-fatigue is evident in her voice as another ignorant journalist snatches her sound and tries to pin it down in the handy box of definitions he brought along. “Anti-Folk was in New York in the nineties, but that, again, doesn’t apply anymore. When something happens that is a reaction to something, or is vital and crucial for a moment, it dies out really quickly.” Suitably schooled, I avoided further talk of definitions and movements. I had tried to wrestle her music into a little box called folk, but she wrenched it from my grasp and set it free in a Narnia-sized wardrobe named “indie.”

The topic of genre rarely fails to irritate musicians, so I threw the letter D in there and asked if Emmy was particularly conscious of gender when she writes music? “Well, all my songs recently have been about a break up, it’s from the female perspective.” Her songs range from the playfully rude to the sexually explicit. Perhaps people react differently to this frankness because she’s a woman? “I have a male friend who said he heard my album and he felt defensive on behalf of men, he said we’re not all that bad. No you’re not all, but it was just this one person whose character I was trying to assassinate. I found it really interesting that my male friends would listen to my music and get bridled.”
Readers of the award-winning music magazine The Stool Pigeon may know more about Emmy the Great than they think. For a year now she has been writing sporadically under the dastardly cunning pseudonym of Emmy Moss. Although she harbours no ambitions to be a journalist, “it’s really helpful being on the other side. It gives you real insight; I know when not to probe, and I would never be rude to a journalist because so many artists have been rude to me. It’s like, how great do you think you are? I’m interviewing you because you’re in a really cool band and I think you’re really good, don’t be an arsehole about it.” A colourful but short article in the October issue of The Stool Pigeon demonstrates such behaviour. Emmy had tried and, due to his temper, resoundingly failed to interview Yoni Wolf (of the band Why?). Even though he’d previously agreed to do the interview he was unhappy and had, she wrote, “the look of a caged animal about to be experimented on, or someone who is being asked to hand over an internal organ.” Although she displays remarkable empathy when discussing it, “I completely understand, he was in a really bad mood, but you can’t then be an arsehole and expect someone not to write that you were an arsehole. Sure you’re playing the worst venue in Brighton but surely you want to be written about? You make music surely you want people to hear about it?”.
Emmy doesn’t want to take the journalism thing much further, “ if you go too far to the other side you will never be a Jedi.” The dark side? “It’s not the dark side it’s just the other side. When you’re a critic you’re always observing and not just enjoying. When you’re playing music you don’t want to have to see other bands like that you want to be able to interact with them. You have to stop being a critic when you’re playing music.” With an album out in February, her confidence is only growing. “I started taking responsibility for my songs. I used to be like, the song will come out, I’m not gonna look at it, it’s gonna come out and then I’m just gonna play it. Then I started looking at them and saying, I don’t like that and putting something else in because I didn’t like that that line. Taking responsibility for it.” A reputation for spikiness had preceded her, but Emmy proved thoughtful and funny. I for one can’t wait for her first album... it’ll be great!