With her recent singles Playing It Safe and Plastic Swings, EMMMA has stepped out from the shadows to embrace the spotlight. Now that moment of redefining herself reaches a new peak as she unveils her debut EP Secondary Character, which features the new focus track More Than That.
EMMMA
As Notion recently noted, the combination of EMMMA’s gorgeous, multi-genre alt-pop and introspective lyrical reflections will resonate with fans of Phoebe Bridgers, MUNA and Boygenius. That point is affirmed throughout Secondary Character, which sees EMMMA find catharsis by challenging the parts of her personality that have held her back a little in the past: taking the safe option, not standing up for herself, and stepping back to allow others to shine. Yet for all that self-doubt, what emerges on the EP is an artist with a new-found confidence and desire to present herself to the world as the person she really is.
EMMMA says: “All of these things led me to the person I am now, and I’m so grateful for them. People can interpret these songs in their own way, but I think it’s very comforting to know that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. Hopefully by sharing my experiences, if someone else is going through the same, I can make them feel like they’re not on their own.”
The new focus track More Than That charts EMMMA’s experiences when she agreed to continue a college relationship long-distance after she had graduated. It’s a less cynical cousin to Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Please Please Please’ and sees EMMMA reflecting fondly on those formative years over swooning harmonies and propulsive percussion. Her highest energy track to date, it’s a song of youthful optimism that love can overcome anything – complete with a personal reference to Bon Iver’s ‘Holocene’. The subsequent context, however, adds a tinge of sadness and nostalgia that their shared idealism didn’t quite work out.
She adds: “More Than That was written before I broke up with my ex. The song details that even though we were long distance for quite a while, it didn’t matter because we were more than the miles between us and that we’d be fine since we grew up in our formative years together and nothing could take that away.”
The Secondary Character EP is completed by another new song in the shape of its title track. It’s a song about love in the context of friendship, and each verse sees EMMMA referencing literature in which a secondary character makes a sacrifice to benefit the lead, going from ‘Lord of the Rings’ to ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ and finally ‘Harry Potter’.
EMMMA wrote three of the songs on the EP with producer Doug Schadt (Maggie Rogers, ASHE) and Emily Haber (Joy Oladokun, Anna Clendening). The title track Secondary Character was co-written and produced by ToneDef.
Check out the chorus of More Than That below and the new EP here:
Raised in Westport, Connecticut, EMMMA comes from a family of creative talents: her mother is a former opera singer who studied at Julliard; her uncle plays percussion with the New York Philharmonic; and her late grandmother was an opera singer and vocal coach, who met EMMMA’s grandfather, a classical radio host, in the school choir.
From influences dating back to childhood (Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell) through to the present day (Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers, Hozier, Holly Humberstone and The 1975), EMMMA has always been a prodigious talent. But talent is nothing without feeling, and so her own songwriter has always been informed by emotions that come from experiences she has lived first hand. Even now, if she struggles to identify the theme that would make a song work, she thinks about how her favourite artists would approach the idea. Her equilibrium between ability and relatable ideas was further reflected in her early days: she studied songwriting and performance at the prestigious Berklee College Of Music, but it was the hard graft of touring around North America’s modest grassroots venues that really made her an artist who could connect with audiences.
A big part of EMMMA’s early career has come from touring the world as the guitarist and keyboard player in Sasha Alex Sloan’s live band. With Secondary Character, she has proven that she excels in both worlds: she can help someone else bring their music to life, but she is equally as adept at making her own artistic statement.
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