Emmy the Great

My musical tastes generally run toward old Jews from my father's generation, like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, or country-tinged tortured souls like Lucinda Williams and Ryan Adams, so I am more than a little surprised to find that my favorite album for the last few months has been First Love by Emmy the Great, a 24 year old Anglo-Chinese “singer-songwanker” (to borrow her phrase). How good is her debut album? It’s right up there with the best folk-rock albums of the last decade: Summerteeth by Wilco; Heartbreaker by Ryan Adams; Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams; More Adventurous by Rilo Kiley; even, so help me, “Love and Theft” by Mr. Zimmerman and Ten New Songs by Mr. Cohen.

How is this possible? It’s a miracle, plain and simple. So is the birth of any true artist. Nothing in Dylan’s background, nothing in Cohen’s, nothing in Adams’ or Tweedy’s pegged them for genius. They were just normal kids from normal families with some highly unusual, perhaps defective chromosomes that made the rabbit holes in their backyards pathways to their own private Wonderlands, rather than tunnels dug by cute rodents. (Lucinda, of course, did have an artistic background, with a famous poet for a father, and Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis was a child actress who co-starred in a sitcom with Lucille Ball.)

This is what I know about the life of Emma-Lee Moss, aka Emmy the Great. She spent her first dozen years in her mother’s native China, then moved to her father’s native England. A little out of the ordinary, but no more likely to turn her into a great songwriter than any other self-perceived misfit born in the mid-eighties. I guess what I’m saying is, put explanations out of your head and just appreciate her work.

The sound of First Love is, indeed, lovely, all acoustic guitars, violins, and Emmy’s clear, generally melancholic soprano. It sounds like what a 21^st century folk album should sound like. But it’s her songs that make Emmy more than just a latter-day Lisa Loeb. They’re full of surprising rhymes, startling images, and raw emotions.

How surprising? How startling? How raw? How about this for a song title: “If I Had Known the Last Time Would Be the Last Time I’d Have Let You Enjoy It.” There’s a whole novel’s worth of pathos and regret just in the title. The song itself lasts barely over a minute (it's not on her album).

I could go on, but instead I’ll let Emmy do the work for me by quoting a few of my favorite lines, some from the album and some from the various singles she released while she was developing her artistry.

“You were stroking me like a pet/ But you didn’t own me yet.”

“You didn’t stop/ When I told you to stop/ And there was a month/ When I wasn’t sure/ If the next time I saw you/ Out on the road/ I’d have something to say/ Other than pay/ All of the money that you owe.”

“I thought romance was pretty/ But you went and spoiled it/ Every time I think of you/ I have to go to the toilet.”

“First we were born then we ran slowly out of luck/ And you’re still not Charles Bukowski and I am not Diane Cluck/ And I would suck the life from you/ If there was any left to suck.”

“The saccharine smear of baby spit/ The secret trail it leaves upon the tit.”

“They pulled a human from my waist/ It had your mouth, it had your face/ I would have kept it if I stayed.”

“I knew you best/ Back when love was just a feeling that ran out between my legs/ On to the back of my dress/ On to the clothes that I was wearing.”

It’s interesting to note that the most shocking, or perhaps naked, of these images come from songs that predate the album. I wonder if she decided some of this was just too soul-baring for mass public consumption.

Not that Emmy is all gloom and doom. There is an almost heartbreaking faith in love in “Bad Things Coming, We Are Safe,” and a strain of wonderfully sarcastic humor in “My Party Is Better Than Yours,” an attack on a friend who has betrayed her:

“Me and all of my other chums/ Will sit and talk ‘bout your smelly bum/ ‘Cause you’re not my friend any more.” (This line was actually replaced with something innocuously unscatological in a second draft of the lyric.)

But I’ve gone on long enough. For those of you who’ve made it this far (or were smart enough to skip ahead), check out a live Emmy performance from the Flying to Paris Sessions, which includes her great cover of Skeeter Davis "End of the World."