Emma Swift is an Australian artist currently living in Nashville. My first encounter with Emma was when she performed at the legendary 5 Spot in Nashville during Americana Fest three years ago. She made quite an impression on me and subsequent visits to that festival have invariably led to further encounters with her, both on and off stage. She also appeared at The Workman’s Club in Dublin last year, opening for her partner Robyn Hitchcock on that occasion.
She is due to release her interpretations of Bob Dylan songs on August 14th with an album titled BLONDE ON THE TRACKS on Tiny Ghost Records. She released the single I Contain Multitudes during lockdown a few months back. It’s a beautiful delivery of a song which was only recorded earlier this year by Dylan and a flavour of the quality across her album.
I spoke with Emma recently about the album, how she landed in Nashville, working with Patrick Sansone of Wilco and her concerns for the industry going forward generated by the COVID -19 pandemic.
Growing up in Sydney, Australia, what music were you exposed to in particular and what turned you in the direction of country music?
I wouldn’t describe the music I play as country music any more than I would describe Bob Dylan’s music as country music. I grew up listening to ‘90s indie rock and golden oldies radio. My early favourite bands were The Sundays, The Smiths, Mazzy Star and The Lemonheads. Pretty, lyrical music for sad teenagers. At age 15 a family friend gave me a record player, and I taught myself to sing by listening to Linda Ronstadt. I guess that’s where the country came in, I got into California country rock, Laurel Canyon stuff - CSNY, Flying Burritos, Joni Mitchell and so on.
At what stage did you crossover from listener to performer?
Music has always, since I was a small child, felt like an essential part of my life force. I started singing in front of people when I was eight years old, so I’m not entirely sure that there ever was a crossover point, even though there have been times, particularly my early adult life, where music took a backseat to other pursuits: partying and studying and failed romances and such.
There appears to be considerable support currently for Country & Americana artists touring Australia. Was that scene around in Sydney when you lived there?
Australians love live music and the scene, local and international there has always been pretty cool.
Was your initial venture to Nashville by way of a holiday or had you intended staying for a more extended period?
I first visited Nashville in 2011 on a holiday. I also spent time on that trip in New York, Seattle and San Francisco.
Anne McCue, who produced your self-titled EP in 2014, took a similar career path, moving from Sydney to Nashville. Had you known her prior to arriving in Nashville or was she someone you naturally gravitated towards when you arrived there?
I admired Annie’s music long before I met her. She’s a deep and sensitive soul, with an incredible talent for playing the guitar.
You’re very much part of the wider artistic community residing in East Nashville at present. Notwithstanding that many of your peers are also not originally from Tennessee, was it difficult integrating into the thriving musical community in East Nashville?
Moving cities is always difficult and moving to Nashville was no different to that. The scene here is wonderful, but in a way that magnified my initial loneliness. You can watch a band at the 5 Spot on a Sunday and think those folks are really great, but buying a record or a beer doesn’t buy friendship. True connection, kinship, love is as much like discovering buried treasure here as it is anywhere else.
That self-titled EP featured material announcing your love of all things Nashville, from the bohemian lifestyle in East Nashville to the lively honky tonks in the more commercial Broadway. Six years later and in an altogether different climate both environmentally and politically, do those songs still represent your enthusiasm?
The songs I wrote for that EP feel like they might have been written by someone else. I still have affection for them, but I don’t really play them anymore. I was very green at that time. I have deep love for this city and for my friends here, but I wouldn’t say I have enthusiasm. Yikes, I sound like I’m talking about a marriage! Perhaps me and Nashville need to consider couples therapy.
Your album of Bob Dylan covers BLONDE ON THE TRACKS (great title by the way!), is due for release in August. It’s interesting that Dylan’s I Contain Multitudes was chosen as the first single from the album, given that it was only released in April of this year, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Can you recall hearing the song for the first time and the impact it made on you personally?
I Contain Multitudes is a heart-stopper for me, a song of exquisite beauty and tenderness and truth. It’s a love song to poetry and art and music and ghosts, and when I first heard it I must have played it back five more times just to take it all in. The fact I had been isolated in my house for almost eight weeks when I first heard it only served to elevate my reverence. It came at a time when I needed a prayer I could relate to, and I am grateful to Bob Dylan for delivering it.
The song title is from Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself. Were you familiar with his writings and poetry prior to hearing the song?
The song is loaded with literary references and while Walt Whitman takes the title, the opening verse with “Follow me close, I’m going to Bally-na-Lee/ I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me” is much more interesting to me, in that it evokes the wandering bard Antoine Ó Raifteirí. I like thinking about Bob Dylan thinking of himself as a wandering bard. It’s an acknowledgment of the great oral tradition of poetry, which to me is much more related to song than the written tradition. But they’re all connected of course! Dylan’s been on tour forever and he has the Nobel Prize for Literature, so he should know.
Back to your question - yes, I’m familiar with Whitman and read and studied Leaves of Grass back in my university days. But the poets I’m drawn to, the ones whose work resonates deeply with my own existence are Maggie Nelson, John O’Donohue, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Lyn Hejinian, Mary Oliver, Frank O’Hara, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Sexton, Gertrude Stein, Ocean Vuong. I could go on and on and on and on. I love words. I love poetry. I love that this song gives me a chance to talk about this stuff.
You must be particularly encouraged by the reaction both the single and video has received?
One thing I’ve learned in my lifetime of art making is that you must do it for you and you only. Praise is unimportant. Success is unimportant. Art for me is a spiritual practice, a dialogue between the me in my body and the me in my soul that existed long before this body. That said, if something I create connects with and brings comfort or joy to other people, that is just wonderful. Music has been my main form of therapy for years, but I just worked out how to create music videos, so I’m glad that my visual side, the part of me that likes to do collage and cut and paste is finally out in the open.
How long have you been working on the project?
The project was born in 2017, put on hold in 2018 and 2019, and restarted in 2020. Six songs were recorded and finished over 2017/2018, and then I Contain Multitudes and Simple Twist of Fate were recorded in April and May this year. The only thing I’ve ever done in a rush in this lifetime is get to the bar before closing time.
Had you intended to release the album in August prior to the lockdown?
I had intended to release Queen Jane Approximately as a 7-inch single this year, but after I lost all my touring work for the year due to COVID, I decided to go the whole way and release an album.
I understand that most of the material had been recorded prior to the lockdown with the remainder while you were in quarantine. How difficult was it to finalise the tracks with so much uncertainty surrounding you?
When uncertainty strikes, it’s good to find something to be certain about. The songs are already great, they’re the compositions of the best songwriter in the world. Are my performances of them any good? It’s not up to me to decide. When it comes to recording and releasing music, I can get stuck in a nowhere zone we call “death by options” at our house. Being in lockdown at home forced me to make decisions. A lot of folks have recorded Dylan songs, so that is not new but I was very determined to be the first to record and release I Contain Multitudes. I guess that song has propelled the whole release.
You hooked up with multi-instrumentalist and Wilco member Patrick Sansone to produce this time around. What drew you towards him?
Patrick is a sweet man and an intuitive and imaginative producer. We love a lot of the same music, and he’s made some fine records with Wilco, as well as artists I really look up to like Karen Elson and Linda Perhacs. He and his partner, film programmer Mae Moreno, are exactly what I was talking about earlier when I spoke about finding your kin in East Nashville. They’re rare and special gems.
Another thing I would say about Pat is that he is infinitely more talented than me when it comes to musical proficiency. I’m a singer. Mr Sansone is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, engineer. But he never once made me feel small about that. He’s a great listener and communicator. I am so lucky to know him.
I expect that you knocked on a number of neighbour’s doors in Nashville to play on the album. What players feature?
The first door I knocked on was Robyn Hitchcock’s, because we have been musical and romantic collaborators now for seven years. He’s a phenomenal guitar player with an inventive picking style that recalls Bert Jansch and Martin Carthy, with a healthy dose of Lennon and McCartney in there too. Robyn is known mostly as a cult songwriter, but he really is an exceptional guitar player.
Jon Estes is on the bass and Jon Radford is on the drums. The Jons are two of the hardest working musicians in Nashville. If you check the liner notes of a lot of records made in East Nashville, you’ll find them there. Exceptional players, exceptional people.
Thayer Serrano is a mind blowingly talented pedal steel player who I met in Athens, Georgia. We became friends very quickly over our mutual love of the Neil Young Ditch trilogy era records. She’s the best.
And of course, as well as his work as producer, you can hear Patrick Sansone all over this record. He plays guitar, keyboards, percussion.
The tracks are an interesting selection, especially choosing songs written by a male but performed by a female artist. Given Dylan’s extensive songbook, how did you approach the selection of the eight songs that feature?
There are so many wonderful Bob Dylan songs and the tracks that made it onto the album were chosen for a couple of reasons. One because I like them. Two because they moved me in a way that made feel I could sing them with heart and soul and purpose. And three because I wanted to have fun with gender pronouns and retell the same stories without tweaking the lyrics in anyway. In the old days women or their producers would adjust the words so that Mama You’ve Been On My Mind became Baby You’ve Been On My Mind for Linda Ronstadt and Daddy You’ve Been on My Mind for Joan Baez. Given that it’s the 21st century, I just wanted to sing the songs and leave it at that. A good song is a good song, regardless of the gender of the person singing it.
I’d consider it near sacrilege to remodel Dylan’s songs. You remained true to the original versions. Had you considered giving some of the selected songs a makeover?
No. I have no interest whatsoever in undertaking renovations on a perfectly good house.
On a wider issue, you’ve decided to ignore the larger platforms and release the album on Bandcamp. With the exception of the more established commercial acts, the majority of bands and artists appear to use these servers for exposure rather than financial gain, given the miniscule returns that the larger music servers provide to the artists. Other than exposure the servers are strangling the majority of artists. No doubt you’ve had this discussion many times with your peers. Do you consider that people have given up the battle with them and conceded defeat, or do you any way forward that artists can be adequately rewarded for providing the material to the platforms?
The way I see it, as a professional musician I am a worker, just as when I was a newsreader in Australia, I was a worker. If the ABC didn’t want to pay me a living wage to read the news, I wouldn’t have done it just for the “exposure”. It’s not my job to tell other musicians how to run their business and each of us has to make whatever decision feels right. But I know for me, I can’t live off the money paid by mainstream streaming services. That might have been okay when I was on tour all the time, but COVID has illuminated how broken the current system is. In the first two weeks of this album being on pre-order, I sold 400 records. The simple math there is that to get the equivalent in income from Spotify, I would need two million streams.
Some of the venues in Nashville appear to be opening their doors again. As both a performer and punter, how anxious are you about returning to live music at present and when do you consider venues like the beloved 5 Spot will be functioning again.
I’m very worried about the future of live music globally, not just in Nashville. I am starting to see places open up again, but without a vaccine, I can’t see myself playing shows or going anywhere crowded soon. We need intervention on a government level to save and protect these spaces. In places like Ireland or Australia, that might be more likely though than in America. I am heartened to see music fans contributing to fundraisers and such to ensure that these spaces can continue. I can’t imagine Nashville without the 5 Spot or Exit/In. I can’t image Los Angeles without The Troubadour.
Finally, the best of luck from us at Lonesome Highway with the album release and your career going forward.
Thank you so much Declan! I am so grateful for your interest and your encouragement. It’s lovely to talk to another music lover. I can’t wait to see you again in the real world.
Interview by Declan Culliton