Emmy the Great - Photo by Simon Bland
One highlight of Saturday at Friends of Mine Festival was catching Emmy the Great perform material from their second album Virtue on the main stage. We caught up with frontwaman Emma Moss and bassist Euan Hinshelwood before they went on.
- This is one of your first shows back after a yearlong break, do you find it difficult to get back into the swing of doing live shows?
Emma: It’s not something we’ve had to do too many times, we’ve never had a year gap like this since we started playing but it does feel really natural to be back together and it helps that we’re all the same people, if not exactly the same people playing exactly the same instruments, it’s a loose collective that we’ve worked with for a long time so it doesn’t feel weird or crazy.
Jim our drummer is the only person who didn’t play on one of our albums and who we haven’t known forever, but we did vote for his band on T-Mobile unsigned three years ago, so we feel like we know him.
- You’re playing more northern dates than anywhere else, do you like the crowd up here?
Emma: We love playing up north. In fact we love playing anywhere you can reach on the M6. We love Glasgow and Edinburgh.
But me and Euan wouldn’t have stayed together as a band if it hadn’t been for Manchester because we really became a band when we stayed at our friend Bernie’s in Whalley Range, and then we recorded our album in Lancashire.
- You played Liverpool Sound City last night, how did that go?
Emma: Because it was our first gig back I think we have sound teething problems and I think we need to tweak but it was really fun and today is The Rapture, the last day of the world according to the eBible fellowship in America, so we were really privileged to be in Liverpool on the last day of existence.
But it hasn’t happened has it? It’s supposed to happen in a couple of hours here but it hasn’t happened in Hong Kong where my parents are.
- What’s your set going to consist of at Friends of Mine?
Euan: I think half old songs, half new songs. We’ve only been playing these new songs for about five days, so yeah there’s teething problems.
- Are there any early favourites to play live?
Emma: I really like Sylvia, but it’s probably not the one that sounds the best, it’s very drudgy, it’s very bass heavy on the album.
Euan: Yeah, so one bass not for pretty much the whole track. But there’s one called North which I suppose is quite slow, it’s got Niel Young elements to it but it’s got spacey synths on top. I love playing that.
Emma: I don’t because that’s really hard for me to sing, so we have our own personal reasons for wanting to play the songs.
- So is your band really part of the musical process for you?
Emma: Not in the recording process this time round, on the first album it was a massively democratic situation where even the drummer, who came up for two days, made up the drum parts.
This time round, me, Euan and Gareth Jones, the producer, all had our own area of expertise we were in charge of and Gareth oversaw the whole thing. So now people are playing parts that are already written but it still feels like a band because they enjoy the parts and they’re inhabiting them really well.
- Do you like doing acoustic sets or do you prefer playing with your band?
Emma: At some venues acoustic sounds better but I think we generally sound better as a band because we have the option to go acoustic too.
Euan: If everything else was taken out it would still be Emma singing live on the guitar.
It’s not like some bands where you take away one effect peddle and the whole band just fails.
- Can we expect any surprises from the set?
Emma: I’ve spiked the hell out of Rick’s drink. There’re a lot of barbiturates in there so we’ll just see what happens?
- What kind of progressing can we see between Virtue and First Love?
Euan: There’s a massive progression, we just became more interested in Sonics and working with Gareth, who was Depeche Mode’s right-hand-man in the 80s, so he’s massively into synths and samples. We didn’t use a huge amount of that but we definitely had that thing going on with him.
Emma: It was that mentality applied to organic sounds, which was really cool. And Gareth is a wise person as well, he’s really lived.
- What’s the content of the new album?
Emma: I started to write it after we came off our first First Love tour when I was about to get engaged. I was writing all this stuff that seemed very general but a lot of fairytale themes came out naturally, which was interesting because I was feeling very lost, because engagement is intense.
Then all of a sudden he left to go to another country and became a very very Christian person so then the rest of the album kind of wrote itself. Then we just went straight away to record it with Gareth but I was trying to hide the fact that it was a break-up album because I didn’t want to talk about the break-up, it was horrible, and also I’d already made one quite adolescent series of break-up songs.
So all that heartbreak is in there but it’s hidden amongst these archetypal story themes which I really focused on when I was writing lyrics.
- A term you’ve used to define the genre of Virtue is Digital Medieval, can you explain what that is?
Emma: When we would go and talk about the parts, Euan for example has a musical vocabulary, I just don’t. I would say things like ‘can we just think nuns for these backing vocals’ but everyone really took to it. If you’d heard what I’d said in sound design meetings, you’d be surprised at how much it’s reflected in the stuff.
There were a couple of songs like Paper Forest and Century of Sleep where we started off with a drumbeat and I’d go ‘oh this is really medieval, let’s go with that’ and I don’t really know if the other guys gave a shit but that’s my personal way of looking at it.
Euan: I think mine and Gareth’s job is to kind of take what Emma was saying and make it make sense musically, we couldn’t just have you in the background saying ‘birds here’.
Emma: Well we did have jungle noises. There was a song called Paper Forest 1, that didn’t make it on the album, but Gareth took it really literally and said ‘everybody is going to be an animal in a forest, there are four microphones in this room and you’re spending the next fifteen minutes as animals.’ Euan was like the kid in school who has a leather jacket and doesn’t want to play dodge ball.
Euan: I didn’t want to do it.
- What’s your favourite anecdote from recording?
Emma: There’s a song called North which is about imagined paradises being colonised by missionaries. My imagined paradise is very south because I grew up in the Tropics and I thought the song was getting too warm.
That night was the engineers birthday and we’d booked to go to a pub and just before the taxi arrived, Gareth did this magic stuff and all of a sudden everything sounded like the Arctic, it was beautiful.
We went outside to get the taxi and it was a full moon in November and it was absolutely freezing. That was my favourite night.
- What are your first impression of Friends of Mine?
We’ve been here for an hour maybe. My falafel was only ok but their bean wrap looked really good - I’m so pleased that we got asked to play a Manchester festival because I looked at the line-up and it is really very Manchester based and I felt so proud that they thought of us.
Interview by Antonia Charlesworth
One highlight of Saturday at Friends of Mine Festival was catching Emmy the Great perform material from their second album Virtue on the main stage. We caught up with frontwaman Emma Moss and bassist Euan Hinshelwood before they went on.
- This is one of your first shows back after a yearlong break, do you find it difficult to get back into the swing of doing live shows?
Emma: It’s not something we’ve had to do too many times, we’ve never had a year gap like this since we started playing but it does feel really natural to be back together and it helps that we’re all the same people, if not exactly the same people playing exactly the same instruments, it’s a loose collective that we’ve worked with for a long time so it doesn’t feel weird or crazy.
Jim our drummer is the only person who didn’t play on one of our albums and who we haven’t known forever, but we did vote for his band on T-Mobile unsigned three years ago, so we feel like we know him.
- You’re playing more northern dates than anywhere else, do you like the crowd up here?
Emma: We love playing up north. In fact we love playing anywhere you can reach on the M6. We love Glasgow and Edinburgh.
But me and Euan wouldn’t have stayed together as a band if it hadn’t been for Manchester because we really became a band when we stayed at our friend Bernie’s in Whalley Range, and then we recorded our album in Lancashire.
- You played Liverpool Sound City last night, how did that go?
Emma: Because it was our first gig back I think we have sound teething problems and I think we need to tweak but it was really fun and today is The Rapture, the last day of the world according to the eBible fellowship in America, so we were really privileged to be in Liverpool on the last day of existence.
But it hasn’t happened has it? It’s supposed to happen in a couple of hours here but it hasn’t happened in Hong Kong where my parents are.
- What’s your set going to consist of at Friends of Mine?
Euan: I think half old songs, half new songs. We’ve only been playing these new songs for about five days, so yeah there’s teething problems.
- Are there any early favourites to play live?
Emma: I really like Sylvia, but it’s probably not the one that sounds the best, it’s very drudgy, it’s very bass heavy on the album.
Euan: Yeah, so one bass not for pretty much the whole track. But there’s one called North which I suppose is quite slow, it’s got Niel Young elements to it but it’s got spacey synths on top. I love playing that.
Emma: I don’t because that’s really hard for me to sing, so we have our own personal reasons for wanting to play the songs.
- So is your band really part of the musical process for you?
Emma: Not in the recording process this time round, on the first album it was a massively democratic situation where even the drummer, who came up for two days, made up the drum parts.
This time round, me, Euan and Gareth Jones, the producer, all had our own area of expertise we were in charge of and Gareth oversaw the whole thing. So now people are playing parts that are already written but it still feels like a band because they enjoy the parts and they’re inhabiting them really well.
- Do you like doing acoustic sets or do you prefer playing with your band?
Emma: At some venues acoustic sounds better but I think we generally sound better as a band because we have the option to go acoustic too.
Euan: If everything else was taken out it would still be Emma singing live on the guitar.