Emma Lee Moss is sitting in a cafe in Camden Town, being bought breakfast, by me. This is not, says the hotly tipped singer-songwriter, something she’s jaded about. The fabled record-company wine-and-dine technique deployed to secure a musician’s signature has yet, it seems, to be used on her. “I always thought it was a myth,” says the 23-year-old, “until I found out all my friends have experienced it, and then I thought, ‘Oh.’ I did have a manager once who used to take me out for pub lunches, but only so he could talk about his weekend. I’ve never been wooed.” For now, she is releasing records on her own label, Close Harbour. “Maybe I’ll take myself out,” she laughs. “I’ll send myself a demo and then take me out to lunch.”
Not that Moss, who operates under the name Emmy the Great, has needed either haute cuisine or a fat advance to progress to where she is now. Word of mouth has built her an audience that, for the most part, hangs on her every lyric and melody. Relentless gigging and a clutch of limited-edition singles and EPs have garnered blogosphere hysteria. In the permanent quick-fire round we all now live in, an artist can, of course, be finished before he or she has even started – and Moss has already attracted her fair share of criticism. A lot of it, she says, is characterised by “the spitefulness of being anonymous” that colours so much cyber-discourse, where people itching with inadequacy and puffed up with grievances pour forth their poison. On one music website, she laughs: “There’s this girl who always, always says horrible things about me. You can go onto their user name and see their photo. I see her around sometimes, and I kind of think, maybe I could ask someone to attack her.”
Better, surely, to sharpen a lyricist’s pen that has already been wielded to wound. On her song The Hypnotist’s Son, Moss muses: “I thought romance was pretty / Then you went and spoiled it / Every time that I think of you / I have to go to the toilet.” More darkly, she sings, on Edward Is Dedward, of a woman attending her lover’s funeral and then having sex with his father, “Between your sheets all charred with grief / The pillows tainted with your dreams”.
You learn to your cost in this job the perils of suggesting to songwriters either that their material may be entirely autobiographical, or so fictitious it lacks felt emotion or authenticity. Regina Spektor once turned on me when I broached this subject – “It’s all rooted,” she spat, “in real emotions” – and Moss is no less vexed.
“That’s ridiculous,” she says. “If you look at someone’s entire songwriting output, if all those things happened to them, they’d be dead. If you write about only things that ‘happen’ to you, you’ll write, ‘I went to the post office today and delivered my package / And then I went home and watched television’.” (Which kind of sums up some of the mockney-fied street poetry being peddled at the moment, but I let the thought go.) “You can’t expect someone to write entirely about their own experiences; you can only expect them to use their own emotions.”
Her new single, Gabriel, a song she says is about a 19th-century woman marrying for money not love, is a good example. In any case, she argues, art of all forms would simply die if creative people felt inhibited about drawing on something because they hadn’t gone through it. “Look at Gulli-ver’s Travels. Are people going to read that and go, ‘But it didn’t really happen. There
were no tiny people’?” None of the things she writes about have happened to her, she says, “or I’d be a really f***ed-up person, frankly”. She addresses this question of fiction and fact with great humour.
Heart-on-sleeve displays don’t seem to be Moss’s thing, as mutual acquaintances attest. The surface is mostly a benign, unruffled one. The real work – mining her dark materials, filing away her laser-eyed observations for later use – occurs behind this placid facade. The daughter of a Chinese mother and English father, she grew up in Hong Kong, before moving to Sussex, aged 12.
“We lived in East Grinstead – we went there for the Steiner education, not the Scientology [the following’s British HQ is situated outside the town]. It’s the weirdos v the weirdos, with a Waitrose in between.” Of her education, she says: “I didn’t get any life lessons from Steiner, but then I didn’t get any maths lessons, either.” But there is something about Moss – her air of free-spirited naivety, her careless and admirably noncareerist approach to her music – that recalls a caveat often entered about progressive education: that it fosters in pupils a belief that self-expression is everything, almost a currency, and that it will pay for the invoices and final demands the real world has a habit of shoving through your letter box.
That is not to say Moss is away with the pixies. Far from it: you sense a core of steel to her, and she has been as efficient at burning bridges as she has at building them in the music industry. When, early on, she was bundled in with Britain’s growing antifolk scene, Moss cadged a lift simply because she found like-minded souls – acts such as Jeremy Warmsley, Noah and the Whale and Jamie T – on board. The movement originated in New York, when local unsigned bands, refused a hearing at established folk clubs because their musicianship was judged inadequate or because they were daring to sully the purity of folk with elements such as punk, set up on their own.
Moss has since expressed reservations about what she describes as the “elitism” of the UK scene, but her rudimentary guitar-playing and bird-yet-to-fly singing certainly fit the original bill, which she describes as “letting anyone play who can’t get a gig anywhere else”. To illustrate, she cites a male singer she saw recently in New York. “He was dressed as a woman, and he was literally playing one chord and screaming about his t*ts. It was great.”
Having successfully batted away the advice of a past manager to “put a few more choruses in”, Moss is currently busy working on her debut album, honing her lo-fi, Michelle Shocked-style songs, whose aim and appeal she sums up as: “Not right in your face, so you have to look for it.” Barring a sudden rush of dinner invitations, the record will be out on her own label in the new year. In the meantime, Emma Lee Moss will be taking herself out for lunch.
timesonline
I hope you didn't get the idea to start this thread from the quote under my username.
Emmy's really great. She's got quite the spunky lyrics!
