Fresh off the back of a new release, an understandably impatient Em Burrows is already performing tracks from her next musical venture.
“It’s a conscious decision I made this year, because I thought that I really want to be able to catch up the release process,” the Perth singer-songwriter says.
“I write a lot and I’ve always thought there’s this huge lag between what I’m working on and what’s coming out.”
Her latest album, 'Invisible Seams', earnestly tracks a “joining of dots” between seemingly separate, life events.
“About four years ago or so, I got divorced and I think there’s a really deep kind of personal growth curve when you end a long-term relationship,” Em says. “[I was] connecting different experiences that I’ve had and making sense of where I’m at in the world.”
For the most part, this reflection is lyrically abstract but the album soars with the songs offering a closer peek into the singer’s personal life.
A vocal sample of Em’s grandfather, a former English professor at the University of Western Australia (UWA), appears on the titular track and offers such a glimpse. “He had this very sort of English, kind of cultivated way of speaking.
"He was actually from Yorkshire, he was a Sheffield man, but I think he sort of cultivated this way of speaking that was so articulate, and he always talked about things like poetry and that sort of stuff,” she says.
“UWA did some oral history with ex-staff who had been involved with the university for a long time, and I found this huge oral history online, and that was a snippet of him talking about [his journey].
“It was completely random, because the actual content of it didn’t matter so much to me, it was more so having his voice in there, and having him reflecting on his life in the context of my song.”
The singer’s fascination with the past carries onto the record, layered with satin-y 1970s synths and saxophones. As a young teenager, she was “really into” the aesthetic of the 1960s and The Beatles. “I appreciated the songcraft… and I still do, everything about it.
“And then I think psychedelic music is often the next step for a lot of people when they get into sort of rock music, because psychedelic music is much more exploratory, less conventional.”
Her next album, already half recorded, is “a little more ‘80s”. Emily jokes that she once stayed clear of the excessive era.
Growing up, the '80s was seen as “terminally uncool”, but she’s recently embraced the music of the “daggy” decade. “I stole all my parents' Roxy Music records in the last year,” she says. “I was just like 'I’ll have all of them'. I took all the Bowie, I took all the Eno, all that kind of stuff, and just listened to so much of it.”
The increased pace of Emily’s musical output is met by a heightened autonomy over her sound and confidence in her place as a female artist.
The singer has always been heavily involved in the Perth music community, but she says her contribution initially came from “feeling like I need to be out there to justify my place in the music landscape. I wasn’t confident enough to just go out there and be a musician.”
Now, she would tell her younger self to claim her own space. “I would absolutely say: 'You are good enough, but that’s not actually the point? You love this, you know you love it and you can do it.' I feel so strongly that young girls need to hear that.”
