Artist Spotlight: Emmeline

The most potent and poignant artists allow you to enter into their world. There’s an incredible self and musical awareness interlinked with the aptitude to douse a listener in such a way, as well as a fearless vulnerability. Emerging artist Emmeline epitomises this immersion, drawing us into her life, her mind and her creativity to the extent that we feel like we are encountering these experiences alongside her.

Raised in a small town in West Yorkshire, Emmeline’s gateway to music was showered in glistening potential; her grandfather a artistic figure point in his local community, her mother in radio and her father a poet and playwright, Emmeline eased into her own creative field through a love of words and storytelling, which seeped into musical resonance. Following a chance meeting at an event, Emmeline began working with acclaimed producer Fraser T Smith (Dave, Stormzy), who has fully brought into her artistic manifesto and is overseeing the augmentation and amelioration of her sound. 

Smith produced the entirety of Emmeline’s debut EP Satellite Navigation System, released of the cusp of Halloween, blessing the singer/rapper with atmosphere encapsulating, stylistically varied and texturally vivid soundscapes that she cocooned atop of, flaunting a diverse lyrical and tonal nuance and developing her narratives in a concise and provoking way. Each of the four cuts insinuates a different set of musical influences and shapes a sprawling sound that sets a marker for the lavish quality and absorbing emotional impact that Emmeline has the capacity for. 

Newly released single Sabrina is the swift follow up from the moody EP, which actualises the nonchalance that Emmeline had previously flirted with on the body of work. It’s a spacious, loose alternative R&B cut based on Audrey Hepburn’s Sabrina, a film that flows with nostalgia for Emmeline, a quality she relays into the rich and vivacious anthem. 

I sat down with Emmeline to discuss acclimatising to life in the industry, working with Smith, and the journey to finding her musical sweet spot. 

Q: Who and what influences you to create?

I think I’m very aware of my surroundings at all times. I have a brain that likes to document, so mentally I’m always taking note of everything I see around me. If I see a couple on the tube, a piece of art or a film I’m watching, I think it’s all subconsciously going on. Then, when I sit down to write music or make something creatively, I think I have all of those things swirling around in my head and pulling at me. Art is definitely the main stimulus, so film, literature, TV and people’s relationships with those things. I’ve always been fascinated in how language interacts with our experience of being in the world and seeing things. It’s just my engagement with what’s around me and what I’m alert to in that sense.

I grew up in a creative household, which I’m aware is an unusual luxury. My grandad was a very key person in his community and would put on a pantomime every year in his village. I’d go and sit in rehearsals and watch him direct these 70 year old men doing the can-can. That was a very early beacon of awareness into how music, theatre, speech and language can give people an outlet in which to escape. So, my grandad was always this massive playful, grand character. My relationship with my parents, they always read to me and shared texts with me, and that was a massive building block for me. Moving forward, it was just getting my first ever iPod which allowed me to develop my own taste of music – up until then I’d always just borrowed my parents CDs in the car. That was a great education in music but wasn’t one that stood the test of time, and it was getting my iPod when rap and hip-hop was the dominant music, so hearing that I could compare it to my early introduction to storytelling. Hearing that you could tell a story to music, that was a huge shift for me. 

Q: From developing a passion through listening, how did you start writing and creating yourself?

When I was younger, we took a lot of car trips and as an only child I was perpetually bored. So, I would take my iPod and would write out the lyrics to songs I’d love to memorise. That then developed into me trying to rewrite those lyrics to learn the different patterns and groups of rhyme and lyrics – predominantly rap songs - which started the habit of writing lyrics. Then at 17, a friend of mine told me to join a spoken word group in Manchester called ‘Young Identity’. You sit in a room, you’re given a prompt and everyone would write a spoken word piece which you then perform. Performing those pieces of poetry and having people come up to me saying ‘you need a beat, you’re writing lyrics’. There was always a musical pulse to everything I was doing, and that’s how I got started out with music. 

Q: From the EP, you seem to have a refined sound already. It’s stylistically and tonally quite condensed. How did you find your sound?

That was the first project I’ve ever made, and I found my sound for that project. Fraser – my producer – helped with that, the beats he was sending me were so rich in what they suggested to me audibly, allowing me to understand the sound I wanted to make. When we put these four songs together, it became apparent there was this continuity to the beats he’d been making and then in the way I was writing the tracks. They fit together. Having now stepped away from that project and thinking down the line, it was very much a building block for us. We’re trying to build upon that foundation. I’d say I found my sound for that project, but there may be other sounds that will come out down the line as well. 

Q: Could you describe the sound of the project?

This EP was the first thing I’d ever properly released, we were thinking a lot about the cinema of music. That EP is like a narration and an insight into my brain and mind. It’s an intimate body of work that is quite expressive of an internal monologue. Particularly in the first song Stay With Me - it has that pulse and drive at the beginning. That felt like the beginning of the film, and you’re watching along and driving along and following the narration of the EP and finding yourself wherever it lands you. There was an innocence to what we were doing as it was our first time working together, and there was an almost naivety about the sound. A track like Girls Write Rhymes was made out of an experiment, where we didn’t know what sort of music I could make, so Fraser sent me a beat that was out of the comfort zone of the other music we’d been making – probably as a challenge – and that’s how that song came about. It was a boundary experiment and limit test for the sound, as well as something that is cohesive and comes out more naturally. 

Q: It’s great that you’ve got a producer who’s pushing you.

Totally, every week when we’re in the studio together there’s something that he challenges me to do. When you’re new, there’s so much imposter syndrome. He’s top of the game and I’ve always felt I needed to prove my worth, and being challenged musically is a very healthy yet daunting way of figuring out what sort of music we make. 

Q: How did you meet him?

It was by chance, one of those ‘Sliding Doors’ moments. It was at a gig. I saw him in the corner of the room and went over to tell him I’d made some demos but didn’t know what to do with them. He offered to take them and listen to them, and he called me to invite myself and my manager to dinner. We had this easy, lovely conversation about influences, creative process and how we worked. Since then, we’ve been working together – he’d send me a beat over text and I’d send back lyrics the next day, and we did that for about three months. Then suddenly we had this EP over text, and we went to the studio to actually record it. That’s our relationship; when an idea comes to us, we don’t hold out. We just send it to the other and hope they’re creatively in the same swing. He’s the most generous, understanding and wise figure musically, and it’s so rare that you find somebody in that position who is so willing to hold their hand out and help you. He’s just phenomenal. 

Q: As someone who is new to the industry and how it works, how are you finding it?

I’m definitely in the first steps of a new job, I’m like the new kid at school. Every day is a learning curve. The music industry is going through an upheaval in the sense of how streaming and Tik Tok are affecting music, there’s a lot of change in the industry and not everybody knows how to ride the wave anymore. There’s a lot of uncertainty, which makes it a good time to join. I’m not being thrown into some pre-programmed wheel. However, it’s also a lot of ‘unknown’ and you don’t know how best to break through, or how something will land. It’s difficult and keeps you turning. It’s hard to separate the creative, artistic side from the management side. Nowadays, you need to be savvy in how your music will be heard and the reach it has. It doesn’t always sit comfortably with making art, so I find that quite hard. 

Q: You almost have to be your own manager and marketer, how do you find that balance?

I think these days, you’re the face of your music and it’s difficult to not be. I think it’s about – on both sides of it – knowing where to let go. Fraser always says to me ‘if you love a song too much, if you hold onto it too closely it’ll break your heart’. On the other side of things, I know that for management you shouldn’t get too involved in the data and the metrics as it takes you too far from the creative. It’s about finding a sweet spot in the middle, but I’ll let you know when I’ve figured out how to do that. 

Q: When you set out to create the EP, what did you want to achieve with it?

It was almost made by accident. It was a series of texts and voice notes between Fraser and I. We would talk about where we were in our lives: I’d just finished uni, moved out of my flat and felt slightly like I’d lost my coordinates. There was a great sense of the unknown. Music was one of the things that, even though I was talking about that sense of uncertainty, I could use it as a crux to get me through that time. It sounds like a cliché, but it was really helpful to me. Of course, that’s what the EP ended up being about. It’s about a time of life when things are a bit confusing, or at a loss, there are these things that draw you in – I use this metaphor that these things in my life are satellites, they’re pulling me round and keeping me tethered. It was just a series of texts, and after this three month period there were these four tracks that stood out to us. We put them together and they just made sense. They’re slightly different pieces, they’re different in genre, tone and mood but we liked that. It’s an opening letter that the music is not of one level, one note, we’re just sort of finding our feet without containing ourselves in a box. 

Q: People expect artists, even if they’re brand new, to come with their exact artistic manifesto. 

That’s what’s nice about the EP as a form, there’s this intention to it as a project and it has fluidity, but it is different from an album. You can be slightly more flexible about what goes into it, and I enjoyed it for that reason. 

Q: What would you say are the main themes you’re trying to get across?

I think it’s a lot about finding your place, finding yourself. Having things feel uncertain, and finding some hope and encouragement through music, through friends, through people. It’s a lot about human relationships, with the self and with emotion. The songs are personal but they’re shrouded in language in a way that, I hope, people can take what they want from them. They’re quite evocative of moods and states, and I hope people respond emotionally to them. I want people to feel when they listen to them. 

Q: What do you want a listener to take away from it? What is it that idealistically you want them to be thinking? 

I think, like I said, my biggest hope with music is that people feel something. I’m not precious about what that feeling is, I just want it to chime something in them so they move, either physically or emotionally. Almost to be transported into a different headspace, as they’re intrigued. I want people to go back to the lyrics to figure out what they mean, and to find the different words they relate to and feel attached to – that’s what’s fascinating to me. People’s relationship with music is so personal, and no one likes the same song for the same reason, feeling or lyric. I’m interested in hearing the different ways people respond emotionally and physically to music. This music, which is so packed with feeling and emotion, I hope that that translates somehow to a listener. 

Q: If you’re introducing yourself to someone that has never heard of you before, and you have one track to grab their interest, which one would you play?

I’d probably play Stay With Me, because I just think it’s a poignant summary of the kind of style of my music – how speech meets song. At the moment, that’s what interests me and is what my music is boiling down to. In the venn diagram of words and music, what’s in the middle? I think that song sits in between those places in a way that I’m really happy with. 

Q: Why do you make music? 

It’s definitely partly that I want to make people feel things, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was a selfish side. I find it cathartic and fulfilling, and I genuinely enjoy it. I have a strong interest in language and how it affects people, especially when combined with music. Also, if I’m going through something or trying to process something, writing music is a way of solving that in my head. It’s soothing and exciting. 

Q: What’s next for you?

We have a lot of music being made, and we’re just trying to figure out what’s the best way to get that out to the world. Figuring out when we’re ready to share it and when I’ll be ready to perform them live for people, they’re the conversations we’re having. I don’t think it’ll be very long, but that’s what we’re working on.