>> EMILY JANE
WHITE ~ "Dark Undercoat"
Armed with little more than an acoustic guitar
and her fragile alto, San Francisco folk singer/songwriter Emily
Jane White offers complex tales of melancholy and isolation.
While comparisons to contemporaries like Cat Power and Hope
Sandoval are frequent, Emily's music owes a clear debt to classic
female jazz and blues singers such as Billie Holiday. Fooling
around with music since pre-school, Emily started on piano around
the same time she learned to read, eventually picking up the
guitar during her college days at UC Santa Cruz. While doing
stints in an array of college punk and metal bands, she began
writing her own songs and fronted her own group, the Diamond
Star Halos.
After graduation Emily picked up and moved
to Bordeaux, where she performed with a bevy of independent
French artists, further honing her songwriting skills. Upon
returning stateside, she moved to SF and began recording 4-track
demos, formulating the songs that would ultimately become her
debut album, Dark Undercoat.
The release of Emily's debut album "Dark Undercoat"
has seen her win praise from the Fader, Flaunt, and Spin, extensive
blog coverage, and the San Francisco Weekly compared her writing
to that of Cormac McCarthy. Her song "Wild Tigers I Have Known"
recently appeared on the soundtrack for the Cam Archer film
of the same title and Rolling Stone placed Emily in their top
5 Hot List, describing the aforementioned song as "melancholy
as a rainbow glimpsed through the bars of a prison window".
