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EMILY JANE WHITE - "Victorian America" - October 2009
Emily Jane White was raised in Fort
Bragg, California, a seaside town nestled in the misty, secluded
woodland of the Mendocino Coast where old men tell stories about
logging and young girls dream of San Francisco. Time moves slowly
in Fort Bragg, where in place of big-city sharp shocks of excitement
there stretches one drawn-out, stable truth, quiet and unflinching.
You will live, Fort Bragg says, and then you will also assuredly
die.
Though Emily Jane White’s newest album, “Victorian
America”, was written largely in San Francisco and Oakland,
the atmosphere of her upbringing permeates her songs. White
has no patience with light fare. “I don’t write happy music.
I’m drawn to writing sad songs”, she says. “Reflective,
contemplative songs. I truly believe that that’s my job. It’s
not my job to create happy music. I’m okay with that.”
This pensive feeling was established with White’s
first album, “ Dark Undercoat”, which critics
and fans alike called a masterpiece; White herself is more inclined
to call it a bare set of sketches. Conversely, “Victorian
America” fills in the blank lines from “Dark Undercoat”
with color, dynamics, orchestrations and a richer sense of poetics,
the product of the three years’ work. “I pushed myself a
little bit further in terms of songwriting”, White notes,
“and the arrangements were more of a collaboration between everyone
involved in the band. Fortunately this group of people allowed
for a lot of experimentation. It was an incredibly organic and
enjoyable process.”
That easy majesty from some of the Bay Area’s
best players is evident from the first track, “Never Dead”,
on the intro the unconventional song structure of “Stairs”.
White’s ethereal conjuring glides the listener through bright
lights and high waters of the little track, a lament for lost
hopes backed by a sublime string arrangement, and White holds
poetically to the Poe tradition with the seven-minute opus “The
Ravens”.
Lyrically, White’s themes act like a devil
on both shoulders who long ago killed off the angel. “There’s
a lot of references in the record to political issues, death
and dying”, she explains, “there’s not a lot of literal
narrative. I strive to create scenes in my writing that allow
for abstract rather than literal interpretation”.
With positive coverage in Spin and Rolling
Stone and with a large European fan base - the reward of near-constant
touring - Emily Jane White is the newcomer to watch this
year. “Victorian America”, like the country it is banned for,
is not an album that rests easy, nor does it exist for the sake
of existing.
From beginning to end, this is new mystic
American songwriting at it finest.
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EMILY JANE WHITE
- "Victorian America" - digipack - 13 euros
(shipping costs are included)
1. Never Dead – 2. Stairs– 3. Victorian
America – 4. The Baby – 5. Frozen Heart – 6. The
Country Life – 7. Liza – 8. The Ravens – 9. Red Serpent
– 10. Red Dress – 11. A Shot Rang Out – 12. Ghost Of Horse
13 euros (shipping
costs are included)
or through our
mailorder
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>> 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".
