{"id":19469,"date":"2011-08-16T08:00:06","date_gmt":"2011-08-16T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=19469"},"modified":"2018-12-12T17:11:45","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T22:11:45","slug":"emmy-the-great-on-virtue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/08\/16\/emmy-the-great-on-virtue\/","title":{"rendered":"Emmy the Great on ‘Virtue’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Emmy the Great<\/a> is the stage name of Emma-Lee Moss. (The moniker was a university joke that stuck.) The twenty-eight-year-old Anglo-Chinese musician first began to attract attention in the mid-2000s, when a set of her acoustic demos, recorded for a school project, began floating around the Internet, and she subsequently became associated with a group of young London-based folk revivalists that included Noah and the Whale, Johnny Flynn, and Mumford and Sons. Her debut album, <\/em>First Love (2009), was built around acoustic guitar and her bright, quavering voice. But her early songs also reshaped classic indie pop and girl-group tropes into funny, wordy tales of romantic disappointment: a boyfriend who whiles away his life watching back-to-back episodes of <\/em>24; a girl who has a one-night affair with a guy who plays her the song \u201cHallelujah\u201d (\u201cthe original Leonard Cohen version,\u201d the narrator makes clear). Moss\u2019s new album, <\/em>Virtue, is both more mature and more heartbroken. The songs were written around her real-life breakup with her former fianc\u00e9, who left her on the eve of their wedding to join a religious order. We met one July morning on London\u2019s Oxford Street (\u201cAbout to meet Serious Journalist from Abroad \u2026 At Top Shop. #igottopickthevenue,\u201d she tweeted) and went to a Soho caf\u00e9.<\/em><\/p>\n

Musicians often say they don\u2019t want to explain their lyrics or talk about the autobiographical elements in their songs because they want the listener to be free to project his or her own stories onto them. But with this album you\u2019ve talked openly to the press about the breakup of your engagement and how it led to these songs. <\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It was the weirdest year of my life\u2014I actually want to talk more<\/em> about it. When I wrote the first half of Virtue<\/em> I was in the middle of my wedding preparations, and thinking, \u201cI\u2019m so in love, I\u2019m so happy, I have a boyfriend who\u2019s my soul mate and we\u2019re going to get married.\u201d And then sometimes I would fall asleep while writing the songs\u2014it was literally this dream sequence of writing them\u2014and they\u2019d come out and I\u2019d think, \u201cIt sounds like I\u2019m worried about something.\u201d It was as though the songs were telling me stuff I wasn\u2019t aware of\u2014they were like messages from me to me. And then the breakup happened, and the rest of the songs just wrote themselves.<\/p>\n

Had you been reading a lot of fairy tales when you wrote the songs? <\/strong><\/p>\n

After I broke up with my fianc\u00e9e and moved back to my parents\u2019 house there was really nothing to do. I spent entire days reading, because I was supposed to be getting married and I had time off from performing. I was reading some feminist fairy-tale fiction, like Angela Carter, but it wasn\u2019t until after I started writing that I began to notice the fairy-tale themes in the songs. And I wondered why I was thinking in fairy tales. I eventually realized it was because I was the bride-to-be. A lot of fairy-tale heroines are about to embark on the next stage of their life, which is usually marriage.<\/p>\n

So many of the new songs mention specific characters by name: Juliet; the prophet Cassandra; Sylvia Plath. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Christians have protector saints that they can turn to, and I don\u2019t have that. I thought that the women in the songs were my personal patron saints, who would look after me. A lot of fairy-tale characters are young women who keep their cool in difficult circumstances, and make it out the other side. They don\u2019t have a great deal of knowledge about the world, but they have a moral compass and enough common sense to navigate through their predicament. Sylvia Plath could have been a fairy-tale heroine. She didn\u2019t quite make it out the other side, but she was a very strong and complicated character in a very uncomfortable time and situation.<\/p>\n

Do you have musical patron saints who influenced the album in some way? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Suzanne Vega. She\u2019s so unapologetically literal, and very sensible! She\u2019s not motherly, but sisterly. There\u2019s a woman named Faye Wong in Hong Kong who did a lot of Cocteau Twins covers. Liz Frazer of the Cocteau Twins\u2014she could be in a classical Greek myth, where something happens to her and all she is afterward is a voice.<\/p>\n

You were born in Hong Kong and lived there until you were eleven, and then you moved to rural England. Do you still have roots in Hong Kong? <\/strong><\/p>\n

My parents just moved back there last year, and I go back quite a lot to play shows. When my first record came out three years ago, people there really responded to it. There\u2019s a very small indie music culture in Hong Kong, and supposedly no one had ever done anything international.<\/p>\n

Growing up, did you ever feel a conflict of cultures? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Everything I picked up from Hong Kong was culturally American. People talk about kids\u2019 programs they watched here [in England] and I literally don\u2019t know what they are. I remember Cheers<\/em> and Saved By the Bell<\/em>, because that\u2019s what we had. I grew up on MTV.<\/p>\n

Did American culture make its way into your music? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I sometimes think it did. The bands I loved, like Cake and Weezer, were very ironic. When I first started making music, I was very ironic, and people didn\u2019t understand that here. But that\u2019s because they didn\u2019t grow up in the nineties in an American cultural colony.<\/p>\n

In interviews, you\u2019ve tended to distance yourself from the new British folk scene. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s that Arctic Monkeys thing: whatever people say I am, that\u2019s what I\u2019m not. I distanced myself from the new-folk people because I felt like I was separate\u2014older and inspired by different bands. They were being very straightforward about folk and the idea of bringing back folk, whereas I was really about finding my way toward Weezer. Which maybe doesn\u2019t come across in my music.<\/p>\n

I imagine it\u2019s tiresome to always be mentioned in the same breath as the same few bands. <\/strong><\/p>\n

It is, but it\u2019s been about five years now, and lately I\u2019m<\/em> starting to think that way.\u00a0When my new album came out, I was like, How does it look against Mumford and Sons?<\/p>\n

Your new songs are clearly autobiographical. What about the songs on your first album, First Love<\/em><\/strong>? <\/strong><\/p>\n

In the first album I was writing a story with my real life and my friends in it. I have a song called \u201cEdward is Deadward.\u201d That\u2019s my friend Ed, who\u2019s not dead. I just wrote him into it because he\u2019s so pretty. And my ex-boyfriend Adam was cast as a lot of the cads in the songs. I didn\u2019t really think widely about audience when I first started writing. I was just thinking about performing to my ten friends. I knew at least one of them would be interested in the song, because it was about them.<\/p>\n

Did anyone ever get upset with you for putting them in a song? <\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a credit to Adam. He was amazingly casual about it, to the point where I\u2019d be playing him mixes after we\u2019d broken up and I\u2019d say, \u201cThis song is basically about what a dick you are\u2014but what do you think of the guitar?\u201d And he\u2019d be, like, \u201cToo loud.\u201d<\/p>\n

Can you tell me about your side project, Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield?\u00a0 It\u2019s inspired by the Sweet Valley High series of young adult books, right? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a blog<\/a> with Elizabeth Sankey, who\u2019s in a band called Summer Camp. The premise is that we think we\u2019re the Sweet Valley twins, and we interview people as if we are teenagers from the nineties. And then we do this lecture series about the books, and some songs as well. We have a song about how we\u2019ve done all these amazing things in Sweet Valley but we\u2019ve never had sex, since it\u2019s an all-American morality tale. And we have a song about Regina Morrow, a girl who dies at the beginning of the books because she does a single line of coke. The main joke is that I\u2019m not blond, and Elizabeth\u2019s not blond, and we\u2019re not twins, but we really strongly believe that we are. The reason we did this is because we discovered that we were Sweet Valley experts. I\u2019ve never been an expert at anything, and when you\u2019re good at something, you just want to go with it.<\/p>\n

Emmy the Great is performing at the Trocadero Ballroom in Philadelphia on Wednesday, August 17, and at the Studio at Webster Hall on Thursday, August 18. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emmy the Great is the stage name of Emma-Lee Moss. (The moniker was a university joke that stuck.) The twenty-eight-year-old Anglo-Chinese musician first began to attract attention in the mid-2000s, when a set of her acoustic demos, recorded for a school project, began floating around the Internet, and she subsequently became associated with a group […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[1147,1423,3282,3278,3268,3280,3283,3276,3273,3275,3279,483,3269,3281,3277,2955,3271,3274,2704,3272,3267,3270],"class_list":["post-19469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-angela-carter","tag-cake","tag-cassandra","tag-cheers","tag-emmy-the-great","tag-faye-wong","tag-first-love","tag-folk","tag-hong-kong","tag-jessica-and-elizabeth-wakefield","tag-liz-frazer","tag-mtv","tag-mumford-and-sons","tag-myth","tag-saved-by-the-bell","tag-summer-camp","tag-suzanne-vega","tag-sweet-valley-high","tag-sylvia-plath","tag-the-cocteau-twins","tag-virtue","tag-weezer"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEmmy the Great on 'Virtue' by Peter Terzian<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 16, 2011 \u2013 Emmy the Great is the stage name of Emma-Lee Moss. 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