Emily Barker- Live in Belfast + Interview: Sonder, Experiments, and Compassion
Last Thursday, I enjoyed seeing Australian singer-songwriter Emily Barker live at The Deer’s Head in Belfast. With red storm warnings looming and another dark January night awaiting us, I am so happy I had the chance to immerse myself in Barker’s beautiful sonic and lyrical world and indulge in a little escapism. On Monday, ahead of the show, I also had the opportunity to discuss Emily’s newest album, Fragile As Humans.
One of my personal favourites from the new album is Wild To Be Sharing This Moment. Seeing Emily perform this beautiful song about sonder, interconnectedness and belonging was amazing as it really captured the tone of the piece and allowed space for the lyrics to shine through. So, without further ado, here is my conversation with the wonderful Emily Barker.
Rose: Wild To Be Sharing This Moment is a beautiful one, and the lyrics put into words those feelings that we all have as humans that are hard to describe; that particular feeling of, we look around the world and we realise that everyone is leading these complex…
Emily: Sonder?
Rose: Yeah that’s the one! I would love it if you could tell me a little bit about where the inspiration for this song came from, and what the process of writing this song was like?
Emily: So, I think of this song as a zooming in and a zooming out as well. I had been at a friend's one-year-old's birthday party, and I’d had a couple of G&Ts and was in London. There was that feeling of enriching old friendships, friendships that became like family. You’ve seen a lot of life together, and you care about each other deeply. And then I was sitting waiting for a train at London Paddington to take me back to Stroud, and I was just people watching, and you get that feeling, which is where sonder comes into it, that you’re the lead in your own life. But there are all these other people leading their own lives as protagonists, and I’m an extra in their lives. I was thinking about individuals and realising how we all have our own histories and what we’ve inherited from our parents and grandparents, and all the things that make up who we are: all the things that lead you to be you.
I was also realising collectively how we’re all very vulnerable, and fragile, which is where the title [Fragile as Humans] comes from. We all experience these joys and highs and lows and difficult times, and life is relentless in giving all of them. The war in Ukraine had just started, so I was thinking about fellow citizens around the world and the pain that’s out there, on a daily level for people, but also collectively. Wild To Be Sharing This Moment has this scale in it, from the individual and their life to our collective global citizenship and experience.
Ahead of singing the album's opening track With Small We Start at the live show, Emily set the song in the context of the new Trump presidency. She expanded on the message of the song, from little things big things grow, by stressing the fact that resisting a person like Trump begins with community organising and connection to other people.
Rose: I was doing some reading this past week as the ceasefire was being negotiated between Israel and Palestine, and I saw somebody write something that I connected to the themes of this song. They said that each of those human lives in Gaza was a whole universe contained in a person. The ability to have complex thoughts and emotions and connections is what makes each person a universe, both in and of ourselves but also how we are all connected. So whenever we see the destruction in places like Ukraine and the Middle East and the sheer number of lives extinguished, that's what makes it so painful.
Emily: Yeah, that's exactly right. I started performing this song not long after October 7th, heavy revenge was waged by Israel against Palestine and seeing the numbers rising and rising, the song took on a new meaning. So, even though the war in the background at the time of writing was Ukraine, it has become about that [Israel/ Palestine] when I perform it.
Rose: Along those lines, whenever you begin the process of writing, are you thinking more on a personal level or thinking more politically/globally? Do you like that people see political themes in your music?
Emily: I do, yeah. With this album, I've written perhaps more overtly about sort of political... it's funny because some of the issues I write about just shouldn't be political, like the climate crisis. But it becomes politicised of course.
But for me, this is an album that comes from such a personal place, but it speaks to our collective experience as human beings. A lot of it started being written during lockdown, and so there were a lot of thoughts and feelings and vulnerabilities and disconnection. So it very much comes from a personal place but speaks to a collective I think.
Turning now to the title track Fragile As Humans, I was struck by how the soft, folksy track packs such a punch lyrically. Despite the song being ruminations about those who have shaped Emily's own life, I sensed that everyone in the room was hanging on her every word as they thought about those who have moulded and shaped them. My favourite lyrics from the song are: 'It's true that he shaped me in ways I'm still learning- as if I were made of clay. And we are indeed healing, healing then breaking fragile as memory and made of who we love.' It was a deeply reflective and powerful moment in the setlist.
Rose: Looking at Fragile As Humans, it's a story of three people in your life and the effects they have had on you. Yet there is a lovely universalness in the sentiments of the song. Whenever I read the title before delving deeper into the lyrics, I interpreted 'fragile' as meaning we are easily bruised and broken and hurt by the suffering that comes from just being a human. But then I looked at the song differently and reframed 'fragile' to mean we are so easily shaped and moulded. Isn't that a beautiful thing, that we exist singularly but we also exist in connection and people can have such profound effects on our lives? It's a song that takes specificity and makes it universal. So, how did you approach writing something like this?
Emily: So I think that one of the ways that you do that is through specificity and detail. It's making sure that you include the details of your unique experience because that's the part that makes it interesting. It's very easy to write in broad brush strokes, so to speak, and to fall back on cliches. But, the more detailed you get, strangely, it's easier for people to connect to because they know what you're talking about because you've been specific and detailed. Then they overlay their own experience to that, so the feeling is stronger. Whereas if you do cliche it's harder for somebody to feel close to the song.
Rose: When you were approaching this album, I read that 'experiment' was the big word for writing this music. So, what would you say were the biggest changes from previous work going into this new album?
Emily: Yeah, that word was my guiding word, and a lot of it was about experimenting musically. So I explored different harmony within the music. I have been a part of an American scene and a folk scene, and there are some limitations with those when you think about things like chord progressions or the internal harmonies of a song. I wanted to give myself permission to go beyond some of those tropes of those sorts of [folk] genres and just write music that feels so exciting or challenging to me.
The first song that I wrote was Acisoma and that harmonically goes to all these different places that just felt right writing on the piano. I started like that and experimented by favouring the odd chords here and there, or the odd chord extension. Musically, I pushed it.
Rose: Did you enjoy the process of uncovering these new styles and going in a different sonic direction more than in previous work? Or do you think that everything has a season to be tried out?
Emily: Everything has a season. But I will say that the more experience you gain, the more records you've made, the more you trust yourself to be a bit daring. So I wanted to push my boundaries, which was very exciting to do. I also had so much trust in the producer, Luke Potashnick, so I handed over quite a lot to him in a way that perhaps I hadn't done before. It felt really good to put my trust in a producer like that.
One of my favourite things about the live show was that I got the opportunity to hear all of this music in a new way. The set was entirely acoustic, just Emily and her guitar or on the piano. Therefore, I can return to these songs and enjoy all the experimental musical elements whilst also having experienced hearing them stripped back.
Overall, if you are looking for experimental folk music and deeply personal yet relatable stories about the human experience, you have the check out Emily Barker. Every day I discover new meanings and layers to her songs, and can't wait to continue growing with them. Emily says, 'If I could choose one word for people to hold in their minds as they listen to this album, Fragile As Humans, that word would be compassion.' I feel that: compassion for our planet, for ourselves, for each other, and ultimately for life's journey colours each and every song on this fantastic album.
