Miss Emily Brown is the Pacific between storms. At times glistening on the surface, at times plunging into the green, her music haunts us with its complexity and depth. Miss Emily Brown’s compositions are fluid and dynamic, impossibly combining music box, autoharp, pianet and her soaring voice. Her debut album released in 2008, Part of You Pours Out of Me, won Canadian audiences coast to coast, weaving nostalgia and adorable girliness into nine wistful tracks. This winter, Emily will release her second album, In Technicolor, featuring songs written as part of her Canada Council for the Arts sponsored songwriting project based loosely on her grandmother’s journal from World War II. .............................
Emily Millard was raised in Iroquois, Ontario, a hometown she describes as “an airstrip, a beach, and a golf course, one restaurant and my parents’ house. That's how it feels.” In the 1950s, the original Iroquois was replaced by a Garden City town, designed and relocated by Ontario Hydro in the 1950s to make way for Toronto-bound ships. “As a kid I would look down off the docks at the old roads submerged under water,” she explains. “It is a very sentimental community. We have to confront the past and the present all of the time. ” .................................
At nineteen, Emily moved to Vancouver Island, where she studied poetry and made strong and recorded her first “clunky folk songs” in a friend’s art studio. In 2004, Emily relocated to Nelson BC, where the Kootenays’ hush and the Selkirk School of Music taught her jazz. She sang in a nightclub. And as she composed, she dug in auntie’s closets for autoharps and toy guitars. “An autoharp is not the sort of thing you can buy,” says Emily. “That would be too weird. You have to find them.” It was in the Kootenays Emily developed her textured style, layering digital soundscape and found instruments with her unmistakable voice. ............................
In Jeremy Fisher’s Vancouver living room, and in Corwin Fox’s Victoria studio, Miss Emily Brown recorded her first full release, Part of You Pours Out of Me, a brilliant neo-folk debut to be noticed. Called “wonderfully poppy” and “winsome” by Monday Magazine and “un véritable univers enchanteur” by the bloggers, the record is soft and nostalgic. The album features bassist Tobias Meis, former drummer of Vancouver’s Hey Ocean, Benny Schuetze, saxophonist Anthony D’Agati and string players Hannah and Nick Epperson. The tracks have been featured on Montreal’s MIKE FM, popular UK podcast The Waiting Room and on CBC Radio’s Canada Next, All Points West and Bandwidth. Reviewers raved over Emily’s breathtaking vocals, teamed with strings and horns and Emily’s signature autoharp. Her first full release, named one of the top twelve albums of 2008 by CBC’s Alan Neal, marked a graceful entrance onto Canada’s independent music scene. .........................
With the success of her first album, Miss Emily Brown toured to dozens of festivals and venues across Canada and the US in 2008-2009. In the winter of 2009, Emily was the recipient of a Canada Council grant for composition, which she used to research and record her second album, Missing My Eddie (now re-titled In Technicolor). The project began with the exploration of her grandmother's journal from WWII, but developed into a complex compendium of songs dealing with themes of femininity and independence under extreme duress. Emily describes the album as “a kind of sound collage, like folk songs embedded in sound sculpture.” .............................
Meanwhile, Emily joined producer Corwin Fox to form the neo-folk duo Morlove. Combining Fox’s instrumentalism and brilliant sound engineering, with Emily’s incredible range and sweet touch, Morlove’s tracks are slow and careful. The duo recently recorded All of My Lakes Lay Frozen Over, while tucked away in a small wooden church in snowy Wells BC. The album is a lush and delicate list of songs to be released this winter. “I think the music that prevails is unhurried and fully-developed, like tea left to steep for a long long time.” ...........................
This summer 2009, Miss Emily Brown will team up with with roots princess Ingrid Gatin for the Great Lakes Train Tour. On the boxcars and in cross-Canada bars, while traveling from Winnipeg to Montréal via rail, Emily will premier tracks from Missing My Eddie, an event not to be missed. From girl-pop to ballads to perfect little folk songs, her live-shows descend into frenetic music box interludes and singing, a careful mixture of old found instruments and digital crafting. “The intent,” Emily elaborates, “is to mirror the experience of finding an old object and following it into the past, while coming up for air in the present.” Her touch is careful. Her music is oceanic, huge.
-Leah Bailly
I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V4.4 (www.strikefile.com/myspace)
you play in Montreal when we play in Ottawa and then vice versa on the Friday night. Hope you're doing well. Heard the show in Van was sweet. Give us a wave when we pass on the highway!
Oct 04: Montreal @ The Gamiq Awards, Club Soda Oct 07: Toronto ON @ Younge and Dundas Square 12;30 (Noon) OCt 08 Cobourg ON @ we are working on it Oct 10:Fredricton NB @ The Capital Oct 11: Sydney NS @ Sydney Marine Terminal Oct 15: Peterbourgh ON @ The Red Dog Oct 16: Kingston ON @ The Living Room Oct 17: Ottawa ON @ OCFF Oct 21: London ON @ London Music Club w/The Fugitives Oct 22: Toronto ON @ The Rivoli w/The Fugitives Oct 23: Wakefield QC @ The Black Sheep w/The Fugitives Oct 24: Montreal QC @ Divane Orange w/The Fugitives Oct 31: Montreal QC @ Grumpy's Bar 8th Annual Bash up on Bishop
hey, hobo elbow! i'm crashing into the west coast in not but 8 days from now. can we make some goosebumps? I also want to play you a version of "she's not far"/"there's a ghost..." that i'm whittling on my pedal of loops... Oh a very big hug for you, miss gossling!
Hey I really like your organ sound! If you don’t mind me asking what do you use? I’m hoping to make it out to the Guelph show tonight is the whole band going to be there? Loving your tunes
Sweet swingin Brownster, miss you, miss tuning with you... I'll be back in ogre country late summer; I think i'd explode with glee if I could share a stage with you...? hugs?
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