Notions and Oceans: An Interview With Singer-Songwriter Emmeline
Emmeline Armitage on graduate London life, her dazzling EP, Frank Ocean, actual oceans, notions, crazy, magic, and more.
Photo by Lily Blue Harper
Emmeline’s debut headline gig at the Roundhouse Rising Festival is a resolute success. She bounds across the stage, bringing the audience along with her with rapturous beats, musical zest and the little stars which decorate her temples. Her new EP Small Town Girls and Soft Summer Nights brims with dynamic vocabulary and spitting syllables, yet as a whole its impression is one of calm and cohesion, a tide of nostalgia and reminiscence which laps at the ears of its inaugural audience. Her lyrical dexterity is supreme, and as she speaks each syllable, the ‘choked blue on the pith of divorce’ of her debuted track Beetle Drive, or the ‘parchment, and ink, magnesium and zinc’ of The Sky Tonight, I am, suddenly and affectingly, reminded of the pure joy of words.
The first time I meet Emmeline is a month earlier on the top floor of the Southbank Centre. We bond over a love for Maggie Nelson’s book Bluets and skyline views. When I arrive Emmeline is firmly settled in, nestled on a sofa which is in turn nestled along a wall of more sofas. It is a nice space, at once expansive and familiar, the feeling of a collective living room. Intrigued by her choice of location, I wondered how she curated her spaces to work and create. She explains how she tries to work together with the dynamism of the big city. “There is a lot of movement in the city. Everyone is very head down, fast-paced going about their business and I spend a lot of time commuting. I often have my notes app open on the tube. That’s where ideas germinate in my brain because I find that my absent mind is where my brain is most active creatively”.
“It’s all a story,” she says later. Emmeline is talking about her attraction to her masters in literary non-fiction at Royal Holloway, her move after she graduated from an English degree at Oxford in 2021, but she could just as well be referring to her own songs, which orient themselves around the question of how we imagine the stories of our own lives. Each song on her new EP catapults you into a new little story world, thoughtful phonetics and enveloping beats creating a beautiful soundscape to accompany each. The effect is startling. Ink, pith, parchment, her lines drip with sonic richness. Phonetics hold forging power in her songs, their spoken effects creating the landscapes in which her lyrics are allowed to play. “Most often it’s pairings of words which will come to me first,” she tells me. “Then I’ll try and work around the world that those words create. Even if for example it’s the sound of them in my mouth if there’s lots of fricatives, or lots of plosives, or lots of sibilance - that will create a different linguistic environment and mean that I’m in the mood to create a darker song or a lighter song based on patterns of words I’m picking that day.”
Song-writing is for Emmeline a deeply linguistic, often physiological process. Aural and oral awareness of sounds drive her creative practice. It is this latter awareness though, her sensibility to the demands sounds make on her mouth, the sensation of production not just perception, which is more uncommon. She explains to me her sensitivity to “the sound and how it manifests in my mouth particularly as opposed to other mouths - because I’m aware that everything sounds different when you say it.” I’m intrigued how this will progress as she moves into live performance, what it will feel like to have her words manifested in the mouths of others. “Because I’m at the beginning of live that’s not something I’ve ever thought about. I will have to tell you …” she replies elusively.
Later, I ask her if she could taste any word, what it would be and she resorts to similar logic: “I think I’d taste the word notion, it comes nicely off the tongue.” I wonder aloud what ‘notion’ would taste like. She tells me “It sounds like the word ocean, and it would taste salty and ocean-fresh.” We decide that words which rhyme with each other must be more likely to taste like each other. “I think it’s because they have a similar relationship with how they come out in the tongue, and I think of the tongue as being a taste thing, so I think that’s where it comes from” she posits. Putting words together then, is like constructing a recipe, synthesising phonetic-ingredients into an overall enjoyable oral experience. If we’re right, I reckon Emmeline should probably consider applying for MasterChef.
Reflecting on her attraction to a master’s in non-fiction, perhaps surprising for its prose emphasis in light of her poetic one, she tells me, “I was really interested in the essay form … I’m interested in the poetry of everyday language.” She continues, “there’s something really interesting about the forms of language that aren’t supposed to be ‘fictional’ and that actually there’s fiction in that because everything you tell is a story.” “I think that’s a misnomer that I understood doing that course,” she ponders, “we all hold that non-fiction is fact and therefore truthful, clinical and logical, and actually I really enjoyed exploring the antithesis of that and finding that there was poetry, creativity and story-telling in those forms.”
The words of Emmeline’s first two EPs certainly cast her as a storyteller. She enjoys inviting other people into a version of her world through “presenting them with a story which they can enter through music.” In song-building she is “building little worlds whatever size or shape they take”. These “little worlds” then spiral out, their power being the way a listener might absorb them into their own lives - their own narratives.
Beyond the bardic bracket though, how does she define her musical style? A background in spoken-word poetry underlies her songs, and an accompanying fascination with cadence and metre means that they are consciously “lyrics first”. Beyond this though, lilting riffs meet pulsating beats (worked on with her collaborator Fraser T Smith) so that her songs elude any single generic marker. As for her musical influences, she loves “the Kate Bushes and the Joni Mitchells of the world for everything they say creatively.” She adds Patti Smith, Tom York, Guy Garvey and Kendrick Lamar to the melting pot. Frank Ocean though takes first place as her desert-island album, loved for the songs which “are lengthy and aren’t self-apologising” and the album’s bricolage of speech, voice notes and samples.
“Because I’m at the beginning of making music, at the moment we’re very much in an experimental phase of trying beats and instrumentals which are different genres and then seeing how I fit into those different moulds.” Rap, spoken word, poetry, song, Emmeline explains her excitement that her music could be considered any of them. “We can try out different things and different sounds and hopefully there’s a through-line between everything … what that through-line is, I’m hesitant to label. There is freedom for me in making music which is not boxed into a particular genre.”
Themes are perhaps easier to track. Her new EP Small Town Girl and Soft Summer Nights takes a nostalgic turn. Harking back to her time spent growing up in a small village in West Yorkshire, it explores, with bitter-sweet reminiscence, themes of growing up and moving away - a lyrical gaze which looks backwards with equal relief and romanticism. Emmeline explains her thought processes: “I was thinking a lot recently when I permanently moved out, how your ideas about your childhood home really become clear when you leave it. I wanted to move out to a city. I wanted there to be things going on, excitement, creative opportunity. There was a resistance in me to being somewhere quiet, slower.” Yet now, amongst the wider world, she admits, she is experiencing the reverse, where “since I’ve come away from that environment, I see it quite clearly for the rich landscape and surroundings which were offered to me, and which were probably super stimulating for my creative brain. It’s beautiful and isolating and sort of mythic growing up in that environment. And I think that now I have this slightly glamourised, fictionalised version of growing up there that almost isn’t true.” Her curiosity and self-awareness of how we all tend to story-build and fictionalise our own lives rings through once again.
Escape to a wider world has always been alluring to Emmeline. However, even from a young age it seems she was on some level aware that escapism could come imaginatively, where it might be limited physically. “It was great for my imagination because it forced me to invent those scenarios in my own head … I think I just retreated internally,” finding the power of “bedroom writing”. Her childhood beguilement with Maurice Sendak’s picture book Where The Wild Things Are perhaps betrays this early appreciation for the imaginative. Engrossed by the book about “a boy who was so in his own head and in his own imagination that these creatures came alive,” she tells me, “I think I understood as a child that he wasn’t going to a place, he was in his own head, and that was really interesting to me.”
If Emmeline’s town was scant of creative outlets, the same can hardly be said for her home itself. With a poet Laureate as a father and a radio producer as a mother, I wonder how Emmeline found her own space in an environment of such creative abundance. Acknowledging her creative privilege, she explains “I was always encouraged to listen to music, to watch films, to read and that necessarily had an impact on me and everything I did.” However, she explains a simultaneous only-child-driven resistance to doing anything near the realm of what her parents did. When she first started going to spoken-word classes run by the Manchester collective Young Identity, she kept her trips secret from her parents. “I’d be applying to competitions and wouldn’t tell my parents anything about what I was doing. Then when I admitted to myself internally that this was something that I wanted to do, I then shared that with them, and they were purely supportive. It’s really nice coming from that environment because I feel like it’s a shared thing and something that we all love and appreciate.”
Before I go I ask Emmeline, masterful as she is with words, if there’s one she thought she used too much. “Crazy”, she tells me, “My go-to response if someone tells me something is ‘that’s crazy!’, and I don’t really know if the word has the most amazing associations and it's a bit of a non-thing to say. So I want to stop saying ‘that's crazy’”. What about one which deserves wider currency? Her answer: “magic”. “[It’s] a word that my friends and I sometimes use which I love, if something’s well or good or we like a plan, we say ‘magic’ and I’d like that to come in more.” Talking of magical things, since I’ve met Emmeline there’s one more key question I wish I’d asked her: where did she get her magical sea green tights?