Would the real Emm Gryner please stand up?
That might seem a tad unfair as an opening salvo in a piece about yet another singer-songwriter from across the Atlantic. But even the multi-tasking Canadian songstress would herself admit that she spreads her talents further and wider than most. A veritable one-woman industry, the part-Philipino, part-Irish Toronto-based Gryner never seems to rest on her laurels.
Where to start? Well, she’s an award-winning solo artist in her native Canada, the shimmering single ‘Summerlong’ from her major label debut Public being a fully-deserved radio classic.
Since then she’s put out seven or eight albums (“I can’t remember exactly how many but it’s something like that”). Performing live with or without a band she swaps with ease from guitar to piano to bass as the mood takes her.
She now runs her own record label, Dead Daisy Records, which, apart from putting out her own solo releases, has four other acts on the books.
When not touring or recording in her own right she plays bass and sings with Toronto based outfit, Hot One, who’ve an album due out later this summer.
She’s also in demand as a backing singer to the stars – she has toured the world with David Bowie and is an occasional member of Swedish superstars The Cardigans, as well as clocking studio time with Rob Zombie, Lou Barlow, the aforementioned Bowie and the late great soul legend Curtis Mayfield.
In Ireland for the second time in six months doing TV and radio promo appearances she even managed to find the time to give a lecture to the students of the Ballyfermot Rock School.
Sitting in the bar of a south Dublin hotel, she seems quietly unfazed at the whirlwind she seems to permanently occupy. The most obvious question has to be: how on earth has she managed to acquire such an impressively chock-full CV for one so young?
“Well, I’m not quite as young as I look,” she laughs. “I’ve had the luxury – or the cruelty if you want to put it that way – of doing this for the last 10 years. It’s hard work trying to run everything and I regularly put in a 12-hour day but it’s what I want to do. I’m also a Gemini and my attention span is very short, so perhaps that’s something to do with it.”
She hints that her past experiences with a major label just might be another reason why she feels the need to work in as many different areas as she can manage.
“When I signed my deal back in the day, I had to agree that I wouldn’t collaborate with anyone else,” she explains. “You had to really stick to your own thing. I suppose they were afraid they’d lose you to something along the way. But creatively it was stifling – in a perfect world you should be able to do whatever you want. That’s what I can do now, so welcome to my world!”
The last time we caught up with her in the autumn of 2005, Gryner was in town promoting her most recent album, Songs of Love and Death, which featured her own unique take on a bunch of left-field Irish rock and pop classics. Songs like her version of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s ‘Nothing Rhymed’ and her surprisingly contemporary re-working of Horslips’ chestnut ‘Dearg Doom’ have since garnered an impressive amount of radio airplay. Was she pleased with the reaction the album received here?
“Yeah, I think it was well-received and I got to meet some of the artists I covered – people like Tom Dunne, Gavin Friday and Eamon Carr. I was happy to do the covers thing and in lot of ways it opened the door for all sorts of other things. But it’s the second covers album I’ve done and I’ve decided I’m never doing one again – I’m done with making other people money (laughs).”
Her latest album of original material The Summer of High Hopes will be released in Ireland this month with a launch at Dublin’s Sugar Club and another brace of gigs to follow, including an appearance at the Trinity Ball and at Oxegen. For someone marked down as a singer-songwriter, the album is stylistically broad, with everything from spiky indie rockers (‘Black-Eyed Blue Sky’) and intimate ballads (‘Girls Are Murder’) to more experimental material (‘Star/Crossed’). As a calling card for her writing and performing talents, it certainly covers the gamut, but others might see it as an identity crisis – musically speaking, of course. “Originally it was going to be a double record with some of the more intimate stuff that I did in my basement,” she says. “Then there’s all this stuff I did in Sweden and in LA, but at the end of the day no-one wants to hear 20 hours of music, do they? ‘Scale it down’ is my motto these days, so I just decided to put out the best of all the stuff I had.
“I used to want to put out a record every year just because I could – there was no-one to stop me. But I didn’t want to just put it out for the sake of putting it out. Doing it this way I actually found out which songs stood the test of time. I tend to think things are really good for a minute and then I wake up the next day and it sounds like Spandau Ballet or something. I’ve had the experience of having to play songs over and over again that other people might think are singles. It’s like, you better like it if you’re going to have to pimp it around the world for a while. ‘Pimp my song’ – that’s actually good idea for an MTV show don’t you think?”
Canada has been the source of some of the best new music of the past few years with artists the calibre of Arcade Fire, Rufus Wainwright, and Kathleen Edwards among others emerging. Does the current focus on Canada help her own prospects?
“Oh I don’t know, I always feel a little outside of any scene. I know some of the people you mention but I don’t hang out in those circles. The perception that there’s a lot of great music coming out of Canada is probably true. But if I like a band I like them because of the music, regardless of where it comes from. It’s similar to the late 1990s when female singer-songwriters were getting signed left and right. I never ever thought anything of that whole ‘women in rock’ thing. It implies that it’s a genre unto itself. I make music and I just happen to be female.”
Despite her exotic dark complexion, Emm’s connection with Ireland is real enough. Her grandmother is from Co Monaghan and as long ago as 1997 she came here to research her roots. She’s been back several times since and says she can’t get enough of it: “I love Dublin,” she says. “I think it’s an amazing city and I say that all the time to the friends I’ve made here and then I discover they’re all dying to get out of it. It’s probably the same with anyone anywhere – you never appreciate your own place. But this trip has been the best ever. I’ve seen so many great shows and I’ve got to hang out with some old friends like Ron Sexsmith who was here at the same time. And I met Bono, who Gavin Friday introduced to me. We had a really nice 10 or 15 minute chat about Canada, the McGarrigle Sisters and whiskey.”