Her Emm Is True

Ontario-raised Filipino-Irish singer Emm Gryner’s 12th album Goddess is one profound-sounding record. But then, she’s no ingénue. Gryner’s played keyboards in David Bowie’s band, is an active member of A Camp’s touring ensemble, and Bono named her ‘Almighty Love’ as one of the six songs from the last 20 years of music that he wished he’d written.

When Gryner opened with that tune at her upstairs show in Whelan’s a couple of months ago, it wasn’t hard to see why. Even in stripped-down guitar and piano format, the thing’s a monster. And as she proceeds through the wintery depths of the latest album, with detours through some inspired covers (among them PJ Harvey’s ‘The Mess We’re In’, featuring a cameo from Matt Lunson, and a stunning piano-and-vocal take on The Clash’s ‘Straight To Hell’) you know you’re experiencing something.
Earlier that day in the Library Bar, still recovering from a tour bus break-in in Belfast and being double booked with a Swiss band in a guest house in Slane the previous night, Ms Gryner attempted to answer our most pressing question: where does the ache in these songs come from?
“A song like ‘Empty Hole’ is about as personal as it’s ever gonna be with me,” she admitted, “but I don’t necessarily write it literally. I think it’s just kind of daring to go a little bit to a place of discomfort. At this point in my life I have people around me who I know aren’t gonna bolt if you don’t censor yourself. So, being married for example, people think, ‘Oh well, she’s married now, that’s the end of her art,’ but it’s quite the opposite. Drama never really goes away, so I figure just lay it all out. Luckily I’m with someone who’s inspiring and very supportive of what I do. That’s super-rare I think.”
Songs like ‘Die Evergreen’, ‘Empty Hole’ and ‘Match’ are weighty enough to feel like the culmination of any songwriter’s career, so it’s doubly surprising when it emerges that Goddess was conceived as a low-key departure from 2006’s Summer Of High Hopes.
“It’s a great feeling to do an album, the first one in about ten years, that is completely all me,” she says. “No co-writes, it’s produced and recorded by me. The songs are the closest they’re gonna be to how they were in my mind when I wrote them.
“This album didn’t exist that I could go and buy, so I wanted to make it. I was a little bit tired of… not that the record’s very heavy musically, but there’s been quite an influx of songwriters and musicians where the celebrated genre is kind of a quiet folk indie thing, at some point I think everybody defaults to that, and I don’t wanna go there. I naturally gravitate to a sort of orchestral vein anyway, the folk thing really isn’t in my DNA.”
Certainly a song such as ‘Empty Holes’, even when performed on solo piano, sounds hugely powerful without losing its intimacy. Like Julie Feeney’s pages, Goddess is a very companionable album. These songs hold the listener’s hand in the dark. Does this confidential quality inspire an intense relationship between Emm and her audience?
“There are a few fans who’ve come up to me… I don’t have any great answers for that, but there’s always a great connection, and there’s some sort of thread between people that listen to my music. I feel like they never leave the house! And they maybe don’t have a lot of friends! But that’s okay, in some ways I wanted to put the focus on the songs that highlighted some of the darkness.”