Emma Lee Moss is better known as Emmy the Great, a Hong Kong born, London-based singer-songwriter with good looks and a beautiful voice. Her self-proclaimed anti-folk sensibility produces spider-web delicate, indie folk songs and she has recently become somewhat of a darling with the UK’s music press. She has collaborated with several other artists, namely Fyfe Dangerfield, Jeremy Warmsley and Lightspeed Champion.
We call her on a Wednesday morning and she is in her flat waiting for some guy to come and fix the hallway buzzer. “I’m doing a bit of a hero because everyone else in my house works full time, so I said I would stay in all day and wait for this guy to come and fix it.”
Asking what she has been up to lately Emmy tells us this story: “The other day my flatmates and I saw this guy in a suit outside the window. We never do anything weird so we were like ‘come on, let’s just through a potato at that guy in the suit’. So we did. It turned out he actually came to a viewing in our house so we couldn’t leave for an hour while he was viewing the flat downstairs. Then, I was emailing back and forth with this press officer guy, because I write for a paper too, and I sent him my address. He was like ‘oh I viewed a flat there the other day.’ Turned out we threw the potato at him! It’s like the only impulsive thing we’ve done together but of course it has to come back and bite us in the ass.”
Emmy spends her daylight hours interviewing musicians and writing features. “I do what you do. I like interviewing bands but sometimes it pisses me off because they treat you like shit, because they think they are so important. But I have a similar perspective to them, because I’m a musician, so I feel like I have more of an insight.” She jokes that she’s better at writing songs than articles.
Emmy the Great, Gonzo the Great and Theodosius the Great: Emmy and her friends love the idea of titles. “My friend took Mount. So I was like fine, I’m going to be Emmy the Great. I tried to get all my friends to call me that for ages but no one would.” With her ultimately claimed title, Emmy the Great became somewhat of a heroine in London’s anti-folk scene. With a piquant Regina Spektor-esque voice, she recites bitter sweet rhymes inspired by T.S Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
For all her sweetness though, the songstress isn’t exactly all lollipops and gumdrops. In the Hypnotist’s Son, she sings: “I thought romance was pretty/Then you went and spoiled it/Everytime I think of you/I have to go to the toilet.” It was one of the first songs she ever wrote. “It was about when I met my boyfriend and I was so nervous all the time and I just kept pooing. You get indigestion when you fall in love with someone.”
Hilariously, the Sunday Times made her out to be an incestuous freak. In one of her songs, Edward is Dedward, they mentioned that she wrote of a woman attending her lover’s funeral and then having sex with her father. “I sat with dad and drank some beer/We hadn’t spoken since last year/I took his hand, led him upstairs/Missed you so large I had to fuck/Between your sheets all charred with grief/The pillows tainted with your dreams.” They misinterpreted her lyrics. “It’s Dan, not dad! I thought that was really risky like why would I have sex with my dad. That’s horrible. Yeah, they wrote that wrong. It’s funny because in America they have to call you to fact check, but I guess they don’t do that here.”
If she wasn’t making music, Emmy would be making cakes. “I like cooking. I went through a phase of being seriously domestic but I really think that I must have been depressed. If I was a cake I would be a carrot cake. I really like carrots”.
Emmy’s voice pipes up in tone when Electric Picnic is mentioned, she thinks it has the best line up of all the festivals this year and she is excited about seeing Grace Jones. Having only been in Dublin once – with Irish singer Wallis Bird who got her “so drunk I was crying” – she is looking forward to playing EP and says to expect “tales of my menstral cycle.” Hopefully she doesn’t bring any potatoes along.
