Aussie Songstress Emma Louise Talks Hustling CDs on the Street & Loving Her Mullet
Fuse recently sat down with Emma Louise, the up-and-coming Australian chanteuse whose eerie, gorgeous "Freedom" is one of our favorite tracks of 2013. Like Ellie Goulding, Louise specializes in introspective tunes coated in dazzling shades of electro-pop.
Sitting poolside at an Austin hotel and sporting the most fashionable mullet we've seen since Joan Jett, Louise told us about starting out as a street busker, being a musical late-starter and what her album title vs. Head vs. Hear means.
Have you always been into electronic music?
No, I actually didn’t have a rich musical upbringing at all. Nobody in my family plays music. This whole thing is really foreign to my mom and dad. I started off very folky. It was just chords and feelings. I never really studied music but now I’ve started to search out new music. That's opened up the whole electronic thing. I don’t know if I’ll end up being an 'electronic artist' for the next album, though, I'm just doing what feels right at the time.
Is there any artist in particular that attracted to you to the sound?
I’m actually very behind on music. I started listening to Radiohead's Kid A and Bjork albums like Post and Debut and Vespertine. I really like music where you listen to it once and immediately know you can just keep listening to it and diving into different layers of the song. That’s what I tried to do with this album, so it is possible people might not get it straight away.
When do you decide to start playing music?
I think one of my friends had a guitar in the seventh grade. I always used to play it and then mom and dad got me a guitar. It was very personal for the first few years but then I started showing people when I was 13 or 14. By the time I was 15, i wasn't doing too well in school and I just focused all my energy on music. Not necessarily wanting to be a musician, but it just kind of happened. I did a few residencies each week at different cafes and bars ended up doing an EP.
When did you realize that music was a career possibility?
Professionally, it was probably after I released my EP. But everything that I was doing after I finished school was music-related. For instance, I was busking at the markets.
Did you make good money?
Yeah, I would make real good money 'cause I would burn a disc and then sell it for $10. Sometimes I would sell 80 at a market in one day. So that was really good. Plus I had residencies at the time.
Did you find songwriting came to you easily?
I never wrote a song just to write a song. I wrote a song to feel or to express my emotions honestly. Then I started realizing that was I was doing was music, so I started learning more about the musicality of songwriting.
You recently covered Alt-J's "Tessellate." Are you a big fan of theirs?
Well, that was one of the first covers I’ve ever really done. I purposely didn’t study it or listen to [the original] too much because I wanted mine to have its own flavor. I've only heard a few songs of theirs but I really want to get their album and start listening to it.
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