Conjuring The Epic With Emma June
by Jody Jenkins
Archeologists working in over mile-deep waters off the coast of Bulgaria recently found a Greek schooner resting at the bottom of the Black Sea, where it lay undisturbed for the past 2,400 years. It’s the oldest intact sailing vessel ever discovered, lost beneath the waves four hundred years before the birth of Christ.
The ship was of the time and type Odysseus was believed to have voyaged, only ever seen by modern eyes on ancient Greek pottery such as the “Siren Vase” in the British Museum, where Homer’s hero is tied to the mast to resist the alluring song of the Sirens.
The story was a fleeting glimpse into a lost world of the mythic and conjured lines from a song by Emma June which have haunted me for months, sung and played as rhythmically plodding as an oar cadence: “Oh you can do better than this/Don’t heed the sirens whispering/Oh find your way back Odysseus/For I planted a kiss in the ground/And we’ll grow in the Spring again.”
While it may seem grandoise to equate the songs of a self-described “Cinematic Folk” group with the classics, in ways obvious and subtle, Emma June evokes the larger mythos at play in our imaginations, blending in a touch of the grim reality of the morning after to render something frail and large and human.
Emma June evokes the larger mythos at play in our imaginations, blending in a touch of the grim reality of the morning after to render something frail and large and human.
“I really wanted to explore my own voice as a writer,” Emma Ayres said of the genesis of her band. “Because of some of the politics and some of the more harrowing issues of my first band, I really needed to step out of it and show myself that I was self sufficient.” Not simply for the sake of independence, she said, but for the sake of grounding. While she knew music and art were her lot in life, her sense of self in a group was buffeted by the whims of others. “Having a mainstay for me was key to feeling grounded in my artistic path,” she said. And that mainstay was her sense of self.
After their shoot for Live At The Grid, I spent hours listening to Emma’s, Abby’s and Zoe’s voices, forwards and backwards, cutting their images, studying their expressions as I laid on a cross dissolve, looking for a camera angles or expressions that captured what was happening in the moment. The pared down, rough-hewn simplicity of Emma June is striking, lyrics sung with such a pleading, accented by Abby’s bleeding violin and the Zoe’s plaintive harmonies. You can hear each part of this spare, simple machine working overtime.
Emma June is a study in taking everything back down to basics. It’s Emma Ayres unplugged, the yin to the yang of the wall of sound that often is her other band, Old Flame. It’s clear when she talks of the trust she shares with Zoe and Abby, she’s talking about refuge and replenishment, returning to a place where music is in the joy of making it and not the quest to a pinnacle. Emma June is the journey.
Emma June is very much about preserving and maintaining the rawness of the creative process.
“It is very much about preserving and maintaining the rawness of the creative process,” she said, trying to define the authenticity and immediacy that makes music accessible and often gets lost in the autotune of perfection driven by money. “I think a lot of that rawness gets lost in the expectations of more mainstream industry standards. It’s like, let a song breathe. Let a song be a song. Let there be mistakes in the recording. Let it be what it is.”
And with Emma June, you can almost smell the raw wood of the workshop in the words and the music with well planed ideas revealed in surprising and unique ways. Perhaps as the daughter of an immigrant from the Azores, Emma Ayres was born to the epic of a seafaring Odysseus, but her tales have a way of weaving grand themes with the threadbare realities of life that resonate on a both a poetic and personal level.
Emma Ayres has to be one of the hardest working people on the local music scene: Two bands, performing in theater, heavily involved in local causes such as Monty’s March, raising money for The Food Bank of Western Mass, and even going national by participating in the Stand for Standing Rock movement. She’s made a name for herself as a part of Old Flame, but it’s clear with Emma June, she has a natural sense of balance and an innate understanding that no matter where the music takes you, you’ve always got to keep one foot on the ground.
Jody Jenkins is a writer and filmmaker living in Florence. He’s the editor of The Collective.
