Emily Wells — This World Is Too For You (March 22, 2019)  •ƒ•    Namísto rčení „absolutní bomba“ a podobných výlevů si říkám, že si musíme zachovat co nejčistší a nejjasnější hlavu, pokud jde o lidské bytí, protože až doteď máme pouze my jedinečnou naději. Na stole mám doslova „friendly“ album, které si po celou stopáž 49:48min počíná vůči Benjamínkovi velice přátelsky. Výhodou je, že album si Emily Wells komentuje sama. Píseň po písni od „Připomeň mi, ať si pamatuji“ až po „Hymnu pro Nový Svět“. Písně začínají jako provize nových prací od The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra z proslulé Liquid Music Series (Liquid Music Series vyvíjí inovativní nové projekty s ikonoklastickými umělci v jedinečných prezentačních formátech. Představení Liquid Music zve dobrodružné publikum, aby objevilo nové a fascinující prostředí v rozkvétající krajině současné komorní hudby. Nedávné události zahrnují Philipa Glasse, Blood Orange a Bon Iver). Emily spolupracuje s houslovou virtuózkou a skladatelkou Michi Wiancko pro smyčcový kvintet a francouzský roh s premiérou loni v Minneapolis. Wells vyvinula album přes pověření od New York Metropolis Ensemble (Komorní orchestr nominovaný na Grammy®), který se připojí k Emily na albu spolu s bubenicí Shaynou Dunkleman (Xiu Xiu, Peptalk).
•ƒ•     Obal alba: Instalační pohled na Seven Magic Mountains v Ugo Rondinone, 2016, Las Vegas, Nevada. Koprodukce: Art Production Fund & The Nevada Museum of Art.
Born: November 20, Amarillo, Texas
Location: East Village, New York
Genres: Folk, Folk rock, Folktronica, Trip~Hop, Experimental /
Instruments: Violin, Piano, Glockenspiel, Guitar, Banjo
Album released: March 22, 2019
Record Label: Thesis & Instinct
Duration:      49:48
Tracks:
01. Remind Me To Remember   5:57
02. Stay Up   3:47
03. Come On Doom, Let’s Party   3:36
04. Eulogy For The Lucky   5:39
05. Misconceptions On Forever   4:08
06. I Need A Placebo   5:39
07. Ruthie   3:38
08. Rock N Roll Man   4:20
09. Your Apocalypse Was Fab   6:00
10. Hymn For The New World   7:04
About:
•ƒ•   The ten song album, produced by Wells, is lush, melodic, and unafraid. It’s both neoclassical chamber music, and art pop, propelled by synths, strings, and beats, and held together through Wells’ un~wincing lyrics and vocals.
•ƒ•   The songs began as a commission of new works from the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s renowned Liquid Music Series (recent commissions include Philip Glass, Blood Orange, Bon Iver), with arrangements by violin virtuoso and composer Michi Wiancko for string quintet and french horn and premiered last year in Minneapolis. Wells developed the album through a commission from New York’s Metropolis Ensemble (grammy nominated chamber orchestra) who join Emily on the album along with drummer Shayna Dunkleman (Xiu Xiu, Peptalk).
Album Cover: Installation view of Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains, 2016,
Las Vegas, Nevada. Coproduced by Art Production Fund & The Nevada Museum of Art. Photograph by Jonathon Lo.
REVIEW
TRACK~BY~TRACK
BY ANAHITA SAFARZADEH
•ƒ•   Singer, songwriter, producer and Violinist, Emily Wells’ latest album, This World is Too ___ For You, set to release March 22 with her label Thesis & Instinct. Wells’ forthcoming album blends classical and modern instrumentals to generate a harmony with dramatic art pop.
•ƒ•   The songs on the album escalate into dystopia through the queer perspective and comment on the climate crisis. A hit list of collaborators, the album features NY’s Grammy nominated chamber orchestra Metropolis Ensemble as well as drummer Shayna Dunkleman (Xiu Xiu, Peptalk) and was commissioned by distinguished Liquid Music Series.
•ƒ•   Emily Wells discusses the tracks from album „This World is Too ___ For You“.
Remind Me To Remember
•ƒ•   The title of this song comes from the bathroom wall of a dive called The Library in the Lower East Side which pours enormous doubles in pint sized glasses and offers its early patrons a token for another. I’ve been amused in this bar, but the sentiment that sticks with me is not the undoubtedly spirited conversations I must have had, but instead this simple ask, scribbled on the bathroom wall, sticky with pathos, hopeful in spite of itself. I hate for these song’s chronology to be tied to that godforsaken election, as though there was no dystopia, no tyranny, no climate crisis, or injustice before it, but they were all written after that undeniably cold shock and reordering and so here I am, orienting. This was second in line, a song about looking oneself squarely in the mirror and recognizing the distinct privilege and rot of apathy. I am a humble servant, I serve myself. I am a humble servant, don’t look me, don’t look at me yet. Cause I can be better, better than that.
Stay Up
•ƒ•   This is the first of a triptych of songs written in a friend’s cabin upstate. I took myself on a week long self created residency with some gear, big speakers, my dog, and a commission deadline. I lost / found myself there, listened to so much music loud in the house. David Bowie felt like a visitor on the day of the big solar eclipse. I listened to old country, and to soul music, started a playlist called “For now, Forever” which became a bible over the course of making the record. I needed a sonic home to rest in when I’d gone too deeply into my own rooms of making. I read in a camping hammock out by the pond in the woods each day. I tried to meditate. There was no such thing as silence. I was in the company of gods — mortals who make things with their hands and bodies and voices, Immortals who know how to live and die in a harmony like breathing. The woods spoke to me each night when the insects turned out, giving over to their desires, just like they should. I wrote. I cleansed myself in the baptism of song each day. And each day the wilderness of the self I’ve learned to quell made its way up through me, into my chest, my throat. And each day I encountered a form of friendship with all those who had been artists before me, all reaching out to touch this thing we don’t name unless we call it god. You heard the cry and you want to cry back. The “friends” I’m staying up for are artists and what they’ve made. This is companionship.
Come on Doom, Let’s Party
•ƒ•   This song came from an essay i’d been working on about early childhood, Cadillac Ranch outside of my hometown, Amarillo Texas, and a tornado. It’s a dead series joke about dread and joy, something I experience in equal parts, though often ungracefully. I was working on it during the aftermath of the Parkland shooting so I always think of those teenagers waving when I sing I’ve been waving like a teenager. I guess it’s the last song I wrote for the album.
Eulogy For the Lucky
•ƒ•   The day after I started this song I went out and bought a bible, a bottle of bourbon, and a pack of smokes, still unfinished in my desk drawer. I understood how hard it would be to complete. I waited a day, then i went back in, into the mania and pain of this song and it’s patient simplistic statements. I once had a conversation with my best friend about the future of our planet. I said I comforted myself by trusting that the planet would eventually rid itself of human beings and learn how to be again without us. She said “yes, but what about all the language, the music?” I saw her love of humanity and it crushed me a little. My comfort was cold. I blushed. But I carried this exchange and it found its way to this song. Just keep the music, and fuck all the rest of it. After the song was written i had the strange and distinctly uncomfortable experience of performing it in front of my mother and feeling self conscious about this line: There’s gonna be no Jesus, no personal Jesus to save us. Making this statement, performing it each night, i think is perhaps the biggest sin i could commit against my family, more so even than being queer. But then James Baldwin comes by and says, “We’ve got to be as clear~headed about human beings as possible because we are still each other’s only hope.”
Misconceptions on Forever
•ƒ•   Misconceptions and Stay up are companions. Stay up about camaraderie in art and those who have made it, Misconceptions looking for that same relation to the natural world. It is a secular prayer, a pleading.
Out there in the dark, everything is moving. Make me that brave….
Take my body, make it stop humming. I want to be still, I want to be something. Alive in the dark moving…
Take my heart, make it stop wanting. I want to be here, I want to be someone, alive, in the dark moving.
My girlfriend, and everyone else, always forgets the tile of this song, “Wait, how does that one go again? Why can’t you call it Alive or something?” So I’ll tell you what i told her. Monotheism always had me cornered as a child… Forever. How can you understand your place in it? Made in God’s image, with the gold streets, all that physicality and yet a body that needs to die. The insects at night, that rhythm they move within, that earth that takes the body and knows just what to do with it, this is the forever I’m praying to move in.
I Need a Placebo
•ƒ•   This is the thing in me that seeks comfort, small reliefs, despite the bigness, the potential radicalness of being alive, of being endowed with free will… I asked for small relief, all I got was free will … I wish not to squander this on the simple sorrows of daily life, nor on their false and temporary reliefs: booze, consumerism, whim. This is longing. This is not getting.
Ruthie
•ƒ•   “Ruthie” is about a desire to be outside of the life you are in, to be held and loved and helped into that other selfhood by the tender “you” the singer sings to. It is porous and the listener can take it on, inhabit it. I wrote it in a snowstorm, unexpectedly, despairing, and it remade me.
Rock N Roll Man
•ƒ•   This, the third of the upstate triptych, written on the day of the solar eclipse. I thought, walking up to the house from the woods, “What are you most afraid of? What magic do you need done to lose your fear?” Time. I thought about Bowie, how we both had things going for us… He, immortal through song, but dead… and me, still here, but trying to make songs, given to the nag of immortality. Also, I was thinking about gender and how my life might have gone some other way in a different body. Imagine for a moment you are reading these words and they were written by a man or that you are listening to the album, made by a man. How would that reframe your experience of the work? … So, as you see, I’m playing with some fantasies, quelling fears. One night I opened the windows and faced the speakers out and played a sample I’d made while writing the song on repeat, full volume out into the forest. I went out there. That bit of audio remains in the final recording.
Your Apocalypse Was Fab
•ƒ•   I don’t know much else to say about where this comes from except that it’s about the climate crisis and the gods that mock us for our hubris and greed and even our soft desires. For the die hards, the title comes from a line in a Tori Amos song, „Hey Jupiter“.
One Bright February, we were all showing some skin
The gods they were laughing, they were playing their cards they placing their bets all in
They said, “play now, play now play now you’ll pay later for the price of this sin.”
What’s better than understanding? Don’t you dare say ignorance.
Hymn For The New World
•ƒ•   I wrote this in the days after the election, in a gutted mood, simply, with a guitar and Leonard Cohen gone from us. I was looking for the “after” both culturally and personally. The after and the unknown were more real, more full of comfort and promise than the present and most certainly the past. I grew up with hymns and I often find myself drawn to a form that seeks redemption, even for transgressions unknown. The experience of music gives us, sometimes, absolution.
•ƒ• http://www.flaunt.com/ 
Emily Wells
B i o g r a p h y
•ƒ•   Emily Wells is a performer, producer, singer and composer known for her varied use of classical and modern instrumentation as well as her deft approach to live sampling at shows. Classically trained as a violinist, she also plays drums, keys, beat machines and whatever else she can fit in her road case.
•ƒ•   Born to a music minister in Amarillo, Texas, Wells began learning violin at 4 at a community college. The family later moved to Indianapolis, where she discovered Bob Dylan, Nina Simone and Biggie Smalls and gradually moved from the Suzuki method to songwriting, guitars and home recording. Releasing her own music from a young age, Wells learned to keep her work close, and toured independently while developing her palate and performance across the U.S. It was in a humble garage studio in Los Angeles that Wells’ recorded her 2008 breakthrough, The Symphonies: Dreams Memories & Parties, picking up praise from sources as varied as NPR and SPIN, who compared her to “a feral, streetwise Nina Simone.”
•ƒ•   Three years later, Wells returns with Mama, a collection of songs as richly hued as ever, but imbued with a newfound warmth no doubt owing to the space it was conceived in. Wells rented a tiny cabin on a Topanga Canyon horse ranch and went to work, producing Mama and playing most of the instruments herself (with a little help from longtime touring companions, drummer Sam Halterman and bassist Joey Reina). She recorded the raw tracks to tape without punch~ins or loops, often in one take. In contrast to The Symphonies, these songs are less conceptual and experimental in both sound and content, and more traditional and universal in structure and the studies of love and grief. 2012 will find Wells touring behind Mama, her first release for Partisan Records, and preparing for the release of Pillowfight, her long whispered~about collaboration with legendary producer Dan The Automator.
Website: http://www.emilywellsmusic.com/ 
Website: http://www.shaynadunkelmanmusic.com/ 
Website: https://michiwiancko.com/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/emilywellsmusic 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/emilywellsmusic 
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