CATHOLIC GIRLS ARE EASY? EMMA SWIFT IS NOT. AND THAT’S A GOOD THING part one
- Bernard Zuel
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
“WHEN I SET OUT to be a songwriter, and perhaps part of the reason that I found that so difficult for so many years – I don’t find it difficult anymore: I’ve done a lot of therapeutic work to get over my repressed Catholic stuff that made songwriting so difficult for me in the first place – I wanted to be candid in a way I didn’t know how to be candid,” says Emma Swift, popping grapes and swigging from a big mug of tea, perched not just on a chair in her Nashville home but on the first waves of response to her new album of confessional, even revelatory, songs.
“So, regardless of what happened or happens to me, my work will always be personal.”
Yeah, you can’t really get to the roots, hell even to the low branches, of Swift’s album, The Resurrection Game, without navigating some crucial personal information, from the minor to the most major. The easiest one is this is effectively her debut album, even though it’s not her first. She had released an EP quite a few years ago, back in Australia, and more significantly five years ago her life was transformed – for good and bad, as we’ll see – by her album of Bob Dylan covers, released in a world hungry for intimate, soft-voiced musical thoughtfulness.
That splendid Dylan album, Blonde On The Tracks, emerged from a period of writer’s block that was almost crippling, though as she told me at the time, immersing herself in one of the great songwriters washed away that block. Unfortunately, Covid and then what she calls a nervous breakdown almost washed her away.
This breakdown – serious enough to have Swift hospitalised – is canvassed in the new lyrics, sometimes obliquely in the concurrent stories of love, but more explicitly in her conversations around the record. Was she determined that this personal context be part of the story of this record rather than hidden away for fans or critics to decipher?
“I think because of the type of songwriter I am, personal context was always going to be part of it.,” says Swift. “I didn’t think out a nervous breakdown so I could then make that part of the story [she smiles] and in some ways that is not very helpful because it’s quite an intense thing.”
Not helpful? But isn’t that what we tell ourselves we want in our songwriters? Isn’t that what pulls people to the country/Americana corners of music where Swift is most often placed?
“I think people are more comfortable with, say, Jason Isbell’s rehab story, or someone else’s divorce record or whatever; a nervous breakdown is probably a little too intense, a little too hard for some people to touch. But I always really liked confessional poetry and in a way I felt very obligated to tell that story,” she says. “I am always trying to tell a bigger story and I think that when I had the breakdown I didn’t really want to shy away from that because the few things that got me through my breakdown were reading about other people who had experienced intense mental health crises.
“In particular there is a really amazing British nature writer called Horatio Clare, and he wrote an amazing book about how when he was in his early 40s he went through a very similar thing to what I went through. I was really dark when I found that book and I guess so I felt a kind of duty to say to people, this record was born out of an absolute shit show and to have some kind of honesty about that.”
Does the album reflect the shit show, the recovery from the shit show, or the wisdom and self-knowledge that happens after the recovery from the shit show? The latter it seems, but maybe also some pre-emptive knowledge, oddly enough.
“I went to a thing at the Americana conference earlier today where Rosanne Cash was talking about songwriting and how sometimes you write a song and you don’t know, you haven’t yet lived the experience, and they have a kind of prophetic quality to them,” says Swift, marvelling at the truth of this comment. “Some of the songs [on The Resurrection Game] were written before the breakdown and then I experienced a breakdown, and it was like a kind of foreshadowing.
“That said, I’m kinda contradictory because I’m a very, generally, pretty happy and optimistic person. I’m much less prone to doom and gloom than say my partner – he is way more nihilistic than I am, though we both have a sense of humour – but I’ve always been drawn to sad songs. And I have this timbre in my voice that if I sing something happy, it’s like being at a weird costume party.”
Pardon?
“I grew up listening to and I like Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams. My music is not as twangy as theirs, but I like that sad-song singer. I like Gillian Welch and I like Gillian Welch when she is at her most mournful. I guess that’s where I see myself fitting in to the songwriting thing.”
There’s even more backstory, more context – for example Swift took everything and everyone to the Isle of Wight to record the bulk of the album; and the “partner” she mentioned is veteran English genius of psych pop, Robyn Hitchcock – but one of the best things you can say about The Resurrection Game is that you don’t need that context to grasp how good it is.
“It was a very intentional, thought-about piece of work having given myself not just the time to do it but the intense focus and the care, and it’s also the product of me being married to a very prolific songwriter, and being in his orbit and world is like going to a kind of songwriting finishing school,” says Swift, who adds producer Jordan Lehning, to the list of crucial differences.
“We are quite different musically, in terms of our touchstones: he is a Nashville guy who grew up in the city, but we both really love Scott Walker and Burt Bacharach, these really old school records and we were trying to make the kind of album people don’t really make any more, in the sense that I would never have been afforded this possibility if I was trying to make a record in the ‘60s. The fact that there are these luscious, cinematic string arrangements on this album is not something I would have imagined before, but I happened to come across a producer who specialises in that kind of stuff.”
The merging of old style Nashville and old school pop with modern sensibilities and a very modern pandemic proved fruitful even if complex and hardly cheap. But it had to happen once you know what came before it.
“From a pure artistic level, how much The Resurrection Game, in terms of the instrumentation and the songwriting and the more opulent side of it, was a reaction to that lockdown is clear,” Swift says. “The last two tracks of Blonde On The Tracks were recorded around my kitchen table in Nashville, which was kind of fun but I’m not a recording engineer and neither is my partner, and I actually much prefer the collaborative process of being in a room with other musicians.
“So the album I made after, once I could finally get out in the world, was taking an entire band to a residential studio and us all living in this tiny village on the Isle of Wight in the middle of winter, making these songs. Just getting in the room with people again.”
But here is another important thing in the context of all these references: The Resurrection Game is not an album of sad songs, of mournful how-the hell-did-l-did-I-survive-that songs. Swift’s voice does take us into a space where that is possible but these songs have gracefulness and energy and, yes, joy alongside the melancholic.
“Essentially I am a romantic person and more than anything else it is a romantic album. It’s full of love stories and some of them are directly in response my relationship: No Happy Endings absolutely is about me trying to be a better person for my partner in the face of a really brutal world,” Swift explains. “But then, Catholic Girls Are Easy is about losing my virginity and all of the confusion and contradiction that comes with being raised in a kind of lapsed Catholic household: I got all of the guilt, none of the God.
“I was a kid in the ‘80s and the two biggest Catholic figures in the 80s were Pope John Paul II and Madonna, so I just grew up very confused,” she laughs. “And there’s a lot on this record that is about the grief, a lot of my adult grief: rejecting that rigid spirituality that I was raised in but grieving the absence of spirituality, and yearning to find that in my own pantheistic way.”
As another Catholic who came out of that upbringing with all of the guilt and none of the God, I tell her that I feel like a lot of my adult life has been about teaching the young boy in me that I’m not the failure that the religion – and maybe one or two other people – seemed to be telling me I was intrinsically. Adult life post-Catholicism strikes me as a case of learning that you are okay, you don’t need to have this God in your life to be fulfilled, nor are you empty because you rejected it, and that legacy infiltrates all aspects of life and relationships and mental health.
“Of course. And it took years and years of therapy to unlearn that kind of really rigid and quite oppressive thinking system where you are taught to feel bad about yourself. And it’s that cycle, that family cycle stuff,” sighs Swift. “For years I blamed my parents but my parents had it too, they were just handing down to me what had been handed down to them, and that’s not necessarily their fault.
“In the song How To Be Small, that is as much about love as it is about the lack of it. That’s very much about my relationship with my mother, and it’s a very fractured, very difficult relationship because I am exactly the person that she raised me to be, and that creates a lot of conflict. She lives in the country and had seven children, very repressed, and I am prone to bouts of extreme expression [she laughs], so there is conflict.”
Catholic girls in fact are anything but easy. Who knew? (Actually, we knew.)
THURSDAY: In part two of this interview, Emma Swift explores the benefits and perils of analysis as a writer, and how music became the immediate and best route to dealing with a shit show of a world. “I was going to be upended one way or another and in a way it’s kind of nice to have the tools of songwriting to be like, well I got upended, now at least I can talk about it.”
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The Resurrection Game is out now on Tiny Ghost Records