WORDS ARE A GOOD THING. WORDS ARE NOT ENOUGH FOR EMMA SWIFT part two
- Bernard Zuel
- Sep 25
- 6 min read
MARRY YOUR OPPOSITE, they say, it will complement you. Move to where the action is, they say, it will motivate you. Test yourself, they say, it will toughen you. Write what you know, they say, it will come naturally. But what the hell do “they” know?
As she looks over the results, and in some cases the wreckage, of the past few years that saw one album and a pandemic, one mental breakdown and a five year break, and now a second record, Emma Swift has some thoughts.
“I married someone for whom expressing yourself has never been a problem, so that was a really pretty profoundly challenging thing for me,” says Swift, the maker of Americana from western NSW, married to uncrowned king of the pop underground, Robyn Hitchcock, from southern England. “Obviously on some kind of unconscious level that’s what I wanted. I knew that I wanted to uncork myself as a writer, and I didn’t really know how to do that, so I was very drawn to someone who obsessively write songs, journals every day, has no problem prioritising art over everything else.”
Sounds good, right? Well, yes, and no.
“That was not the way I was raised at all, so that’s been really good but in the early stages of that, particularly around the time of [2020’s album of Bob Dylan songs] Blonde On The Tracks where I did have that really profound writer’s block that led to that record being made, that was brought about because I put myself in these really challenging situations ‘to grow’ as a person. But I was like the weed buried under the grass or something, I couldn’t quite shoot up,” she says.
“I moved to Nashville where everybody writes songs and I married someone who write songs, and I was like if I could just be around it, then somehow it will just happen with me. But it didn’t. But by doing the Dylan thing, that helped enormously because people liked it – not that I necessarily require validation from people, but it freed me up to try other things.”
Not that there’s anything to be embarrassed about requiring validation from others: we all need validation. It shouldn’t be the only thing, it shouldn’t be the defining thing, but nor should it be underplayed how the positive reaction she received for the Dylan album gave her what she needed to move on with her writing and her music and now her first album of original material, The Resurrection Game, whose formative ground she discussed in part one of this interview.
“The other thing is, yes I had a nervous breakdown, but the other reason for the five years [between albums] is two to three of them were pure pandemic and I definitely grieved. I had made this absolutely beautiful Dylan record that was received in a way that was kind beyond my wildest dreams, I was totally thrilled and overwhelmed by how kind and generous the response to that album was, and then we were in lockdown and I couldn’t do anything with it. I had two cancelled tours of Australia where I was booked in to play all these beautiful theatres, and that all fell apart. Frankly, that was just really depressing.
“Even if you are a really Zen, happy cat, and all is cool in your world, when you’ve made this beautiful work and people want to see it and you can’t play it for them, that sucks.”
The scars from the covid years go deeper still for Swift, and plenty of us may recognise them.
“It was really hard and I think one of the contributors to that breakdown was I don’t think I gave myself permission to properly grieve what that experience of lockdown was like as a human being. I don’t think many of us did; I think it was very much we are in lockdown, then we got back to work. I don’t think it’s why I had a breakdown but I don’t think being in denial about how brutal the time was has been very helpful for anyone.”
To that analogy of the weed trying to push through, what’s interesting about some of the decisions she has made, such as surrounding herself with songwriters, having manifested in front of her what she wanted manifested in herself, is that in the end she still needed to learn how to be Emma Swift the artist so she could be Emma Swift the artist.
“And it was really challenging. It was not an easy path for me. I admire and envy those people who are ready to go, the young sprites, the Bob Dylans and the Jesse Welles of the universe who have just got it in there,” Swift says ruefully. “My path to being creative was much slower, and part of that was because the way that I was raised in the education system I was brought up in, I was taught a lot of critical thinking which I actually think is fairly detrimental to the creative part.
“I was a very good student, I was really good at writing essays about poetry and books and I think when you are taught to pick at things that’s not necessarily going to free up the creative. It made me good in an academic sense and my first job was as a baby journalist, reading press releases and getting grabs. It was all very helpful in a writerly way, but it wasn’t dreamy, it wasn’t losing myself.”
But clearly both of those elements are part of her so maybe it’s not a case of one thing harmed and blocked her but she needed to find a balance between the analytical and losing herself, so neither would define her.
“Oh, totally, and I have no regrets about any of that stuff and I totally love it. But I also wonder what my life would have been if I had done music, if I had done the guitar course at Lismore College instead of going to Sydney Uni and studied Shakespeare. But if you’re happy with where you landed, it doesn’t really matter how you got there.”
Whatever the causes whether it was, to use her words, a total shit show or a mild one, shit was going to happen.
“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,” Swift says. “I’m not gonna lie, I took a writing course last year with Faber in London and it was a memoir writing course, and I was trying to write my experience of having the breakdown. It was too hard, I couldn’t do it. Which is not to say I wouldn’t do it down the line but I was trying to do something too soon and the feelings work well in the songs, broken down into little pieces.
“Trying to tell the biggest story in a memoir-like fashion I am probably too close to that experience to have context. 43-year-old me who had a breakdown at 41 is not going to write about this as well as 60-year-old me will.”
Let’s face it, even if she were to write now it would still not be a full picture without the time and separation, without the intellectual understanding, not just the emotional immediacy. That’s easy to do in a song which is more diffused, as it doesn’t have to be a single experience but can incorporate others’ stories, it can obscure through characters, and it’s shorter. And at the very least it can be a first step.
“I’ve started as I’ve gotten older to appreciate that being able to sing is a real gift. I think because I could always do it, even though I had to learn a lot of stuff, I never really valued it as much. But now, particularly when I went through that dark night of the soul period and I wasn’t doing anything at all – some of the medication I was on made it difficult to sing at all – I’ve got a greater appreciation for what a wonderful tool that is to convey a feeling or an experience.
“It’s like, why would I write a poem when I can write a song? You can get away with a lot more in a song too,” she laughs. “And I think because I found it took me such a long time to become a songwriter, and I don’t want to jinx myself by saying I’ve got it figured out, but now that I’ve unlocked something in myself the makes it easy for me to do that, I would prefer that to be the space where my limited energy goes.”
They say that’s what can make you a good songwriter. This time they may be right.
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Emma Swift’s The Resurrection Game is out now on Tiny Ghost Records.
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