Though Erika M. Anderson, who performs as EMA, has played in bands since being a teen, not until earlier this year was she able to quit her job as a substitute teacher in Oakland, Calif., to focus on music full-time. This transition has proved less glamorous than it sounds.
She lives in Portland, Ore., where she rents a “windowless basement” attached to an underground parking lot, she said in a recent interview with The Daily. Her front entrance is of the garage-door variety — “I’ve tried to tape it off so I don’t get carbon monoxide poisoning” — and she wakes up to the smell of exhaust.
That is, when she’s home. On this particular afternoon, Anderson was in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., shuttling between fashion shoots with Spin magazine and the style site Refinery 29, an enormous suitcase in tow. “Basically I brought all the clothes I own,” she said, “even though like half of them are like found on the street or from Goodwill.” Anderson had just finished her first U.S. tour with her new band; the next day, she was scheduled to fly to Sioux Falls, S.D., where she was raised and where many of the unhappy characters that populate her songs still live.
To the extent that the tall, lanky, personable Anderson is now a professional musician, it’s because of a song called “California,” from May’s “Past Life Martyred Saints,” one of the year’s best and most unexpected LPs and the first record Anderson released under the name EMA. (Her old band, Gowns, split in 2010 after a tumultuous five-year run.) “California” is the rare type of song that does not make you think of other songs. Over a drone of guitar feedback reminiscent of thunder or breaking waves, Anderson delivers an incantation, equal parts grief and exhilaration. “I’m just 22,” she intones, as rough, jagged chords fall and rise behind her voice. “I don’t mind dying.”
In fact, Anderson is 29, and the lyric is considerably older, borrowed from “Who Do You Love,” the much-covered 1956 Bo Diddley single. “California” also quotes a couplet from the 19th-century minstrel ballad “Camptown Races.” Neither allusion has prevented listeners from wondering if Anderson is talking about herself.
“Everyone’s very surprised when they meet me,” she said over lunch, grinning. “They’re like, ‘Oh, I thought you were going to be so somber and dark and deep or whatever, and here you are laughing and joking.’ ”
The assumption makes more sense than she lets on. “Past Life Martyred Saints” is a wounded, at times claustrophobic record powered by Anderson’s uncommonly vulnerable voice, which is generally poised somewhere between a whisper and a snarl. “Marked,” one of the oldest compositions on the record, finds her chanting, “I wish that every time he touched me left a mark” in a voice so scraped over and raw that a listener might be tempted to call the police. It’s not easy to listen to.
“I think as a kind of closeted Midwesterner who doesn’t talk about her feelings with her closest friends, I go extra hard, like almost over the top sometimes, on the lyrics,” Anderson said. “And some of them are real, but some of them are just me pushing myself to figure out where the line is and to kind of take it a step over the line sometimes.”
Many of the songs on “Past Life Martyred Saints” — which are dense with teenage goths, closeted, small-town gays and desperately unhappy loners — draw on Anderson’s ambivalence over growing up in Sioux Falls. “I was the only girl to ever front bands in high school,” she said, describing her younger self as “a total misfit.” But Anderson also credits her time in the relatively closed-off Midwest, as isolated as it often felt, with making her into a musician.
“I didn’t know anything about art,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about who any painters were. But it was very free because there was no one watching.”
Unlike her characters, many of whom — as “California” puts it — have never seen an ocean or been on a plane, Anderson graduated high school and left South Dakota for college in California. Going back now can feel “schizophrenic,” she said. After years in Los Angeles punk bands — first in the long-running noise project Amps for Christ, and later in Gowns, which managed one record and a series of incendiary shows before succumbing to the same tensions that cost Anderson a romantic relationship with one of her bandmates — Anderson occupies a less naive head space than she used to. It led her momentarily to consider giving up.
“Before I started doing this record again, I was really about to be done doing music. I was like, ‘This is ruining my life, this is financial suicide, the life on the road is impossible,’ ” she said of her emotional state after Gowns. “For a while I was really like, ‘I want to move back to the Midwest, and I want to get a couch, and I want to get a refrigerator, and I want to make jalapeño poppers, and I want to live for a while.’ ”
Instead, EMA, which began as a project to salvage old songs written for Gowns, was almost an immediate success, finding a receptive audience at Pitchfork and other major music magazines that had previously not taken much notice of the last five or 10 years of Anderson’s career.
The attention has not been unwelcome, Anderson said, as a waitress cleared away her lunch and she prepared for having her picture taken yet again, but it has made it more difficult for her to take the same emotional and sonic gambles that made “Past Life Martyred Saints” so harrowing. “There’s a pleasure in watching really fantastic musicians play,” she said. “I’m not a fantastic musician. That’s not what I do. I want there to be a risk of failure.”
Risk is what allowed her to create “Past Life Martyred Saints,” a record so tremendously unguarded and thin-skinned that at times it can feel like one giant bruise. But the illusion that no one is watching — the sense that Anderson’s only real audience is herself — is becoming harder to maintain.
“I don’t think it’s lost to me yet,” she said. “But I do hope recognition doesn’t [tamp] it down,” she added. "I can’t tell if that’s going to happen or not. Because people have expectations of you because they’ve heard you. It’s harder to just be like, ‘Well, let’s take a chance on totally f***ing this up.’”
She lives in Portland, Ore., where she rents a “windowless basement” attached to an underground parking lot, she said in a recent interview with The Daily. Her front entrance is of the garage-door variety — “I’ve tried to tape it off so I don’t get carbon monoxide poisoning” — and she wakes up to the smell of exhaust.
That is, when she’s home. On this particular afternoon, Anderson was in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., shuttling between fashion shoots with Spin magazine and the style site Refinery 29, an enormous suitcase in tow. “Basically I brought all the clothes I own,” she said, “even though like half of them are like found on the street or from Goodwill.” Anderson had just finished her first U.S. tour with her new band; the next day, she was scheduled to fly to Sioux Falls, S.D., where she was raised and where many of the unhappy characters that populate her songs still live.
To the extent that the tall, lanky, personable Anderson is now a professional musician, it’s because of a song called “California,” from May’s “Past Life Martyred Saints,” one of the year’s best and most unexpected LPs and the first record Anderson released under the name EMA. (Her old band, Gowns, split in 2010 after a tumultuous five-year run.) “California” is the rare type of song that does not make you think of other songs. Over a drone of guitar feedback reminiscent of thunder or breaking waves, Anderson delivers an incantation, equal parts grief and exhilaration. “I’m just 22,” she intones, as rough, jagged chords fall and rise behind her voice. “I don’t mind dying.”
In fact, Anderson is 29, and the lyric is considerably older, borrowed from “Who Do You Love,” the much-covered 1956 Bo Diddley single. “California” also quotes a couplet from the 19th-century minstrel ballad “Camptown Races.” Neither allusion has prevented listeners from wondering if Anderson is talking about herself.
“Everyone’s very surprised when they meet me,” she said over lunch, grinning. “They’re like, ‘Oh, I thought you were going to be so somber and dark and deep or whatever, and here you are laughing and joking.’ ”
The assumption makes more sense than she lets on. “Past Life Martyred Saints” is a wounded, at times claustrophobic record powered by Anderson’s uncommonly vulnerable voice, which is generally poised somewhere between a whisper and a snarl. “Marked,” one of the oldest compositions on the record, finds her chanting, “I wish that every time he touched me left a mark” in a voice so scraped over and raw that a listener might be tempted to call the police. It’s not easy to listen to.
“I think as a kind of closeted Midwesterner who doesn’t talk about her feelings with her closest friends, I go extra hard, like almost over the top sometimes, on the lyrics,” Anderson said. “And some of them are real, but some of them are just me pushing myself to figure out where the line is and to kind of take it a step over the line sometimes.”
Many of the songs on “Past Life Martyred Saints” — which are dense with teenage goths, closeted, small-town gays and desperately unhappy loners — draw on Anderson’s ambivalence over growing up in Sioux Falls. “I was the only girl to ever front bands in high school,” she said, describing her younger self as “a total misfit.” But Anderson also credits her time in the relatively closed-off Midwest, as isolated as it often felt, with making her into a musician.
“I didn’t know anything about art,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about who any painters were. But it was very free because there was no one watching.”
Unlike her characters, many of whom — as “California” puts it — have never seen an ocean or been on a plane, Anderson graduated high school and left South Dakota for college in California. Going back now can feel “schizophrenic,” she said. After years in Los Angeles punk bands — first in the long-running noise project Amps for Christ, and later in Gowns, which managed one record and a series of incendiary shows before succumbing to the same tensions that cost Anderson a romantic relationship with one of her bandmates — Anderson occupies a less naive head space than she used to. It led her momentarily to consider giving up.
“Before I started doing this record again, I was really about to be done doing music. I was like, ‘This is ruining my life, this is financial suicide, the life on the road is impossible,’ ” she said of her emotional state after Gowns. “For a while I was really like, ‘I want to move back to the Midwest, and I want to get a couch, and I want to get a refrigerator, and I want to make jalapeño poppers, and I want to live for a while.’ ”
Instead, EMA, which began as a project to salvage old songs written for Gowns, was almost an immediate success, finding a receptive audience at Pitchfork and other major music magazines that had previously not taken much notice of the last five or 10 years of Anderson’s career.
The attention has not been unwelcome, Anderson said, as a waitress cleared away her lunch and she prepared for having her picture taken yet again, but it has made it more difficult for her to take the same emotional and sonic gambles that made “Past Life Martyred Saints” so harrowing. “There’s a pleasure in watching really fantastic musicians play,” she said. “I’m not a fantastic musician. That’s not what I do. I want there to be a risk of failure.”
Risk is what allowed her to create “Past Life Martyred Saints,” a record so tremendously unguarded and thin-skinned that at times it can feel like one giant bruise. But the illusion that no one is watching — the sense that Anderson’s only real audience is herself — is becoming harder to maintain.
“I don’t think it’s lost to me yet,” she said. “But I do hope recognition doesn’t [tamp] it down,” she added. "I can’t tell if that’s going to happen or not. Because people have expectations of you because they’ve heard you. It’s harder to just be like, ‘Well, let’s take a chance on totally f***ing this up.’”
