Emma Louise Has Found A Grand New Voice, And Its Name Is Joseph

When Emma Louise was recording her debut album, 2013’s vs Head vs Heart, she heard a vocal take slowed down. She loved how it sounded like someone else, and not quite real. She called the voice Joseph, and pledged that, one day, she’d do a whole album in this voice. Five years on, and Emma Louise - born Emma Louise Lobb, in Cairns - is true to her word. Her new LP, Lilac Everything, finds her voice pitched down throughout; a bold artistic decision that was met with resistance, at first.

“From the start, everyone - except for Toby; Tobias [Jesso Jr], the producer - was against it,” says Lobb, 27. “They were like, ‘You can’t do that, you’re a crazy person.’ People were telling me we couldn’t release it. But, I just had this force, this feeling, that this was the right thing to do, what I had to do, as an artist. Like, it was already pre-written, and I couldn’t change my mind.”

Releasing the first singles from the album, the reaction has been equal parts positive and “‘What the fuck did you do that for?’” Lobb laughs. Lilac Everything is a striking listen: “The deep, deep sadness of all the songs is wrapped in this super-joyful treatment,” the pitch-shifting never feeling like a gimmick, or detracting from the music’s sincerity. Rather than playing with the interface of human and machine, the recordings preserve all the intimate qualities of Lobb’s vocal performance. “That’s [engineer] Shawn Everitt,” Lobb attributes. “He went through all the vocals and treated them all. He must’ve spent like a week just on that, making sure the human element was preserved.”

The making of Lilac Everything was, for Lobb, a study in serendipity. Feeling stuck in a rut in Melbourne, she booked an imminent flight to Mexico. There, she wrote songs, sent them off to Jesso Jr - whom she’d never met - and, by chance, met the owners of Bear Creek Studio in Seattle, where she’d end up recording the album.

All these intersections of chance, or fate, played into Lobb’s conviction that the vocals be pitched down. When asked about it, in interviews, she’s tempted to talk about it as a conceptual idea, but knows that it was a purely impulsive decision. “I didn’t think too much of it. It just felt like the right thing to do,” she offers. “I could definitely say that I did [think of it as a concept], come up with something about it being an exploration of the female/male balance, or some attempt to be genderless, but I wasn’t thinking of that.”

Making the album has helped Lobb do something she’d long felt she needed to: create more separation between her artistic output and her sense of self. “Every artist, when their work is so closely associated with their name, any failure or success affects your identity. It affected the way I saw myself. So, when I did well, it inflated my sense of self. Then, all of a sudden, when I wasn’t getting that constant feedback, I would get sad and deflated, feel like I’m unworthy. I noticed that it was a real cycle, and it was really unhealthy,” she says.

This cycle is familiar to non-artists, too, as the destructive by-product of social media. Lobb, who deleted her personal Facebook five years ago, knows that all too well. “It’s a real thing, the source of so much anxiety,” she says. “It’s there for everyone, and probably only gets worse the bigger your platform. Like, if you’ve got lots and lots of followers, you get a greater stream of validation. But the more validation you get, the more you need, the more you come to rely on it, and get further and further away from your sense of self-worth.”

Any acclaim for Lilac Everything, for Lobb, will be its own thing. For her, the making of it lived up to her hopes. “I’ve been trying to separate my art from my identity for so long, so it’s less painful, but it’s really hard,” she says. “[With this album], to be able to step outside Emma Louise, and put a different voice to it, it feels good, like a relief.”