portrait of this blog's author - by Stephen Blackman 2008

Tuesday, June 09, 2020


More Emily Barker news . . . . . .

EMILY BARKER RELEASES NEW SINGLE ‘RETURN ME’

by FRUK Staff 9 June, 2020



It was in 2017 that Emily Barker last graced us with a solo album. 'Sweet Kind Of Blue' had a defined Memphis sound, shaped by both Emily’s own great musical tastes and her choice of support: Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis, Grammy-award winning producer Matt Ross-Spang (Margo Price, Jason Isbell) alongside various members of Memphis ‘music royalty’ as her backing band. While she may not have been looking for any sort of affirmation, it most certainly came when she won UK Artist of the Year at the 2018 UK Americana Awards held at Hackney Empire in London.
Last week the news that she had signed to Thirty Tigers was accompanied by a new single ‘Return Me’, the first from a new album which we hope to have more details on soon. It’s a sweet number on which her band’s sensitive light touch adds to the acoustic warmth of the song adding shades of light to a stripped-back personal number. It has that laid-back country-soul feel which calls to mind long days of summer and here finds her yearning for home.
In recent times Emily has found herself gravitating back to themes that have haunted her lyrics since she first started writing songs. The climate crisis that dominated last year’s news brought burning questions back to the fore, and ‘Return Me’ marks her response – the yearning tug of home and family.
“I started to ask myself whether or not the path I am on is still the right one in light of the sombre and overwhelming revelation that our earth is very sick,” Emily said of the track. “Whether the journey is leading me where I want to go…whether it is time at last to return to my first home – a question that seems to have no answer, despite the number of songs I have dedicated to it.”

The accompanying artwork is by Ange Mullen-Bryan and features a detail of a larger painting that Ange made after listening to her new songs and making a painting in response to them.

While it’s been a while, since her last album, Emily has hardly been static, only last year she released an album with Marry Waterson – ‘A Window to Other Ways’. They got together after meeting on a songwriting workshop by the hugely talented Kathryn Williams…you can read our interview with Marry Waterson about that collaboration here.

We’re looking forward to hearing the next chapter.

www.emilybarker.com

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