Nashville, Tennessee: perched above the great swathe of the South, its clinking, dusky honky-tonk bars and country music pedigree set a romantic scene.
Steeped in the early history and traditions of the United States, it is country music’s modern spiritual home, and as most Nashville road signs would remind you, home of the Grand Ole Opry – among country music’s most established and recognised institutions since its inception in 1925.
It’s hardly a wonder, then, that Emma Swift found herself hopelessly immersed in the city’s rich cultural charms and creative energies. Having formerly helmed FBi’s Americana radio show In The Pines, followed by Double J’s Revelator program, you might say this courtship had been a long time coming for the Australian musician.
“I juggled it [music and radio] for a year while I was at Double J and everyone there was super lovely and accommodating with my weird and often frantic schedule, but in the end I just couldn’t do it and took off for an American tour,” she says.
“I like coming home to Nashville – I like communing with the people, the dreamers, the country music ghosts. Before I moved there, I slow-danced with a stranger on the dancefloor at Robert’s Western World while the band played an old George Jones song and I just thought, ‘I can’t die without living in Tennessee.’ So I moved. That was five years ago. A couple of months back, I watched two 70-year-olds on the dancefloor of The Nashville Palace while the band played a pedal steel weeper and I just lost it. I never get tired of that memory or that sight.”
Swift is the kind of artist whose songwriting is, by her own admission, necessarily bathed in longing and loneliness. Neil Young’s On The Beach is her favourite record, and the spirit of sadcore is very much ingrained in her creative expression. So too the lilting poetry of T.S. Eliot and the sensual honesty of Pablo Neruda.
“I find it hard to discuss songwriting in an academic sense – for me they’re just feelings with notes attached,” Swift says. “If I have a process, I’m not aware of it. I like down songs and my voice is full of longing, so it makes sense that I create that kind of music.
“In real life, I present as an eternal optimist, so my internal world is full of stuff I’m reluctant to share or admit except through song: my sadness, my ongoing fear that nothing lasts, that love isn’t real, that we’re all going to die alone, that relationships are doomed… If I ever write a happy song, I’m not going to waste it on me, that’s for sure. Someone needs to make it a hit so I can get some cats and a house and write more sad songs.”
Country music seems the perfect fit for this contrast; this essentially human duality of character that Swift embraces. Perhaps more than any other genre (although gospel gives it a good run), it is simultaneously mournful, poignant and reflective, yet buoyed by an honest awareness. Swift’s new collaboration with the evergreen Robyn Hitchcock, ‘Love Is A Drag’ – which follows the release of Swift’s debut album in 2014 and last year’s ‘Follow Your Money’, also with Hitchcock – is stripped back further still.
“The songs were written with Robyn on the Isle of Wight in the middle of a desolate, grey winter,” Swift says. “I had relocated there from Nashville in pursuit of a romance but I didn’t really know what I was doing in England or how permanent the move would be. Every day I watched a sandstone cliff slowly crumble into the ocean from the window of a damp seaside flat. That’s what influenced this song – tiny fragments falling from a great height.”
Robyn Hitchcock & Emma Swift perform at Newtown Social Club on Sunday December 11, Emma Swift is also appearing with Ryan Adams at the Enmore Theatre on Tuesday December 6.
