We had the pleasure of interviewing Lou Emery, and here’s what she had to say:
Q: What do you enjoy most about songwriting?
EMERY: Songwriting is a really special way to share experiences with other people. I love when I hear a song by someone else that resonates with me so personally, so my favorite thing is being able to write a song that resonates with other people in that way. When I perform live, I can feel that there is an audience of people experiencing the music with me, feeling the story with me, in a way that goes above normal conversation. And we build off of each other. Any time someone lets me know that my music touched them or that they were jamming to my song in the car earlier, it’s such a cool feeling.
Q: What’s the story behind “Roots”?
EMERY: When I wrote “Roots,” I’d recently gotten out of a long relationship that did not end well. I realized I’d lost much of myself to an emotionally manipulative boyfriend, so the song describes that experience while I finally start to stand up for myself and reclaim my confidence. But through that process, I had to lose my heart-on-my-sleeve emotional depth and shut myself off from romance completely, in order to protect myself. The lyrics switch between sarcasm and raw honesty to express that story. “Roots” started with just the guitar riff in the verses, which I wrote a couple years ago on my acoustic. I’d been listening to a lot of female rock recently, so that’s the inspo that was running through my head.
Q: Could you walk us through the production process for this song?
EMERY: The song was built around the guitar riff in the verses, which I loved so much that I didn’t want to over-complicate or bury it. So a lot of the instruments just double or play off of that. I actually recorded the drums and lead vocals a couple of years ago at my college, the University of Miami, with Jack Dratch playing the drums. I basically sat on those stems for a year before actually building the rest of the song with my producer, Alex Arnaout, in LA. The production, at first, came together pretty quickly, falling easily into that punk-pop-rock sound. But disaster did strike—when the song was in the midst of mixing, and pretty close to done, a computer failure caused most of the recording to be lost. Suddenly we had to go back to the beginning production stages and rebuild almost the entire thing! This delayed us another 6 months or so, but we ended up being much happier with this second version, which was a bit edgier and more raw.
Q: Wow! I’m glad you kept going. What is your favorite vocal training routine?
EMERY: It’s very basic, but I swear by lip trills. I was not very classically trained in singing growing up, so I developed some bad habits around vocal training! I always warm up with lip trills, though, and I have a very large range so I go super high up on the piano. But personally, I also have a small repertoire of songs I’ve been singing forever that I sing portions of consistently to keep my belting voice in shape.
Q: What is your best part about releasing new music?
EMERY: It’s such a long process from starting to write a song to releasing it, so it’s super rewarding to finally see it on music platforms under my name. It can take years to write a song, finish it, change it, figure out how you’d want it produced, realize that’s actually not the sound you want and change the entire production, hire musicians to play on it, mix and master it correctly, get promotion shots, create album art, send it to platforms… etc. So it’s a huge accomplishment to actually release music, which makes the release date so exciting. I’d also add that I love looking at the statistics of how many people have Shazam’ed my songs because that means someone was randomly hearing it, and liked it enough to want to look up what it was.
Q: Who would you say is your biggest supporter? Why?
EMERY: My mom! She’s been at every show and audition my whole life, including when I was in musical theatre, and would perform the exact same show four nights in a row. She would be at every single one telling me how it was even better than the night before. She makes me send her every demo and bounce of a song, even when it’s going to be released in a couple weeks because she can’t wait to be able to stream it. One time she even came back from a run and showed me what she was listening to while she was exercising—and it was a really sad, slow song of mine that’s definitely not fit for running. But she loves and supports me so much that I guess it pumps her up anyway! Love you, momma!
Q: That’s so sweet!
Interviewed by Zoey King
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