It was an uncommonly cool evening outside, when as part of Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors 2013 free summer concert series, Emily Wells clearly conveyed that she was well versed in her craft. Playing between Kronos Quartet with special guest Mariana Sadovska, and My Brightest Diamond, she fit right into what Lincoln Center described as “Art song gets earthy and edgy with three compelling, genre-defying female vocalists.”
Emily Wells is a multi-instrumentalist in every sense of the word. A classically trained violinist, she also uses a wide range of percussion, analog synth, guitar, melodica, glockenspiel, and probably some other things I don’t know about. For this Lincoln Center performance on the large outdoor bandshell, she surrounded herself with these instruments, which she would pick up one by one, sample, loop, and layer with the next. By re-interpreting classical music much like Joanna Newsom, and adding an electronic beat with a strong voice similarly to tUnEyArDs, she makes some next level sing songwriter compositions with her own personal lyrics. She could have a full band, but there’s something in the way she can craft everything when it’s just her, allowing us to watch exactly how she builds a song.
She started off with an atmosphere-building intro, then went into the soulfully suggestive “Mama’s Gonna Give You Love,” off her latest release Mama, on Partisan Records. This is when she busted out some melodica skills and went further with her vocal melody. She had her kick drum positioned behind her, so she could hit the pedal with her heel, and with a snare to her left, and floor tom and ride cymbal to her right, she built the percussion beats and threw in some tambourine. From this song, she began to transition from her more classically influenced compositions to sample based electronic hip-hop influenced tunes. One of these was “Becomes the Color,” a song she did for director Chan-wook Park’s latest film Stoker. She explained a little about the song in her Texan-tinged accent, and how she wrote it in a basement studio in Bushwick, which is probably all the explanation she needs to give on how she achieved that darker, more intense sound.
When Emily reached the end of her set, after also playing “The Fire” and a song “about friendship, whiskey, and Jesus,” she let the loops go, jumped down from her rig, and danced at the front of the stage to her own beats. When the crowd responded enthusiastically, she gave a little bow and ran offstage. It was a fitting finale, like having a musical education, then a dance party.
Check out Emily Wells on Facebook, the Tweet space, and hear more tunes on Spotify.
