First Love (2009) Emmy the Great

Written by Ethan Lehrman

I’m obsessed with a certain kind of coming of age media. Not the ones about pounding hearts and excitement and ‘the summer I finally found myself’. They're all well and good, but I’ve never found them that compelling. Moreover, it’s not the kind of earthshaking ennui The Smiths bring to the table either. I’m here for that slow everyday dizziness. Those periods where you glimpse the outline of the next stage but haven’t yet grasped the crayon to scribble it in: that kind of growing ache that sends you walking for hours. No piece of media has dripped with this nameless feeling quite like Emmy the Great’s 2009 album First Love. It’s drawn me back over and over to try to make sense of it. 

I first heard First Love through a shitty old pair of headphones in a laundromat in some hotel on a family vacation. I was at the age where acne was starting to show in angry blotches heralding the hormonal melodrama of the next few years. The album felt like a peek into the future. It was familiar to the passions bubbling in me, the same way as doodles were familiar to a Caravaggio: the same species differing in levels of refinement. At that time, Two Steps Forward stuck with me the most. Naturally so, it is a song reminiscing the stage of life I was at: the time where fantasies of “falling into rabbit holes and never coming out” coexist with interludes in friend’s garden sheds. I hardly even noticed the narrative present of the song which sees the singer try to reconcile her intimate memory of her now famous first flame with his current media persona. This central dilemma is treated with a mix of maturity and sardonic angst, which is a hallmark of the album. Emmy peppers her ponderings with little twists: digs at a girl who won’t stop bragging that her mum knows Elton John, or the darkly comedic image of the singer doing a line off a magazine print of her former lover’s face. These insertions are never prevalent enough to fully pull her songwriting into the distinctly teenage-y vibes of The Smiths or Weezer, but do position her with one foot behind the threshold of adulthood. They melt alchemically with evocative images and moments of maturity to bring the album's highest highs. First love is at its best when it's twenty-two and confused, but still kicking. Still, that doesn’t quite encapsulate what makes this album so special.

A few months ago I was compelled to dust off its memory when a fling reminded me of the title track, First Love. It’s a peculiar one in many ways: its production stands out as noticeably more polished than its predecessors. It loosely adapts Samuel Beckett’s short story of the same name into a vignette about a one night stand with a bench-stranger in a top floor room with a broken tape player stuck on the chorus of “‘Hallelujah’, the original Leonard Cohen version”, and it’s capped off with synth interludes and folk-esque final breakdown. All that together is enough to make the song memorable. But, that’s not why I retrieved it from the dusty recess of my mind. What jogged my memory was the very particular feeling the singer has about the song’s events. She asserts in close succession “Well I wish I never met you that day [...] I wish that I’d never come” and “but now that I have, I would do it again/I would forget like I’d piss on a grave” without contradiction. It is not tinged with irony nor held aloft as a great achievement, but just how it is, a messy human feeling. It feels realistic in a way not many songs about love, especially by younger artists, do. This holds true with her break-up songs too, even at her angriest in Dylan and also, Canopies and Drapes. She captures that weird mix of hurt and tenderness at the end of things. Well not exactly at the end of things. She doesn't tend to write from the moment of swelling change; Emmy writes from the moments before and after.

Chameleons’ eyes are capable of independently looking in two opposite directions. I’ve heard this being compared to looking into the future and the past at once. In this way that special feeling First Love evokes is a sort of chameleonic ache; the singer-narrator is almost never present in the songs. The singer occupies the space between. They are dread-longing for the future and ruminating on the past -- stuck between life and death, town and city, love and loss, child and adult, here and there. When she is present in the moment she takes a stance of meditative consternation. That is the feeling gives it its distinctly early twenties feeling: a time for cleaning up childhood's loose ends while stumble-charging forward. Emmy the Great has created a soundtrack to wade through the misty swamps of young adulthood to press further and further towards maturity. “It’s so weird how time goes on.”