Miss Emily Brown
Miss Emily Brown’s debut album, Part of You Pours Out of Me, named one of the top twelve albums of 2008 by CBC’s Alan Neal, marked a graceful entrance onto Canada’s independent music scene. OnJanuary 18, 2010 Emily released her sophomore album, In Technicolor, which features songs written as part of her Canada Council for the Arts sponsored winter-long songwriting project that explores her grandmother’s journal from World War II.
Emily Millard was born in Iroquois, Ontario, a hometown she describes as “an airstrip, a beach, one diner and my parents’ house. That’s how it feels.” In the 1950s, the original town was replaced by a Garden City town, designed and relocated by Ontario Hydro to make way for Toronto-bound ships. “As a kid I would look down off the docks at the old roads submerged under water,” she explains. “It is a very nostalgic community. We have to confront the past and the present all of the time. ”
At nineteen, Emily moved to Vancouver Island, where she studied poetry and recorded her first “clunky folk songs” in a friend’s art studio. In 2004, Emily relocated to Nelson BC, where the Kootenays’ hush and the Selkirk School of Music taught her jazz. She sang in a nightclub. And as she composed, she dug in auntie’s closets for autoharps and toy guitars. “An autoharp is not the sort of thing you can buy,” says Emily. “That would be too weird. You have to just find them.”
In Jeremy Fisher’s Vancouver living room, and in Corwin Fox’s Victoria studio, Miss Emily Brown recorded her first full release, Part of You Pours Out of Me. Called “wonderfully poppy” and “winsome” by Monday Magazine and “un véritable univers enchanteur” by the bloggers, the record is soft and nostalgic. The album features bassist Tobias Meis, former drummer of Vancouver’s Hey Ocean, Benny Schuetze, saxophonist Anthony D’Agati and string players Hannah and Nick Epperson. The tracks have been featured on CBC Radio’s Canada Live, Canada Next!, All Points West and Bandwidth, on popular UK podcast The Waiting Room and on university radio stations across Canada.
With the success of her first album, Miss Emily Brown toured to dozens of festivals and venues across Canada and the US in 2008-2009. In the winter of 2009, Emily was the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant for composition, which she used to research and write her second album, In Technicolor. The project began with her grandmother’s wartime journal, but developed into a complex compendium of songs dealing with themes of femininity and independence under extreme duress.
For more information, visit her website.
