Emiliana Torinni’s new single was a complete surprise. We don’t mean that the summer ska feel of Armeni & Me was a shock after the bleak world of her Fisherman’s Woman longplayer. No, although we weren’t expecting this change of direction it’s nothing to the astonishment that the Icelandic-born Brighton singer felt when she found out she’d written it. It started with a night of “amazing whiskey”, Emiliana buffing her production partner Dan Carey’s nails until they were shining like disco balls. After that it went hazy.
“I think I went into some sort of trance and this spirit of this woman stalker came into me and we wrote Me & Armeni,” Emiliana says with a cheeky smile. “Three days later I said I wanted to have another song on the record and Dan said, “Why don’t you use the ska track?” I had no idea what he was talking about.”
Even now Emiliana has no recollection of writing the song, or even who Armeni might be. She says that it’s a name she’s never heard before. She seems fine with the outcome though but worries if Armeni will go into shock when he hears the song, wherever he is.
Welcome to the strange world of the lovely Emiliana, a joyful world that will happily take a random left turn at any point.
It’s taken a few of those left turns to get from a childhood choir in Iceland to being one of the few singer songwriters in Brighton to have been nominated for a Grammy Award. A combination of going to opera school, gutting fish in a caviar factory and singing in a local production of the musical Hair lead to Emiliana recording a quartet of cover versions for her father’s 50th birthday. A few additional songs later and the young girl had the biggest selling album in Iceland. Not bad for someone who wasn’t sure they could even sing.
A job at the largest record company in the country, another record – she claims both are terrible – and Emiliana was spotted by the head of One Little Indian singing in a restaurant. He persuaded her to come to England to write some songs
” I wasn’t interested at all,” Emiliana shrugs. “I just wanted to sing.”
Thank god she took his advice though, because it was songwriting for someone else – after a couple of albums of her own – that lead to that Grammy. The someone else was Kylie and the song was the No.1 smash Slow, the lead single from Body Language.
“When I think about it now I think, How did we even dare try to follow Can’t Get You Out Of My Head,” recalls Emiliana. “We produced it as well and could have been slated for it.”
Clearly that didn’t happen, which is especially impressive for a song that came together in just half an hour. But she was so sure the song would be rejected that she was planning her own white label. Emiliana and Dan didn’t win the Grammy but they didn’t leave empty handed.
“We got a medal!” giggles Emiliana excitedly. “Every Grammy nominee gets a medal in a Tiffany pouch, which I thought would be full of diamonds. Me and Dan had such a laughing fit when we got it. I never had a medal before and I always wanted one. I think we wore them everywhere we went for about a month. It was really surreal to get a medal for songwriting.”
Since that decorated success Emiliana has written songs for, erm, nobody. Slow was written in the middle of the sessions for the stunning Fisherman’s Woman, her second British album after the trip hop of Love In The Time Of Science. (“Do I still like it? I haven’t heard it since I recorded it. I can’t bring myself to do it.”). It’s the musical embodiment of the phrase ‘still waters run deep’. The first line announces that Emiliana is “Home alone and happy” but there’s a real melancholy running through the simple acoustic gentleness.
“It’s quiet,” corrects Emiliana when we hint at the LP sounding sad. “Music reflects on how I feel at the time. I went through a humungous trauma before that record. I took me about eight years to come to terms with it in some ways. That record was a part of the process I guess. I definitely wasn’t going to go ‘Woohoo!'”
That doesn’t sound like it’d be much fun to take on tour around the world, as Emiliana has been doing for the last few years. Is it difficult performing the songs?
“I love singing the songs,” she says quickly. “It did come to the point when I was touring where it became a little bit much, because they have a really deep meaning for me, so it became very difficult to sing them for so long, delving into the emotions again and again. I went through a little bit of vodka. But now I love singing them. It’s changed into a much more peaceful thing.”
There’s no such trauma for the new album, named after the song she doesn’t remember recording. In fact much of it was written after Emiliana fell in love. Big Jumps especially has a spring in its step, whilst retaining the stripped back acoustic guitar of the previous LP. Elsewhere Gun sounds like a one woman Can – with a single electric guitar riff – and Beggar’s Prayer fleshes out the contemplation with a ghostly choir.
“I thought I would write some amazing poetry when I fell in love then but it all disappeared.”
Swapping a little poetry for happiness doesn’t see too bad when you can channel stalkers to write your songs for you. Or there’s some amazing whiskey to be drunk.
