Trying to get her big break
After years of slog, things may finally be falling into place for Christchurch musician Emily C Browning.
The 26-year-old was recently enlisted as live guitarist in Jon Toogood’s The Adults and opened female powerhouse Julia Deans’ Christchurch show in August. Toogood is better known as the frontman for Kiwi band Shihad, Deans for her time fronting Fur Patrol.
Much of Browning’s success she credits to her Instagram presence, having amassed more than 118,000 followers. She ‘‘blew up’’ two years ago after featuring on an American Instagram page.
Browning caught up with The Press ahead of the Australian leg of The Adults tour. They play at Blue Smoke in Christchurch on Friday.
‘‘I started playing music as a hobby when I was about 12 and I’ve been singing forever,’’ Browning said.
A brief tertiary stint in speech and language therapy shored up her thinking – ‘‘I was maybe 21 [when] I decided music was my thing’’.
She escaped to Melbourne to break through the noise into a musical career, quickly learning ‘‘it requires a lot of steps before you can just make it’’. She recounts John Mayer and Jimi Hendrix as influencers.
‘‘I was pretty naive, so I had no contacts, I didn’t have a smart phone, no laptop, nothing to start up. It was fun and I learnt a lot, but in the end I was super broke so I came home.’’
She churned through a Bachelors Degree in Music from CPIT Jazz School, now Ara Institute of Canterbury Music Arts, graduating in 2017.
Playing at bars and venues across the city to make ends meet, she would play smooth tunes for restaurant diners, or covers to get people dancing at Fat Eddies. She was a working musician.
In 2016, a video of her singing featured on PickUp Jazz, a popular New-York-based page now called PickUp Music, boasting almost 400,000 followers.
‘‘If you’re a new person featured on that site you very quickly get to 1000 followers, you get a bit of a boost. I went from 200 or so followers, just friends and family, to 1000 really quickly,’’ she said.
‘‘That’s when I realised I needed to take this seriously, it was an opportunity that presented itself.’’
With many of her followers based in the United States, she embarked on a selfmanaged solo tour a year later.
‘‘I built this circle of contacts and cool musicians, people I could relate to and play with, so yeah, the US thing went really well for me,’’ she said.
Hoping to avoid playing covers or one-off gigs, she planned to return to the States in January, pending a touring artist visa, to tour with an as-yet unannounced artist.
‘‘In between now and then I’ll be working on the visa, No 1 priority, there is a lot you need to do.’’