Woonsocket’s favorite voice
Emily Luther’s March 2 hometown concert will celebrate the performing arts programs at Woonsocket High School
WOONSOCKET – Since city native Emily Luther competed on NBC’s “The Voice” last year, her car has become a sort of de facto rehearsal hall.
She spends a lot of time on the road, hopscotching from one audition to the next – many of them in New York City.
“I actually learn a lot of my songs in the car while I’m driving,” she said during a recent interview, on the return leg of another trip to the Big Apple.
As her vehicle hummed across the tarmac of I-95 just this side of the state line, she was tuning up another song set, but she already landed the gig – at Woonsocket High School. And she didn’t have to audition for that one, because she invented it.
Set for March 2, “Emily Luther Unplugged” is both an homage to her alma mater and a fundraiser for a scholarship in the performing arts – two things she says put her on the path toward a career as a vocalist.
“A lot of things started happening for me and what I wanted to do with my life because of Woonsocket High School, particularly Jennifer Maiello, the director of theater arts, and Lisa Alves, the music director.” — Emily Luther
“A lot of things started happening for me and what I wanted to do with my life because of Woonsocket High School, particularly Jennifer Maiello, the director of theater arts, and Lisa Alves, the music director,” says Luther. “It’s my way of kind of remembering that I started out just as a kid from Woonsocket. With support and determination and the scholarship money I received I was able to accomplish certain things that – who knows? – I might not have been able to do without the platform I had at that school.”
Luther will be performing with members of the WHS Select Choir and theater arts students, but she will also be getting some help from a few friends she made during Season 13 of “The Voice” – fellow competitors Jon Mero, Gary Carpentier and Stephan Marcellus. Of the four “Voice” alumni, Marcellus lasted longest on national TV’s most-watched search for the next pop star – making it as far as the final eight contestants.
“We’re all like family,” says Luther. “We all just love each other. That’s part of the experience, making these lifelong friends.”
The material for the show
is a closely guarded secret, but Luther says it will include some familiar cover tunes from musical theater and R&B, plus something unexpected: a few originals. Folks who know Luther from her exposure on “The Voice” – which is to say, a lot – probably don’t think of her as a creator of original music, but she’s already recorded a few singles.
She performed a couple at the Stadium Theatre last spring, but the WHS performance will mark the first time they’ll sound like they do on her recordings.
“There will be full production behind it, so I’m super-excited about that,” she says. “They’re going to be performed as they sound on the record. They’re all recorded and mastered.”
Luther says none of her recordings are in distribution, but she’s still thinking about how they might be packaged and marketed. A more important question for Luther is when that will happen.
“I have four or five singles and I’m still deciding what I want to do with them,” she says. “I’m one of those people who just has to wait for the right moment. I’ll know when it’s the right moment and I’ll do it.”
A 2010 alumnus of WHS, Luther, 25, has been in the national spotlight more than once since she graduated. Af- ter two years at Berklee College of Music in Boston, she left school for what she calls “the Ellen thing,” referring of course to the maven of daytime TV, Ellen Degeneres.
Luther appeared on “The Ellen Degeneres Show” twice – exposure that helped her land a record contract with another company in Los Angeles. For a while, Luther was traveling back and forth to LA on a regular basis and eventually, she resettled there.
The label ultimately folded, but sometime before that Luther sensed she and her handlers weren’t a good fit.
“The management team I had around me was like the cherry on top of the negativity,” says Luther. “It was more like they wanted me to be this young sexy artist on the radio singing songs that really didn’t mean anything to me. It was just a bad situation and I knew it wasn’t going to work out.”
At that point, Luther says, she took a step back, rethinking her strategy for what it meant to have a career as a vocalist. She decided that, above all, she would be herself, singing songs that were important to her – and let the chips fall where they may.
Last year, she landed a berth on “The Voice,” by sending the producers an audition video in which she sang “Glitter in the Air,” by Pink, and “Edge of Glory” by Lady Gaga. Though she didn’t win, Luther has no regrets about her performance on the show.
“I’m a firm believer in whatever is meant to happen is going to happen,” she says. “I did my best. I did the songs I wanted to do and I got a lot out of it, and for that I’m grateful.”
These days, Luther’s official residence is with her parents, who moved from Woonsocket to Coventry a few years ago. Her attitude about the music business these days is fittingly blue-collar for an artist born in an old mill town.
It’s work, she says, and lot of the work is looking for work. That’s what all the traveling and auditioning is about.
“I’m just like anybody else looking for a job,” she says. “I’m just trying to hustle and work my butt off.”
And loving every minute of it.