EMILY RODGERS’ ALBUM IS A MATTER OF TRUST
Having been an adjunct professor of English and creative writing for six years, Emily Rodgers knows all about homework. As a recording artist, she also knows albums generally clock in at about 10 songs over 40 minutes.
So, it was with some trepidation that Rodgers informed legendary New York indie/punk producer Kramer, in advance of his spring 2019 visit to Pittsburgh to work on her fourth album, that she only had one song. One.
Their relationship dated back to 2009 when Kramer mixed and mastered the Pittsburgh indie-rocker’s second album and Misra Records debut, “Bright Day.” Kramer, the founder of the esteemed label Shimmy-Disc, applied his experience of playing in such bands as Bongwater and Shockabilly and producing everyone from Galaxie 500 and Low to White Zombie, GWAR and King Missile.
How they became acquainted is a relic of a bygone era.
“He reached out to me on MySpace like a hundred years ago,” she said, laughing. How he found her there they have no idea, but the result was a brilliant record that captured her psych-pop approach that’s reminiscent of Mazzy Star and other dreamy, reverb-drenched shoegazers.
In 2016, he moved into the full production role for her third album, “Two Years” (cut at The Wilderness Recording Studio in Zelienople), which All Music described as “swimming in an atmospheric netherworld between earthbound Americana and ethereal folkrock.”
In the attic
Jumping ahead three years, Kramer was interested in releasing the next Emily Rodgers album on his relaunched Shimmy-Disc label, but there was the matter of the one song. Rather than putting it off, Kramer convinced her that the session with her and husband/guitarist Erik Cirelli, in her Bellevue attic, should proceed as planned.
“This is sort of classically me struggling and not believing in myself, but
Kramer steadfastly believing in me and pushing me,” Rodgers says. “I had one song and was in a panic and didn’t know what to do, so we told Kramer that was the deal, and he said, ‘I believe in us, and we’ll see what we can do.’ ”
“Trust inspires people. It can even inspire inspiration,” Kramer notes in an email. “When you trust someone to do great things, it can often be the very reason they DO great things. And without that trust, an artist can hibernate, watching years fly by before they pick up a guitar again.”
He points to a quote from fellow New York creative Richard Serra: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
And so, in a seven-day whirlwind, they recorded the eight songs that make up “I Will Be Gone,” another spare, beautifully haunting entry to the singer-songwriter’s catalog.
Although she didn’t have fully realized songs going in, she did have a notebook filled with five years worth of lyrics. On previous albums, Rodgers, who has been busy switching careers to become a psychotherapist, would have the songs worked out on guitar and then bring in her band to flesh them out.
With these lyrics, she says, “It was the music I was having trouble coming up with. I felt like I was writing the same music over and over again.
“I always tell my students that professionalism breeds stasis, and I was just hanging out in stasis for a long time. This was borne out of necessity.”
For the session, Cirelli came in with some music that he had written “decades ago, like, exercises he had done on guitar,” she says, and then she improvised vocal lines and melodies. Once they laid down their tracks, Kramer embellished the songs with backup vocals and MIDI keyboard.
“When we were doing the song ‘Blame,’” she says, “I remember singing some vocal melodies, Kramer saying ‘OK, that’s great,’ and then me going and getting a sandwich or something and coming back a few hours later and he had the song pretty much how it sounds now.”
Spare parts
Rodgers comes to the genre with a strong literary background. Born in
Johnson City, Tenn., and raised in Georgia (near Atlanta) and Elkhart, Ind., she began her studies at the Mennonite Goshen College before coming to Pittsburgh in 2003, with friends in the band Boca Chica, to attend Chatham University. She got her master’s in creative writing in 2009 and added a master’s in literature and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon in 2012.
As a songwriter, she favors an airy, minimalist approach that allows the listener to fill in the blanks.
“At a basic level, I’m writing the kind of songs I like,” she says. “Story songs don’t super do it for me, generally. I’m writing what works for me in terms of singing. Actually, Erik said something to me yesterday about me covering a Lou Reed song — we were talking about ‘Sword of Damocles’ — and I was like, ‘I think I’ll sound like an auctioneer,’ trying to deliver something with rapid lyrics. It just doesn’t sound like me.”
In one of the album’s most powerful songs, “What Have You Done?,” Rodgers returns to the painful subject of her brother’s suicide in 2005, hovering on the line, “Sweet boy, what have you done?”
“That’s a line that someone said right after he died that I think I just wrote down in a journal at some point and thought, ‘I don’t know what to do with this, I don’t know what to make of this, but it feels important,’” she says.
“I’m certainly writing with a lot more vulnerability on his record. For years, mostly in live performances, I would be like, ‘Yeah, I’m singing these lyrics and most of them are cloaked in metaphor, but I know what they mean.’ So, I think that comes out on stage -- that I’m feeling a lot. They’re sort of like encoded messages on previous records. I’m being a lot more straightforward on this record.”
Complete canvas
“When I got there, she had one song ready,” Kramer writes, summarizing the project. “The rest blossomed from there.
Erik and Emily together mixed the paints. I applied it to the canvas, added some shadow work and hung it.”
She held onto the record for well over a year, because, she says, “It’s always my greatest fear to make something and release it into the ether.”
When the time comes to perform them live, she’ll have an interesting predicament with this canvas.
“I actually don’t remember writing a lot of these songs,” she says. “It’s the same for Erik, where it’s like, ‘OK, like, we’re going to play a festival this summer. We’re going to have to learn these songs.’ I have no idea what the chords are, I have no idea what the lyrics are. We’re going to have to sit down and learn these pieces as though we didn’t write them. We were in a collective fugue state most of the time. I don’t remember most of it.”