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"Emily Barker has a gift for great melodies" - The Guardian
“an album of spare, striking beauty” - Mojo ★★★★
“…a kind of Australian equivalent of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake” - UNCUT 8/10
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all…” – Emily Dickinson
The opening line of Emily Dickinson’s short poem ‘‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers’ inspired the central image of Emily Barker’s new single ‘Feathered Thing’, written while she navigated cumulative grief.
When Barker was first introduced to producer Luke Potashnick (Gabrielle Aplin, Jack Savoretti, Katie Melua) in May 2022, she brought with her a full album’s worth
of songs. But after visiting Potashnick’s storied studio, The Wool Hall and hearing his ambitious production ideas, she was inspired to write one more song.
“I also needed to process some heavy news” she comments. Barker and her husband Lukas Drinkwater had been trying to start a family. Following a couple of failed IVF cycles (and other “starts that we’d lost”), they investigated adoption and had decided to relocate to Australia to be closer to Barker’s family.
“It felt like we couldn’t work out what we wanted, but we finally reached a point where we both felt at peace with not having kids,” Barker recalls. “It had been an incredibly intense time, coinciding with a house move and the pandemic.”
And then Barker found she was pregnant. “We’d done all these things to try to make it happen, and then it happened naturally (and against all biological odds). Having previously navigated losses throughout our pregnancy journey, we now had to get our heads around what having this new person in our lives might look like - emotionally and practically.”
Soon after work began on the album, Barker had a miscarriage.
“Songwriting has always been a way of processing throughout my life.” Barker reveals how the new song came quickly as she sat at her piano at home. She shared an early version with Potashnick and remembers him politely asking, “Do you mind telling me what this is about?”
“I think I’d left it too abstract, initially,” she reflects. “It was difficult to open up about the miscarriage, but Luke was very supportive and encouraged me to dig a little deeper without necessarily being specific. I revisited the lyrics, and the result is much stronger.”
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