Track By Track: Emily Brown tells us about confronting mental illness on her Emily Frown EP

The Most The Most The Most

I wrote this while I was walking at night on Balboa Island in Newport Beach. A lot of my song ideas come to me when I’m engaged in some kind of kinaesthetic activity-- walking around or biking or doing dishes. I figured out the melody and words in time with my footsteps on the walk home.

I Come to You

This song started while I was staying in Chicago with a friend. We’d cooked and eaten breakfast one morning after a week packed with heavy conversations about influences in our lives that weren’t currently present. I sat down at the piano and started playing this heavy, droning piano line, and just hummed and mumbled lyrics about those ideas for 20 or 30 minutes.

The Worst Weekend

This is about a terrible weekend. It was terrible! Full of breakdowns and relationship messes and by the end of it I was convinced that all people are selfish and mean. They are not all selfish and mean (at least not all the time), and I am actually great friends with every person in the song, but that weekend was awful.

What Car

This song is about how sometimes I want to be dead but then I remember how much my mom cares about me. My favorite part is when the harmonies come in at the end-- the words “don’t dare,” feel so percussive.

The Most The End

This is the reprise to the first track of the album. I wrote it a few months after the first part, while riding my bike around Provo, Utah (where I lived while working on the album). There’s a fun little clipping noise that comes in just before the music starts, which Stephen Cope and I added as a nod to the horror genre.