Emmy The Great shares new song "Mary"

"Mary" arrives after last month's lead single "Dandelions/Liminal", and is named after a fortune teller in Hong Kong.

Emmy The Great explains, ""Mary" is named for a Hong Kong fortune teller I met in Kowloon, who gave me the wrong fortune when I mixed up my Cantonese words. It was written in 2017, when I wandered Hong Kong’s neon-lit streets looking to explore my relationship with the city of my birth, unaware that this was the last moment of calm before the city changed beyond recognition with the protests that began in the summer of 2019. Maybe that’s why the song is about a fortune teller who can’t tell the future. The song was later recorded in Brooklyn, with Jo Lampert, my friend and an astonishing singer who played the lead in David Byrne’s Joan of Arc, as Mary."

Emma-Lee Moss, aka Emmy The Great, writes of her new album, "The album was recorded over two weeks in February 2018 in the Creamery in Greenpoint. It’s the fastest record I’ve ever made, which is ironic because its release was later delayed to accommodate a year’s maternity leave. I produced it with Bea Artola and Dani Markham, who was in my US band and also played drums. Jeffrey Fettig, our guitarist, also engineered, and the rest of the players were mostly friends as well as musical collaborators. These sessions became a kind of goodbye, and I left New York for Hong Kong permanently a few weeks after they finished."

She adds, "I’ll never know why the city called me back, but I know what it gave me. In return, I want to give it this album. That Mid-Autumn, nobody could have predicted what was to come, neither the atomisation that began with the anti-Extradition Law protests in June 2019, nor the struggle for democracy that continues now, through the Covid-19 pandemic. To witness your birth city in its greatest moment of need is a powerful, humbling event, and I know I watched Hong Kong’s destiny shift into something turbulent and uncertain. I’m glad I recorded what I felt there, during a precious, peaceful time, when life was so good that all I had to do was trust the moon. May it be just one small piece of witness among many, and may the voices of Hong Kong never stop speaking, and asking to be heard."

April / 月音 will follow on from Emmy The Great's 2016 LP Second Love.