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“Fragile as humans and made of who we love…”
The first song Emily Barker recorded for her latest record, Fragile As Humans, was its title track. To capture the “hyper-real recording” he desired, producer Luke Potashnick (The Temperance Movement, Gabrielle Aplin) surrounded Emily with microphones at his studio The Wool Hall in Beckington, UK, an impressive 16th century stone building that was first converted into a studio by Tears For Fears in the early ‘80s. She accompanied herself on Luke’s Gibson L37 archtop guitar (1938). They did about six takes, but the first was the best.
Written and recorded as her time living in the UK was coming to a close, Fragile As Humans sees Emily turning her lyrical gaze inwards. The expansive themes of her previous album, 2020’s A Dark Murmuration Of Words, are replaced by an empathetic concern for matters more personal, familial, closer to home.
“Feathered Thing,” Emily’s latest single, was written while she navigated cumulative grief following a miscarriage. “It’s basically about grieving an idea or imagined future,” she clarifies of this song, whose central image was inspired by Emily Dickinson’s short poem ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers. “Feathered Thing” commences gently, with oscillating piano and distant drums, until the arrangement gradually transforms into an instrumental dervish of vibrant strings and cymbal crashes. Throughout, Emily’s vocals float and hover like a slipstreaming feather.
“I had this idea of putting Emily out front, just diving further into what her voice could do and exploring much quieter parts of her voice,” Luke explains. “Every single line had to be faultless, otherwise the illusion and the contract between her and the listener would collapse.”
In May 2022, Dom Monks (Big Thief, Nick Cave, Laura Marling) introduced Emily to Potashnick via email. She shared some demos she’d been working on and fondly recalls, “Luke noted my harmonic choices and lyrics – two aspects I’d worked particularly hard at – and asked what sort of album I’d like to make.”
A few days later, she travelled from Stroud, Gloucestershire (the town she called home for 13 years) to meet Luke at The Wool Hall.
During pre-production, Luke took on the role of editor, placing each song under the microscope, line by line. “I’d never spent so long working on the songs with a producer before and really trusted Luke’s songwriting background as well,” Emily reflects. “The songs were made stronger – without a doubt – through him pushing me to dig a little deeper, to tweak a part, to substantiate a choice. I’m so glad I was open to it.”
Emily “did most of the edits” throughout July 2022, while touring the US with Mary Chapin Carpenter, performing and refining songs on the road. So by the following month, she had reached peak gig-fitness going into the Fragile As Humans recording sessions.
Her new musical chapter was ushered in by 2023’s filmic single “Wild To Be Sharing This Moment.” As Fragile As Humans’ calling card, this song introduced the album’s production ideas, which brought Emily’s sound more in line with some of the contemporary songwriters she admires (Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey, Phoebe Bridgers, Feist).
“We wanted to push the dynamics, so it could be intimate in some sections and really atmospheric in others,” Emily reveals, “but also to exercise restraint somehow; to create tension.”
Ahead of the Fragile As Humans songwriting sessions, Emily wrote the word ‘EXPERIMENT!’ on a postcard before pinning it to a cork board in her writing room alongside family photos, postcards of Aretha Franklin and red-tailed black cockatoos, and “a strip of paper from my niece wishing me a happy day”. This word, in all caps, served as a reminder for Emily to challenge herself creatively and actively pursue the unknown: “I wanted to favour the odd and less obvious lyric, chord progression or melody.”
The first song written for Fragile As Humans, “Acisoma” started out as an elegy to Sir David Attenborough (although he was still alive at the time), but soon metamorphosed into something completely different. “I sat at the piano and moved my fingers around trying not to think about it too much,” she recounts. “Some chords fell into a loose order, I set my voice free to roam and hit record on my iPhone. Listening back to my sketch, it certainly didn’t sound like anything I’d written before – my word [EXPERIMENT!] had infiltrated my process.”
On recording this closing track, Emily reveals, “I played an upright piano and sang into a FLEA condenser microphone – the very one Nick Cave sang into when he performed ‘Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone At Alexandra Palace.’” Luke shared this detail shortly before hitting record, which informed Emily’s vocal performance: “It lent me a mood for capturing the song that I was grateful for.”
Although Emily initially envisaged the album’s meditative, crestfallen second single “Loneliness” with full-band production, Luke’s instinct was to keep things minimal: a felted piano, a dulcimer and a trio of strings to add haunting textures. Emily acknowledges, “Luke got it right… It’s lonelier this way.”
Luke had suggested Emily perform half of the album tracks solo, accompanying herself either on guitar or piano. They recorded the solo songs first. Then Luke’s cherry-picked musicians – Tim Harries (electric and double bass/piano/string arrangements), Tom Visser (drums) and Richard Causon (keys) – joined them at The Wool Hall, tracking the remaining songs in a matter of days.
“How long has it been since I put on paper wings and flew on a whim to this fraught land?”
“Call It A Day,” the first song the band recorded, chronicles Emily’s positive experiences – friendships, music connections – from two-plus decades spent based in the UK.
“Making this record was a beautiful way to wrap up my 21 years of living in the UK before heading home to WA,” she points out.
Emily left Western Australia aged 19, with a steel-string guitar and a backpack, and first arrived in England in the summer of 2000. She has previously written entire albums about longing for home, but Fragile As Humans was inspired and written in both hemispheres: during a writing residency in Stroud, while people-watching at London’s Kings Cross station and upon returning to WA following the state’s strict, pandemic-related border closures.
The 10 songs on Fragile As Humans take us on a deep dive into the human condition, an unflinching self-examination of grief, pain, loneliness and loss, at the same time sparkling with hope and optimism.
“If I could choose one word for people to hold in their minds as they listen to my album,” Emily muses, “that word would be: compassion.”
Fragile As Humans is scheduled for release on May 3rd.