The Understudy Emerges
Singer/Songwriter Emmi talks her new Shakespeare concept album "Players"
When Australian singer/songwriter Emmi finished school at age 16, she found herself in the strange situation of being put off by drama schools because she was too young.
Rather than wait, Emmi began to study independently, and at 17, she was cast as Chava in the Australia-New Zealand tour of Topol’s Fiddler on the Roof. For most of three years she traveled with the show—“I sort of grew up with the cast”—while also appearing in the off seasons on the long-running Australian soap Home and Away and serving as dance captain in The Pajama Game.
Here’s her scenes in Home and Away, in which she serves up some stone cold nastiness as a mean girl ridiculing two leads for starting a help line. (In the first scene she’s the crank caller on the phone.)
While in real life Emmi is anything but a Tina Fey confection, one thing about her work on Home would prove characteristic of her career: She can draw a character of great specificity and realism with incredible brevity. She’s onscreen here for barely a minute, yet it feels like she’s been on the show forever.
After moving to London to act, including as the understudy Narrator in the national tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Emmi started writing songs, and fell so in love with the work she left the theater behind to pursue it.
In 2015, Taylor Swift included Emmi’s second released song, “Sleep On It,” on a playlist of “New Songs that Will Make Your Life More Awesome (I Promise). In an interview Emmi said, “I thought it was a hoax. She misspelt my name in the note and I actually thought: do I change my name at this point?”
A year later, she made news again after she received an email while on holiday from the film director David Yates. Without explaining why, he wondered whether she might compose a song based on some suggested lyrics.
Months later, she was asked to perform the song in motion capture, still without any explanation as to what this was for. It turned out to be a song sung during the Harry Potter spin-off series Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
And it sizzles.
In recent years, Emmi has been working on Players, a passion project of songs from the point of view of different characters from Shakespeare. She’s begun to release some tracks slowly, including the extraordinary first song “The Prologue.”
Recently we got together at a coffee shop in the Village to talk the song and the show, and how singing in the persona of others has liberated her to give voice to herself.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
I found the “The Prologue” incredibly visual. I first listened to it on a plane to London and immediately started sketching moments from it.
That’s the biggest compliment that you can pay me.
Really? Why?
The idea of “music that you can see” is my favorite genre. My first entry into music was classical music. I was a weird six-year-old: My parents were listening to Pink Floyd and Deep Purple and all this kind of stuff and I’m like, Tchaikovsky!, with my little Sony Walkman, imagining stories to these classical pieces.
For me music was always escape. If you can see it, then I feel like it’s doing its job.
Would you say that “The Prologue,” as compared to other songs you’ve written, was written specifically for the theater?
It was written as a prologue for a project that I’ve been working on for…six years, I think?, called Players. It’s a collection of songs, each inspired by a different character from the plays of William Shakespeare.
The premise of the project was to use these characters as bounce-off points for pop songs, essentially. It started as just female characters and then it became all the characters, and now, 70-something songs in…
70? 7-0?
At least. If I’m being ruthless I’d cut it down to 34 that I can really stand by. We play a game, Name a Play and a Character, and I’ll play the song. It’s like a jukebox.
Wow.
I didn’t really know what it was when I was making it, but it just started taking on this very visual, dramatic element. And I’m a theater girl at heart, so of course it had 200 voices on it and key changes and strings and orchestrations. It became this larger-than-life thing that was so much bigger than I was in life.
The reason it’s called Players is Shakespeare has that quote, “Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It’s a tale told by idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That “hour on the stage”, if that’s the symbol of a life, then this album is an hour and it’s the experience of being a human. And every song within that hour is a different aspect of it—it’s ambition, it’s revenge, it’s falling in love, it’s falling in love with the wrong person, it’s unrequited love, it’s jealousy, it’s sex, it’s everything you can think of.
So the ice cream seller idea, which I love, is a vision of yourself?
A “walking shadow” in Shakespearean language is in an understudy. A shadow in the theater would have been an understudy who shadows behind, copying the main actor.
When he says life is like a walking shadow, he’s saying life is like the understudy got thrown on. You don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re there to make the show as best you can without truly knowing why you’re there, or maybe not being good enough to handle it. Which is how I feel and how I think most people feel: We have that impostor syndrome in life. No one asked to be here, but we are anyway. So there’s this sort of acceptance that happens in growing up of, Well, I am here. And life’s super short. So am I backstage, am I an extra, am I the villain, am I the kooky best friend? And will I always be there? Or am I going to try on what it feels like to be maybe all of those characters?
My process with this album has been trying on being the Lady Macbeth instead of the Juliet. And when I did, I realized, Oh, I feel more honest, not because I’m going out and killing people, but because I have an ambitious monster that I’ve never taken out for a walk and given 3 minutes to go crazy.
And then you take out the next person, he’s pathetic and romantic, and yeah, that’s also me. We are all these characters. So it’s like I’m experiencing what it’s like to be kings and queens and paupers and villains and spies and soldiers, and all these things. And I want you to, too, because I think we all kind of stick to one role that we’re given. At some point, someone says a word over us and we’re that for the rest of our lives. She’s shy. Okay.
At the end of “The Prologue” you talk about bringing your shadows into the light, into life. Do you see each of the characters in Players as shadow parts of you?
I think so. I think there’s a lot of songs that I wouldn’t have written just as Emmi, because I wouldn’t have wanted my parents to hear them. *laughs*
But then the fact of the matter was I didn’t write for anyone unless I related to them in some way. With Lady Macbeth it was, I will do everything that’s in my power to make this happen, I have this vision of what my life could be and I’m going to do it. And I get that. I don’t get what she does afterwards, but I get that bit. And I get that annoyance of waiting on men to do stuff. It’s like, Yeah, me, too. And suddenly I let this little entitled nasty minx out and I thought, Wow. It felt like I really needed to do that.
Emmi describes “Crown” as her “ambitious monster” Lady Macbeth piece.
I feel like we all need a piece of that, we all need to let our tiger out a little bit and give it a piece of meat and give it a run, and then put back in its cage, so it’s not angry. Because if we don’t let it out for years and then something triggers you and you just let it out, Oh man, you don’t know what that thing is going to do.
There’s an Oscar Wilde quote, “Man is least honest when he speaks in the first person, but give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” Writing these songs, I gave myself permission to try out a lot of things that I’d never allowed myself to be. They taught me that I really can say anything. They gave me the permission to say things that may not be for convenient to the world. They gave me bravery.
Does “The Prologue” come from the point of view of a character, as well?
When I finished with all these characters, I was thinking, Have I really shown myself, revealed myself as I am? Have I ever spoken to the listener as Emmi?
I thought it was important to start the show [with that]. I say “show” loosely—it could be a gig, it could be a concert, it could be a show in terms of theatrical experience. I always imagined I’d be selling ice cream, and then just walk up on stage and start singing this as myself.
I looked through prologues, actually, to see if I could base it on one, and it’s loosely, loosely, loosely based on the Henry V prologue “O for a muse of fire”, except I’m more like, O if only I had fire in myself. Because the idea of doing a show is terrifying to me.
So this was an opportunity for me to say, I’m as scared as you, hi! It’s the only time that I speak as myself. And I wrote it fairly late. I already knew what the body of work sounded like.
Photo by Erica Johnston
It sounds like “The Prologue” ends up being the fruit of your work on Players.
I felt like Okay, I’ve had this experience, and I’ve got this muscle now where I get to be honest, and I’m going to try it out. *clears throat* Here we go.
And it’s terrifying. My stage fright is terrifying. But courage doesn’t exist without fear.
So much of pop culture is aspirational. It’s I’m the greatest, and I’m going to wear this make-up and have these friends, and we’re going to set up this fashion line, and you should look like this, and rah rah rah. And that’s all well and good, but is it useful? I’m scared all the time. And I’d like to believe I’m not that different from the rest of humanity.
Aspirational pop, the Cosmo of music.
As a musician there’s this message you need to lead, and they follow. What is it I could honestly lead? I’m not the kind of girl that a 17-year-old’s going to look at and want to look like. I hope that maybe she looks at me and wants to look more like herself. That’s the maximum of my influence and power there.
If there’s anything I can try out, it’s being scared and doing it anyway. I don’t want a Lady Macbeth song to be the first thing they hear from me and have them go, Well, she’s got it all together then. It becomes interesting if it comes from a little person who’s as scared as you are.
You actually start “The Prologue” with that mic tap and throat clearing, which immediately creates that sense of a real person who feels a little uncertain, maybe doesn’t know exactly what they’re doing. And at the end, you give a sort of “eh” that makes me wonder whether you even liked the song.
I almost certainly didn’t like the song, I can tell you right now. If you could see me alone, you would watch me just judging myself. *laughs*
I’ve always been terrified of having impact, which is a ridiculous thing for an artist to say, but here we are. I used to do this thing, playing at a pub or whatever when I used to gig. I would have created this atmosphere and everyone would be right with me, and there’s this beautiful moment happening, maybe there’s even people crying, and I’d go Plunk! and resolve with this chord and do this stupid little face.
Sort of undermining the moment?
Yeah. It was like, You know that thing I just spent 4 minutes creating? I’m just going to take that away and make this funny. I think it has always been a defensive mechanism. It’s like I’m so sorry if I had power over you. Have it back. I don’t want it.
What’s the fear—that you’re taking away people’s freedom? Or charming them into something they don’t really want?
Someone said to me recently, “In order to be breathtaking you have to be comfortable stealing the air.” I don’t think I was ever comfortable taking the air. It was like I like to win, but only if no one else is inconvenienced about that, and the truth of the matter is there’s no such thing, there’s no such world in which you get to have everything you wanted and everyone still likes you. So you gotta choose. If you’ve got something that could be useful to say, then you can get up there whether you’re ready or not, whether you’re stuttering and without breath and have stage fright or not. Because you only have an hour, so come on now. Life’s too short.
What would be worse is sitting there saying, Ah, I really left that stage empty for this narcissist to walk up there and take it.
They’re always ready.
They are, and they know how to take up space and they know how to be heard. I think in the face of extreme hate you gotta find a way to be extremely loving, and love by default is quiet. It says, No no, after you, I don’t want to affect the molecules in the room, so I’m going to stand back here with my back against the wall.
That’s not working for us anymore. Scared people are going to have start saying some stuff, with shaky voices.
“Why Does My Heart Hate My Guts,” a song inspired by A Midsummer Night Dream’s Helena.
Did you find your own shaky voice and mic tap at the beginning was in a sense both an embrace of your own shakiness, and a kind of act of defiance toward the industry that wants to erase any trace of that?
Can I be honest? I had just left a team when I wrote this song. This was the first song I wrote after breaking away from a team. I decided to do it on my own, because I was constantly being asked the question, Why should people follow you? And because I didn’t have a good answer for that, it was falling apart. And I feel like the song was me coming to terms with why I do this.
It was maybe a little bit of an act of defiance. You don’t think a scared person can do it? Watch this. I’m going to do it anyway.
I find that tracks with the many ways the song surprises, both narratively and structurally. It starts with the almost comical “Please turn off your phones,” but then that becomes this profound invitation not to hide from this experience.
I wanted this to be a voice in the dark, getting the listener into the right state to hear it. And if someone was just experiencing it in headphones—and ironically they would be doing that on their phones; I was aware of that joke—
That’s hilarious.
—Yeah, I was so aware of the stupidity of what I was doing. *laughs*
Wherever you were, if were you in a train or in a car or listening your laptop, I wanted you to feel like Okay, I’m in a theater now, and I’m about to experience this. It’s the same as the Prologue in Henry V: Suspend your disbelief.
Except here it’s “Stop suspending your phones and experience this.”
It really does irk me at concerts. On the one hand, be here. But on the other hand, the artist isn’t seeing faces, they’re just seeing a bunch of lights. And why? So you can experience it later? I don’t know.
I think the reason why I love theater and why I love live anything is the dialogue between the audience and the art. There’s this dialogue of being in a group of people experiencing the same moment at the same time. And how the audience reacts to the stage is affecting what’s on the stage. You’re not just sitting there watching a TV. It’s not going to just happen without you.
You go from that to talking about how you tend to hide yourself. Suddenly you’ve changed your position in the narrative to one of us.
Photo by Darren Skene
That happens a couple times. You sing, “If you want to leave, let my friends show you the door,” which feels aggressive. But then what follows is “But if you’re gonna stay let’s make a deal now to be more.” Again, there’s this sense of you and us together on a journey. The song keeps blossoming in ways you don’t expect.
As you were writing it, were you conscious of those kinds of twists or reversals?
I never know what I’m doing when I’m writing. It just falls out, and I think, I guess I needed to say that.
Musically “The Prologue” does not follow your standard pop formula, either. Each verse is its own little melody.
I’m a pop writer by trade, so the whole verse pre chorus, verse pre chorus, bridge, double chorus, ad libs over the top, Bob’s your uncle, Fanny’s your Aunty’s sister, that’s my home. But I just wanted it to be short. And I think because I knew it was going to be a prologue, I knew it was meant to be a stream of consciousness.
It turned into a much longer song than I intended to, because it turned out I had a lot to say. And I knew it had to grow to introduce the cast, and then I wanted them to all go away at the end, so there was this full arc. They’re just going to leave me on my own again.
It’s funny, though, when you’re on your own again and humming to yourself, there’s none of that initial hesitation. You almost seem unaware of us. You’re just free.
How I saw it in my head, but again, it can be however you see, is that everyone’s there and I’m feeling emboldened by being on the stage with this whole cast of characters that I’ve made up in my brain, and then they maybe disappear or the screen comes down or something happens where they’re gone, but I’m humming along as if they’re still there.
Then I realize I’m on my own with a spotlight and I’m going, Oh shit, you’re seeing me again, and I go “huh.” I’m back to myself and still uncomfortable with it. Which honestly just happened—I remember going Okay I’m done, I’ve finished my take, and “huh.”
I think as well I was feeling like, Gosh, look at that, I was just selling ice cream and we made a song. And did you see those 200 people, and the lights, and the stuff that happened? That was wild, right? And then we’re back to just me and my ice cream, and it’s like, Huh! Anything can happen! And not just for me: If that can happen in my brain in two and a half minutes, let’s see what else we can find out about ourselves. If you start speaking into a microphone, you might start singing with your whole chest. No promises, but you won’t know unless you tap it, check it’s on and start.
Whenever I make a song or recording I’m constantly bamboozled by anything that comes out of my mouth. I’m just like Wow! That’s so cool! I’m like a kid.
At one point you sing “Let’s make a deal now to be more.” Then you give a list of things we should reach to be more than, and the very first thing is “more than our dreams.” So many pop songs are about achieving your dreams.
I think I was able to make this music because I’m lucky enough to have people in my life who have heard me and said, Cool! And what if you thought bigger than that? And I’d be like Wow! *sings a melody* And what if you thought bigger than that? Wow! *sings a melody* And what if you thought bigger than that?
Our dreams are limited by what we have been shown as possible. Or you dream to the limit of what you feel you can without your heart being broken. But what if there is something in store for you that’s so much bigger, like so much bigger than you can even perceive? Sometimes people never get that question, What if you could be more than that? Go on one more step.
The idea that the impossible might be possible is how things get done. No invention has happened because someone was thinking within the realms of what’s happened before, what’s possible according to science to date. You have to be delusionally optimistic that maybe something lies just over there that’s so much better than your tiny little human brain can see.
Emmi with Chaim Topol.
When writing “The Prologue,” did you start with lyrics or music?
I had some chords that I sent to my friend and cowriter/producer Jonathan Stein. I said I know it has to start small and get big, and he sent me back some chords and I wrote to that, and then he built around that.
It started with melody and lyrics almost simultaneously from the beginning, because I knew it needed to be an announcement. I did not expect it turn into Let’s just say everything we’ve ever thought about the world and the universe in one minute.
I love that halfway through we suddenly get a fabulous gospel choirs of yous.
I’m a lonely person *laughs*. I like to have a lot of voices singing the same thing, because it makes me feel a little less alone.
It makes it feel universal to me. And it also make everyone who’s listening feel like they’re also saying those words. I wrote this in 2020. We were in a moment in time when the world was going through a global existential crisis. And there was a sort of sharpening of perspective (so we thought) of what was important. What we were all suffering from at the same time made everything feel for a second evolved somehow.
I’d walked away from a bunch of money to do this project. And I was like, I don’t know how this thing is going to happen, but I have to imagine a universe in which this scared person with no funding can create this thing. I’m going to dream that, and it’d be nicer to dream it with a lot of people.
I notice your lines in the song almost never rhyme.
Really?
Nope. What you do instead is all kinds of consonance, some internal rhyme—
I love an internal rhyme.
—and then lots of slant rhyme. You rhyme “me” with “screen”. You rhyme “pain” and “say”. At the end you’ve got “shine” and “light” and then “shine” and “life”. Even in the resolution you refuse to give us a fulfilled rhyme.
Normally I’m more pedantic about rhymes. Normally I’m the really annoying person who will spend 4 hours on line 2 of verse 3. And everyone’s like It’s fine. You can rhyme “face” with “way.” And I’m like, No!
Did you intentionally resist rhyming here?
No. You’re triggering all kinds of weird responses. I’m like, Oh my God, I could have found the perfect one. *laughs*
Like I said, this one felt like it just fell out. And so many of the things just felt right without me really questioning it. I guess this is what I really sound like when I’m not being too cerebral. I wasn’t filtering, because I really wanted to be raw. The song was just permission to speak.
I love so much that you didn’t even know about the rhyme.
I didn’t! And normally I would have gone over this thing with a fine-toothed comb.
“Night Light,” another song inspired by Lady Macbeth.
Just riffing: Rhyme gives us a way in, but it also makes us feel safe. Maybe you give us just enough rhyme for us to feel interested and comfortable, but you don’t allow us to rest there, or you invite us into the possibility of more than safety. Which is kind of what you’re doing with yourself in the song.
I wish I could take credit. Maybe when you know what you’re saying and what you’re saying is true it’ll just come out the way it needs to.
If it’s a little imperfect, that’s great. Especially now with AI, I think now more than ever that leaving evidence of our humanity in songs, in anything in art generally is going to be worth its weight in gold. Something falls off a table during a recording? Leave that in. You want to sneeze? Do you know what robots can’t do?
There’s that Japanese philosophy wabi-sabi, [which talks about] the beauty of imperfection. A wabi-sabi gallery of pots will have pots that are a little bit misshapen and cracked, and they’ll fill the cracks in with gold. The imperfection is evidence of our humanity, but it also makes us unique.
We all have our unique ways of getting it wrong. And it’s how you get life wrong that is art.
Last question: Have you done Players as a show yet? And if not, are you going to (please)?
I literally spent the day kicking myself, going It’s time, it’s time.
For this project?
Yeah.
I think I’ve taken a little while to catch up with the boldness and bravery of my music. There’s nowhere I feel safer and stronger and more emboldened to be mad than in a studio. I’m a completely different person in a studio than to real life. I think real life means slowly catching up to her.
Yeah, I think I’m meeting my music now. My music was the aspiration and now I’m where she is, and I’m willing to be seen. That is my North Star, actually doing what I said I would do in my music. Anyone can say stuff, but actually getting up there and having the shaky voice, and being like yep, this is the thing.
And selling the ice cream.
And selling the damn ice cream. I won’t even sell it, I’ll give it out for free.
By the way I don’t have to be selling ice cream. It could be albatross.
I want to be ready for it when I do it, which is why I’ve kind of sat on it. I know what it’s done for me, and I want to make it available in case it does anything good for anyone else, but I also wanted to be ready to do it properly.
I tried a show last year to test my new brave self. I sung one song with a friend in New York at Sony Music Hall and didn’t tell anyone. And it wasn’t a perfect performance, but I was buzzing for like 6 days. I felt what it was to not be perfect and to be okay with that and more interested in the effect. Me and the audience had a real dialogue, and it was just a really beautiful moment.
I thought, There it is. So this is okay. You don’t have to be the best vocalist in the world, you don’t have to say the most important thing. We could all die tomorrow, so speak how you can, when you can, because you can, right now.
Opening the set with “The Prologue”, you’re also giving yourself space to name that anxiety. It’s like you’re Evil Knievil and this is your ramp.
I think that’s the thing. Anything you’re afraid of, if you can speak it out, it loses its power. So if my big thing before I walked on stage was going to be I’m terrified, I’m not entertaining enough, or I’m not the kind of person who can hold this room, or sing well or dance well or look right, or be all the things people need me to be, if I say that, then I’m free. Anything comes after that is bonus. And it’s fun.
It’s so interesting that the path to that freer, bigger person is by embracing your vulnerability rather than burying it.
There’s some Game of Thrones quote, I think it’s Tyrion that says it, “Wear your weakness like a badge. No one can hurt you then. No can touch you.”
The bad thing about you, the different thing, the wrong thing, the thing that veers off from what society would deem convenient is probably your most beautiful thing. It’s the thing that sets you apart, makes you that cracked pot with the gold in it, makes you more expensive and exclusive. There’s no one else like you.
There’s so many people in my life where I think You have no idea how beautiful you are, how brilliant you are, how exceptional, kind and good. Just wondrous. I can see that in other people and I want to share that with them.
Thanks so much to Emmi for this in-depth conversation. You can find Emmi’s music, including tracks from Players, on Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, and elsewhere.