It takes place somewhere in the heart of a business mall in Los Angeles, where there’s a few parked cars and a green flood light giving the whole lot a sickly green hue. Emily Jane White sits on the steps of a dark stairwell, outside of Pehrspace, so our interview takes on this friendly, formless nature. She mentions her role as an interpreter of unpopular stories, where the world knocks down the meek and it seems like all is lost.
And it you might feel that Emily Jane White is being negative with her bleak, Gothic influenced bluesy/rock. But she sees it a different way. “It’s not just making something dark. It’s always been looking at things and shining a light on them,” White says with a sense of perplexity, as though this has always been an obvious in her music. “When I tell people about my writing, I look at it in the Jungian philosophy,” she says, “and that’s what interests me: the morbidity of life, but never the horror.”
White recalls growing up in the isolated town of Fort Bragg in Northern California. So, it’s no surprise that her music has a doleful tinge, with her breathy voice echoing throughout the sparse landscape. A voice that conjures images of noir films, with cig smoke billowing into the lens.
So, is that voice the byproduct of smokes and spirits?
“I definitely drink and smoke from time to time. But my voice doesn’t come from that. It’s been the exact opposite for a while, because I’ve been on tour for the past several years,” she explains, “I’m very reclusive when I’m home and I don’t really party that much.”
Later that night at the business mall, inside a room that could pass for an office space, she picks up her guitar and is accompanied by Henry Nagle who has been playing pedal steel and electric guitar on this tour. The two of them stand in the middle of the room, dimly lit by lamp that has lost its shade, the crowd of people sitting cross legged on the floor.
In Paris, White is big with the French people, her voice a firm representation of what women who haunt old mansions probably sound like. Her fans speak French, thus giving her English drawl all the more resonance to their ears.
The follow up to 2007’s “Dark Undercoat,” White’s newest album, “Victorian America,” has set its sights on the political stage, nods to the flooding of New Orleans, the way Americans have changed for the worse and just about reveals the author’s fascination with an older America.
The arrangements, the string work, the room that’s left for the guitar and White to breathe, is not so much a leap from what she did in 2007, but her new material takes on a literary narrative, as opposed to a loud, long list of complaints, she's stepped into the spotlight and still caters to the poetic realm, but now she seems to have narrowed her spot light.
“I explored a lot of political and emotional ideas. What gender studies, contemporary feminism and what are really deep and sad and stuff like that, but it’s also a movement,” she adds at the end of a string-of-consciousness list for her inspirations.
All that she asks is you humor her outlook as we all reap our whilrwind.
“I definitely drink and smoke from time to time. But my voice doesn’t come from that. It’s been the exact opposite for a while, because I’ve been on tour for the past several years,” she explains, “I’m very reclusive when I’m home and I don’t really party that much.”
