Bridging the Divide: EMA interview

America is tearing itself apart. The weekend before we're due to speak to Erika M. Anderson – aka EMA – white supremacists in Charlottesville, some carrying Nazi flags and swastikas, gather around a statue of Robert E Lee in Emancipation Park and clash with left-wing protestors. Battles rage, arrests are made. A car is deliberately driven into a group of peaceful activists, resulting in multiple injuries and the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer. In an already turbulent year, it’s a new low. Much like everyone else, Anderson is shocked but not entirely surprised. 

“If you had asked me a year ago if something like Charlottesville could have happened, I wouldn’t have said yes,” she tells The Skinny from her Portland home. “But I could also sense some sort of darkness.” She’s deep into preparations for the forthcoming tour in support of Exile in the Outer Ring, a record that explores that “darkness” with surgical precision. A glance at the subjects it deals with – working class alienation, Middle America poverty, rising anger at inequality and injustice – would suggest she’s a skilled fortune teller, but Anderson has always had an uncanny knack for being prescient.

2014’s The Future’s Void dealt with surveillance, online abuse, and her anxiety about being publicly female in a pre-Snowden, pre-Gamergate world, fears that have become all too real for millions. Anderson as some arch, Millennial sage is a neat narrative, but one that ultimately she rejects. “It’s not something I set out to do, I just pick out what’s interesting to me,” she says, adding that Exile in the Outer Ring's scorching, anthemic first single Aryan Nation was conceived three years ago.

For her, writing about such topics “wasn’t a conscious thing”, nor an attempt to comment on the state of the nation. “Void was a really personal record, and I built that world to place my own personal story within," she explains. "With this one, again a lot of the songs are very personal; The Outer Ring is just another world I built, and it happens to intersect really, really profoundly with what is going on in America.”

EMA’s music has always been fiercely independent, burning white-hot with rage, anguish, or indignation. She rejects linear narratives in favour of sprawling scenes, sporadically zooming in on specific details to make her point and employing a variety of narrators. Regurgitating the minutiae of raw, human emotions can take its toll, but is something she sees as necessary to her process. “I don’t really care about art [that’s not purely aesthetic]; I’m more of a truth person than a beauty person," she says. "It’s cool when art has a real world political dimension, but I don’t necessarily set out to write that; I write personal things. It’s weird to me that it never gets talked about in interviews like that, art is always placed in this wider context.”

Nor does she appreciate the 'tortured artist' label. She thinks herself to be “playful”, and gets frustrated when the jokes and mischief she casually scatters through her songs are misunderstood. “Fire Water Air LSD is funny to me. Breathalyzer is funny to me, being in the back seat of a Camry and having this really wild night in suburban America. There's humour and hooks and melody and heart, and that’s why I’m always thinking: ‘OK, I didn’t just write a didactic’. This couldn’t have just been a think piece, you know?”

Art often functions as a mirror, held up to help us see in reflection what we cannot with our own eyes, or as a catalyst for change. In the album’s accompanying press release, Anderson talks of showing people that “there’s another way – I want this record to bridge a divide.” That’s a big ask for an album we say. “That was wishful thinking,” she replies, acknowledging that “maybe I’m either too obscure or too hip for some of these ‘small town’ people.” But as a proud Midwesterner, she wants to reconcile the two forces currently pulling America in opposite directions, and is uniquely placed to understand the faults that lie on either side of the divide.

“No-one was paying attention on the left as to what was going on in Middle America, there was a big vacuum and I think people rushed in to fill that. These people’s pain has been exploited. I wanted to go there and say: ‘Look, you can hate, or you can have a resentment to the signifiers of liberal culture – which would be avocado toast and nice coffee – and scoff at that, that’s totally fine. But it doesn’t mean that you should let your values erode to the point where you are carrying a Nazi flag.’”  

These are tricky topics to navigate around, and Anderson is aware of the difficulties involved in charting a course around outrage. She had to fight hard for Aryan Nation to be included, and bristles at the binary narrative that neither side seems to want to surmount. For her, the dismissal of vast swathes of the country as “inbred” or “racist rednecks” is just as stereotypical as anything thrown at the liberal elites. “These people are suffering from extreme poverty and drug issues, why don’t they deserve compassion? Why is it OK to write them off? If people can’t see the hypocrisy in that…”

The Outer Ring, as she conceives it, is that part of the suburbs where urban blue and rural red crash against each other like waves at a headland, one being pushed out, the other being pushed in. It’s a place of decay and ruin, where the spirit of the American Dream has faded to a distant memory and broken promises rattle around abandoned strip malls. Overgrown parking lots and burnt out plots serve as a neat metaphor for the razing of a generation’s opportunities and aspirations, yet this is not an angry album. Instead, it sounds defiant, hopeful even; as close to the brink as America might be, salvation is still a possibility.

These are heavy burdens to carry in one’s art, but Anderson is no stranger to picking the scabs others feel uncomfortable even acknowledging. Her debut record dealt unflinchingly with sexuality and abuse, a white-knuckle ride that plunged the depths and left you concerned for the creator’s well-being. She talks about seeing the human story within larger narratives, and how “small details can speak multitudes”. She compares her desire to document such unsettling topics to “a person finding inner strength in the face of torment or turmoil. They find steel in their spine, to stand up and say: ‘OK!’”

But the great question mark she always leaves hanging is the ultimate outcome; what becomes of her protagonists? We ask if she’s an optimistic person by nature, but she replies that we're looking at it all wrong. “I don’t even know what that means, optimistic or pessimistic. The music I make is cathartic – I want it to leave me feeling stronger than I was before, and I don’t want to do it in a superficial way because some of these ‘power anthems’ can be infantilizing.”

We circle back to current affairs and the problems plaguing society on both sides of the Atlantic. She points out that while “I don’t write policy, I make art,” she’s also proud; of her music, her principles, and “sticking to my guns on this”. She had thought of including some “fucking good, way poppier material”, but the election put paid to that; dealing with questions skewed towards the political is a price she’s willing to pay. “Very few people, and even fewer women, are asked about their art to these depths, but I made all the modular synth solos myself, and I sculpted the sound. I’m a composer as well, and I write really honest shit.”

For an artist who often wears her nihilism as a badge of pride – not everyone would revel in songs titled I Wanna Destroy or 33 Nihilistic and Female – violence and rage is never the answer in her worlds. Instead, she preaches compassion; people are simply misguided, or corralled by forces outwith their control. We tell her this album reminds us of Gil Scott Heron’s Comment #1, and his description of the United States as the land of blood and tears instead of milk and honey. Who will survive in America? “People are making strides, but I do worry,” she says. One gets the sense that Anderson has found her redemption, and believes that America can find hers too.