I’m a firm believer that the music of Emma Tricca, also a wonderful friendly soul, deserves to reach more ears. She clearly made an impression on Simon Raymonde, who has just signed Tricca to the highly respected label he runs – Bella Union, through whom she will release her new album Aspirin Sun, due out on 7th April – pre-order now.
Simon once told us in an interview: “…Of course, you can’t sign everybody you think is amazing; it’s just physically not possible. The way I do it now? I wouldn’t sign anybody I wouldn’t want to have round for dinner and anybody that my dog would bark at!”
To celebrate the occasion, Tricca has shared a colourful and captivating video for the first single, “King Blixa”, directed by Francesco Cabras. Commenting on the track, Tricca says: “Since childhood I have always been fascinated by folk stories. From Italo Calvino to Homer to British and French Troubadour ballads. The magical element of turning the impossible into the possible is what inspired this poem/song – like in the line, I would ask the sailors to break their solitude.”
As mentioned below, Tricca’s vocals uniquely inhabit each of her songs, and King Blixa is a finely crafted example of what sets her apart from the crowd.
Don’t miss her London headline show just after the album’s release, performing at The Grace in Highbury & Islington on Wednesday, 19th April, with the full US band. Tickets are available here.
I’ve enjoyed following Emma Tricca’s musical footprints since we first reviewed her 2014 album Relic, on which Thomas Blake concludes: But it is Tricca’s singing that consistently shines through. Ranging from an otherworldly warble, not unlike contemporary American singer Jessica Pratt to a thoroughly urban London twang, her voice inhabits each song like a piece of antique furniture in a room. Her individual approach gives Relic a unique, bittersweet mood. This is a distinctive and quietly beautiful album.
In 2018, her album St Peter made an equally enthralling impression: About two minutes and ten seconds into Emma Tricca’s new album, you realise that you are in the company of someone a bit more special than your average folky singer with an acoustic guitar. The bottom drops out of the opening track, Winter, My Dear, and what remains – a short, wordless vocal refrain – leaves you with a tingling sense of openness, a feeling of something suddenly discovering its freedom, like the first flight of a fledgling. It’s a magic that exists not just in the moments of epiphany (and this album has a few of those) but in the very bones of the sound. St. Peter is full of shimmering, finely crafted layers. Tricca has employed an enviable array of talented collaborators to help achieve this unique effect, but it is her own approach to music-making that really marks this out as a serious piece of work.
Talking about her fourth album, Tricca says, “It felt like I was driving through tunnels”. As with any transformation, it is this sense of movement that underpins Aspirin Sun and its bold new form, ebbing and flowing, continually unfurling. The tunnels led the Italian-born, London-based singer-songwriter towards something expansive and far-reaching: an entirely new and experimental collection of songs. But they also drew her closer to her late father and her memories of him driving them both in his small white Fiat, darting through the Alps and whizzing through darkened passageways, where shafts of light flickered ahead of them in the distance.
Light and shade, past and future, love and loss. “I was in uncharted territory trying to understand what was happening to me,” Tricca says. In the winter of 2018, only months after her mystical third album St. Peter was released, her father died, submerging her in a subaqueous world of grief. “I think that the loss really informed the tunes a lot,” she muses. And the tunes quickly emerged. Tricca decided to spend a few months in New York during the summer of 2019 – and started recording Aspirin Sun in her long-time collaborator Steve Shelley’sstudio.
“With this record, it was very much accepting that one does what they do,” Tricca says philosophically. “Don’t try to be anyone else, you can’t fake what you’re not.” She wanted to venture outside her comfort zone, and the result is a kaleidoscopic exploration of what it means to break free from past constraints. Ask Tricca how Aspirin Sun feels to her, and she’ll describe it as “a weird germination” of disparate influences. A “Wim-Wenders-meets-Fellini-8 ½” kind of set-up…
This new psychedelic horizon could only be fully brought to life by a band she calls her family. The same musicians she collaborated with on her 2018 outing, St. Peter: Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, Dream Syndicate guitarist Jason Victor, and bass player Pete Galub. All three musicians brought something unique to the record. “Pete comes from more of a traditional songwriting background, Steve and Jason are more experimental, and then there’s me, very much in-between. For me, that was magic,” she says. As an only child, Tricca has always been used to solitude. But when the world shut down, her windows flung open. “On the one hand, I’m a loner; on the other, I get so much excitement when I work with other people. If you grew up in a broken family, like I did, when it comes to work and friendship I’m always looking for the family I never had. That’s why, with these guys, I feel complete.”
After her initial stint in Shelley’s studio, Tricca flew back to London only to return to JFK airport in January 2020: a homecoming that she calls “fate”, considering what was set to follow. A few months later, the world would irreparably change. “Hell broke loose with Covid,” she says – which only added to the record’s core theme: its sense of alienation. Back in London, she liaised with her New York band over the summer of 2020, working on overdubs and exchanging ideas, “finding a new way with a renewed confidence.”
Reading Frank O’Hara by day and listening to Can, Neu! and Brian Jonestown Massacre by night, Tricca ventured off the beaten path, extending beyond the softer Greenwich Village sound of her 2009 debut Minor White, keen to expand upon the classical Italian melodies that she’d grown up listening to as a young girl: Morricone, Puccini and Rossini. She carries these strong melodies in her blood, just like the rhythms of the beat poets. “That’s my natural state,” she concludes.
Darkness and danger are always there, Tricca muses. But just like those darting beams of light she remembers from her childhood, racing through the Alps with her father, hope is never far from view.
Tricca has also announced news of a London headline show just after the album’s release, performing at The Grace in Highbury & Islington on Wednesday, 19th April (The show will be with the full US band). Tickets are available here.