Our Song of the Day comes from Emma Geiger, a contemporary singer songwriter based in Durham, North Carolina. She released her debut EP in April 2022 (Haven). Since then, her reputation has been growing, helped by performances alongside several similar contemplative artists such as Libby Rodenbough, whose Between the Blades album featured in my Top 100 Albums of 2023.
In September, she released All Your Worlds, her first single from a new collection of songs that delve deeper and more fearlessly into a constantly shifting internal world. Her latest single is Empty, also our Song of the Day, which was released last month.
The accompanying video was filmed on 16mm by Archer Boyette and co-directed with Emma. From the opening, the song has a pastoral, dreamlike feel, accentuated by Geiger’s gentle guitar and Michael Grigoni’s keening pedal steel. The video has been beautifully done, using folkloric imagery to accentuate that dreamlike feel – cradling a horned skull and the ceremonial-like cutting of a pomegranate. This fruit can symbolise power, fertility, blood and death, a duality well-matched to the lyrics. Geiger has also drawn parallels between the song and the story of the daughter Persephone, who is carried off by Hades, the god of the underworld…
“The idea for the video started with the pomegranate without knowing why, just feeling connected to it as something beautiful and strange. But it holds a lot of significance that fits with the song’s themes. It is a symbol of death, abundance, love, and is also in the myth of Persephone, who after eating the seeds of a pomegranate is doomed to spend part of the year in the underworld with Hades. The story in ‘Empty’ feels parallel to this myth; the entrapment in love despite a desire to escape; being convinced by the other to stay. There seem to be endless parallels between the world we created in the video and Perseophone’s fate; the river as a boundary between earth and the underworld; the pomegranate pulled from it as though sent from the underworld; submerging in the river as both departure from earth and rebirth. It’s interesting how these myths subconsciously shape our perception of the world.”
No I don’t want to let go
No I don’t want to leave
These latest offerings were recorded by Alli Rogers (Plains, Wye Oak, The Tallest Man on Earth) at Betty’s in Chapel Hill, NC and accompanied by Joe Westerlund (see our recently reviewed Setting album), Zack Kardon (The Dead Tongues, Indigo De Souza), Justin Morris (Sluice), Emma Kelly (Maple Glider) and Michael Grigoni (albums on Longform Editions, 12k, Other Songs).
Bandcamp: https://emma-geiger.bandcamp.com/track/empty