Emmy the Great’s debut album First Love is re-issued on vinyl to mark its tenth anniversary. The album is accompanied by new liner notes by Emmy and is it's first time on Vinyl.
It was an era of Myspace and indie-bands with strict haircuts. A handful of scratchy demos in home-made packaging began appearing around London venues, on tube seats and in between pages in second-hand bookstores. These were the first recordings by Emmy the Great, born Emma-Lee Moss. Emerging as part of the early-2000’s London singer-songwriter boom, she soon established herself as an original voice, her songs made of long, lyric-heavy stories wrapped around acoustic guitars barely played in tune.
First Love, recorded in Lancashire in the late spring of 2008 and released the following February, came to soundtrack an innocent age of early Internet. A break-up album, it channeled a young woman’s heartache through fictional vignettes, set against pastoral scenes - an imagined English landscape, green and hopeful that Moss describes as ‘the England of my dreams’. The first single, We Almost Had a Baby, told the story of a lingering connection between ex-lovers, backed by sha-lala girl-group vocals. Meanwhile, title track First Love was a homage to Leonard Cohen named for a Samuel Beckett novella - the ultimate expression of her penchant for literary allusions and the dropped names of musical heroes.
Spreading slowly through word of mouth, it eventually ranked number 7 on the New York Times Albums of the Year in 2009, earning cult status with audiences around the world. It was self-produced and self-released, setting the tone for Moss’ career, in which she has continued to defy both convention and expectation. She continues to release albums, while also working as a journalist, composer, and radio presenter.