Don't Think, Just Write - Emma Davis

Emma Davis doesn’t put people in boxes so we should probably return the courtesy, and abstain from labelling when speaking of her music. Categories like ‘Female Singer Songwriter’ for example, while accurate, are singularly unhelpful in describing her style; her clear, sweet voice, her sure instinct for a story, and the way it’s all clothed with deft picking, folksy hooks and gently precise turns of phrase.

Meeting for a leisurely breakfast of avocado on toast ahead of the release of her self-titled debut album, Davis seems like the sort of person who may not always feel the need to offer an opinion – but will deliver it with unerring aim when provoked. “I don’t think of myself as a singer, [but] as a guitarist who sings,” the Sydney-based artist tells me, with trace remnants of a London accent still clinging to her speech.  “I feel like a lot of people use guitar as a way of accompanying singing, so it’s just this thing that’s there for the sake of it. For me, the songs get their character from the guitar.”

Davis began writing songs at a tender age under the influence of the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel albums slipped her way by her classical guitar teacher. A stint as the “gimmick” lead guitarist in an otherwise all-male, Chili Peppers-idolising high-school rock band allowed her to deal with the “terror of hearing the sound of one’s own voice in a microphone,” before she decided to forgo the Oxbridge future of her peers to pursue music at Boston’s Berklee College of Music – and finally followed her family to Australia.

In between studying Italian (“you might not know this, but to major in something you don’t actually have to be very good at it”), learning to talk Aussie and schlepping in hospitality, songs began to be written. “I always start with the music,” she explains. “I always try to think as little as possible when I do that. If I sit down to write a song, I won’t write a song. If I sit down to play my guitar and am sitting there and not thinking, something will come. Because I have such a non-methodical way of working, writing a song might take a long time…”

As might recording an album. Davis spent the last year working sporadically with Sydney troubadour Brian Campeau in his homemade Newtown studio, placing older songs that were weighing down her pockets alongside newer material written over the last few months. “I think we worked well together, because we both had a similar idea of what should happen,” she says of the production partnership. “Both of us kind of felt like the songs were quite delicate. We tried to add to it really slowly so that we weren’t piling things on for the sake of it. [Campeau] inspires me because he doesn’t give a shit – he wants to do what he wants to do.”

And what does Emma Davis want to do? “If I try to write a song that’s going to relate to everyone, then it’s going to sound like a load of wank, and I’ll start saying things that I don’t really think. [I want my songs to] sound like that’s just how it was, like someone didn’t even write it, it was just there,” she continues. “That’s what I’m trying to do, and that’s why I try not to think when I write.”


First published in The Brag, Iss. 385, September 25th 2010