"A Very Natural Part Of Me": Emily Brown Releases Album 'A Fish Of Earth'

Indie musician and poet Emily Brown has released new album A Fish Of Earth following up on 2018’s Bee Eater.

According to the artist, the album is "a love letter to the romantic sublime, honoring all that is wild, unmolded, resisting outside influence". There is a stream-of-consciousness approach to the lyrics and a strong theme of "living in partnership".

Brown is actually the daughter of several generations of Mormon pioneers and comments on her background in the context of her music:

“Mormonism has this running thread of controlling appetite, taming the hungry self. That self is called the ‘natural’ self– the natural man or the natural woman. A female church leader once made a joke that if someone made you feel like a “Natural Woman” (like the Carole King song), you ought to run! Anyway, I grew up with this very powerful inner censor, always wanting to be correct and believing that what came ‘naturally’ to me wasn’t necessarily right. The desire to make art became sort of a struggle when I judged it against what the church expected of me-- self-denial, motherhood and wifehood.

But I had a grandma who really honored that very hungry, very artistic part of me. She taught me to play the piano and introduced me to all kinds of art, and because of her, I felt allowed to explore these really natural parts of myself. Because of her, I’d come across art or literature or music and I think “Oh, I can do that” and I’m suddenly painting all the flowers in her house, or writing my first poem in fourth grade, or realizing my chord theory workbook is giving me the tools to make songs. Today it’s that very natural part of me, that curious and exploratory self, who is still trying to make poetry and songs and sort of scratching at the door of these huge, romantic ideas.”

The origin of this particular album relates to  phone recordings Brown shared with Utah-based producer-arrangers Bly Wallentine (Choir Boy) and Stuart Wheeler. Wallentine and Wheeler suggested an unorthodox approach to Brown’s phone recordings, highlighting the unfinished nature of the song sketches. Wallentine and Wheeler began sending arrangements from Provo back to Brown while she attended grad school in the Bay Area until the team converged in January 2019 to track the album.