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American SongAuthor: Joe Hines
America was meant to be a light on the hill a place others looked to when they needed to find their own way forward.If America has ever truly been that light, it came from its music. From the people who suffered the most and somehow still found something worth singing about.From colonial taverns to protest marches in the Eastern Bloc, from gospel churches to a ghetto in Soweto, American rhythms helped people band together, speak truth, and refuse to quit. Our songs became the world's songs not because we exported them, but because people who needed hope reached out and claimed them as their own.American Song tells the stories of the artists who made the music and the people who were moved by it. One era at a time. One genre, one band, one song at a time. Music that started by campfires, in cotton fields, in churches and juke joints and moved out into the world to become something larger than any one nation could contain.This is American Song. Language: en-us Genres: Music, Music History, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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New Artist Interview - Emzae; All the Things She Taught Herself
Episode 11
Thursday, 22 October, 2026
Get in touch!Perseverant. By the time you finish listening to my interview with emzae, you’ll have a good idea about why I’ve started my introduction like this. Other words also apply. Intelligent. Interesting. Insightful. Inspiring. These words also seem uniquely appropriate for this singer-songwriter from Derby, England. emzae and I met for this interview across the span of one continent and one ocean but by the end of our conversation, I felt like we were a little bit closer. I think you’ll have the same experience.emzae is the stage name of Emma, a singer-songwriter, producer, and mixing engineer from Derby. She calls her hometown an engineering city with little creative heritage or pathway. She coined the name in a 2009 MSN Messenger chat. For years afterward she drew artwork with it splashed across the front, rehearsing a future she wasn’t sure she’d be allowed to have.The road there was not direct. Chronic illness, M.E. and OCD, arrived in her teens and took her out of school at fourteen. She finished her schooling in a hospital outpatient classroom and taught herself the rest: singing, guitar, piano, production, and mixing. You see - there it is; perseverance. In 2014 she began posting demos to SoundCloud, many of them recorded on a guitar she’d received at seventeen, purchased at Argos. One of the songs she wrote for her first acoustic project earned her first BBC “Introducing” play. Then came “Lucid Dreaming,” a trip-hop-tinged confession of how badly she wanted to make music for a living. It was the first song she felt proud enough to share with her own family. You’ll get to hear a number of her songs, interwoven through this interview.That song opened the door to All Those Things I Thought I Knew. Taking six years to complete, her debut album was released in September 2023 on her own label, Zirconia Records. She wrote it, played it, sang every layer of it, produced it, and mixed it. She then toured it, remixed it, and pressed it on vinyl with money she didn’t really have.Since the Beatles and the Stones first took American R&B home and handed it back, British pop has been talking back to American song. emzae belongs to a newer branch of that family tree: the artist who is also the engineer, the label, the publicist, and the booking agent. Perhaps I should go back and insert the word, multi-faceted, up there at the top? She has written candidly about the cost of that arrangement. She describes it as a fine line between “protective hyper-independence and simply screwing yourself over.” She has also written about walking away from the major-label dream in favor of something she could actually sustain.Today she mixes and produces for other artists through her studio, Zirconia Audio. In October 2026 she played her first full-band show, and her second album is well underway.In this conversation, recorded in August 2026, we go song by song through All Those Things I Thought I Knew. We also talk about building a career outside the system, and what it takes to keep making art when your body sets the schedule.More Ways to Enjoy American Song!Visit us on Substack. Drop us a note and share your ideas for future shows, see more of our new artist interviews. Read our blogs. It's all on Substack. Use the link!https://substack.com/@americansongJoe Hines is now live on GUTSY radio twice a month on Saturdays at 5 pm Eastern time. Great music, fascinating stories, good vibes! See the Gutsy show schedule for details.
