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a prog rock blues band, I'm sure you'll know of them. They live around the corner and sometimes
we say oh, do you want to jump on with us and they play guitar and keyboard? I'm very open and I
also work with a lot of other people as a singer.

BiTS: How did the blues find you, Emma?

EW: [Laughing] Oh, Ian, gosh. I wonder if we mean emotionally, metaphorically, musically,

literally, all of those?

BiTS: All of the above, as they say.

EW: Do you know what, if I had to pin it down, it would be the ‘Aretha Now’ record and also

followed up by ‘Aretha Sings the Blues’. Two Aretha albums. I was really heavily into Motown,
Stax, early Atlantic soul recordings, Fox and people like that. All the great soul and blues singers
and Aretha, her more commercial tracks didn't really grab me. I was in my mid-teens, so ‘Think’
and ‘Say a Little Prayer’ and ‘Natural Woman’, great songs but they sort of still felt semi-light. It
was only when I got the albums that I heard
her more bluesy songs that were a bit more
raw, for instance, ‘Today I Sing the Blues’,

which is one of the ones I cover. [Singing]
Without a word of warning, it hit me that
there was a style of music that was more
deep, more guttural, more earthy, more sad
and I think that's when I started to hear the

blues.

BiTS: You don't need to have the blues in
order to sing the blues, in my opinion?

EW: Well, that's true yes, but I have to say,
as I've got older and life's thrown things at

me, you do. It's a funny thing, Ian, it's not like
you go on stage and think about your ex-
boyfriend and think [singing] my man's left
me. You're not thinking about that, it's a
subconscious thing. It has to get into your
fibre. You have to be on the stage, and you

have to be looking at the audience and you
have to think I'm going to give them it. I like
to think of it as all the groovy poets, the
Kerouac's and people like that, they talk about
stream of consciousness. I believe that. I believe that when you're performing, you have to tap into
this kind of, if you're over conscious of what you're saying, Ian, it becomes cheesy. If you're not
Dallas, Texas, Night skyline.
conscious enough, it's not believable, so you have to find that middle spot.

BiTS: I see what you're saying. I think that's absolutely right. Do you ever get lost in the song?

EW: Yes [laughing], you do, but you've got to be careful because it's very interesting because I do
get lost in a song and I go for notes and it's a fascinating thing because you're lost in the emotion,

but there's a small part of you, there's a small part of me still that's trying to be technical.

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