Avalon Emerson: ‘The biggest thing you have to hone is your taste and attention’
A modern luminary in dance music, Avalon Emerson shows the breadth of her talent on sparkling dream pop record ‘Written into Changes’.
Avalon Emerson has already lived plenty of lives. A decade ago, she was a web developer coding in San Francisco. In the time since, she’s conquered the Berlin club scene en route to becoming a headlining DJ in rooms around the world, before settling back down in the quiet countryside of upstate New York with her wife.
Somewhere, amid the move from Germany to the United States and a packed calendar of DJ bookings, Emerson has settled down to record and release her second album under her indie rock project Avalon Emerson & the Charm.
When she joins me to discuss Written into Changes, she’s at a friend’s house. Her dog, a Havanese-poodle mix named Elmo, jumps on her lap.1
“I’ve been a DJ for like 10 years professionally, but writing lyrics I don’t have a ton of experience with,” she says early into our conversation. “I am a huge nerd about music, and I have always been obsessively listening to and collecting stuff, and I feel like I have a pretty specific taste, but it’s also another thing to create it.”
Although Emerson is no stranger to making and releasing music, making music with the Charm forced her to confront a new sensation: vulnerability. And while the first record pushed Emerson outside of her comfort zone — singing across songs, putting her lyrics out to the world — the new record amplifies it, telling stories of rocky relationships, candid confessions of love, and wider existential concerns about aging, relocation and finding balance.
“The thing that I found this time around that has led me down a good path is, whenever I’m writing something and feel a twinge of vulnerability, and maybe a hair of embarrassment, that’s the direction I should follow,” she says.
“Dance music can also be very emotional and a conduit for connection, of course, but it’s also very functional and utilitarian. You spend so much time on the kick and the bass, which needs to fucking work together so they hit the speaker and so it does the thing for the dancefloor.
“With this, you can’t look at a YouTube video of how to put an Ableton plug-in chain together to create a resonant song. It has to come from more abstract ways of learning how to do it.”
I ask Emerson about how she bridges her many worlds and whether she’s felt any connection to her life as a coder or DJ in making an album under the Charm moniker. She begins to answer before pausing, pursing her lips and restarting.
“I’m interested in that code comment,” she mulls. “Honestly, I think [making music] is like learning how to code in 2010 or whenever, because it’s very different now, but you have to relearn how to think in a very block-by-block way of structuring and flowing logic. You’re communicating with a computer to give it code so it knows what to do.”
Emerson rattles off the ways it informs her music-adjacent work: building a live rig for touring, the skill of troubleshooting, ways of cataloguing music when digging for DJ sets. Then she considers the way all that translates into her music.
“When I’m making music, I try to apply my taste to a song. I think the biggest thing that you have to hone is your taste and attention, noticing tiny details, and what these do to you as a listener,” she says. “I apply my self-teaching in the same way that I learned how to make dance music, or I learned how to write Ruby code or learned how to write lyrics.”
“It does all feel the same, and it’s the same kind of hubris that’s within me that thinks I can do it. I think anybody can do it. If you love it, then you will try again and again. Even if you make a crappy dance track, or a broken app, or a shitty poem. It’s like, ‘Well, you have to make a shitty one before you make a good one’.”
I’m not sure when Emerson wrote her shitty songs, but she definitely got them out the way before Written into Changes. The album works off a strong foundation of Emerson’s airy vocals and a luscious, cloud production, spearheaded by Bullion (with a timely cameo from Rostam Batmanglij), but it separates itself from the pack with a slate of unexpected, delightful subversions.
There are too many of those, as Emerson would put it, tiny details to list. I love the jangly bursts of guitar that echo across ‘Jupiter and Mars’, the way the brass instruments poke through the smog on ‘Wooden Star’ or just about everything in the wonderfully off-kilter ‘How Dare This Beer’.
The first Charm record, written during the pandemic, felt like an impressive flex from a world-class DJ: proof that she could make music that was the polemic opposite to her day job and still make it great, Written into Changes feels like an incongruous extension of her life in dance music. That lineage is most felt in the propulsive funk that lines most of the album: from the teaspoon of post-punk in ‘Country Mouse’. the glitchy bass of ‘God Damn (Finito)’ or the bounce of lead single ‘Eden’.2
“I do have a very strong affinity for dance music, and I have heard a lot of dance music, so it comes out naturally. But I think when I’m making stuff for the club, it’s much more utilitarian,” Emerson says. “It’s a lot quicker, for sure. Sometimes I’ll be flying into a DJ gig, and I’ll have an idea for an edit and I make it on the plane, and then I finish it in the hotel room, and then I play the first version in the DJ booth. And then I’ll be like, ‘Okay, well, I need to change this and this’, and it’s like this kind of live iterative process.”
Written into Changes is a different kind of beast: Emerson says she worked on it for over a year, working with a much wider range of collaborators than any of her dance projects. She glows when talking about her producers Bullion (“so many beautiful and refined soft skills”), Rostam (“so lovely and pleasant and so funny”), and gushes with excitement over getting to tour Avalon Emerson & the Charm with a band that includes long-time friend Keivon Mehdi Hobeheidar (who plays bass and cello across the record) and her wife Hunter Lombard, an established artist in her own right, who plays guitar.
“I feel good about touring. I feel better than the first time around, for sure. At the beginning of the first one, there was so much that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. Now I feel like I at least understand the corners of scare3 and what the things that can go wrong are, so I feel a bit more confident,” Emerson says.
“The best part is just being able to do all this with people that I love. I think that’s gonna be great. And I’m excited to play all the new songs. The first time we only had 10 songs plus a cover, so it was trying to get all the juice out of that one album’s worth of songs. I’m glad we have more latitude this time around.”
As a rule of thumb, I avoid asking artists about what’s next. At best, it’s a bit lazy and at worst it’s a disrespectful use of precious interview time that overlooks the substantive work of art they’ve shown up to talk about. But I find myself breaking that rule with Emerson, being the polymath she is, to ask whether she could envision herself producing an album for someone else in the future.
Emerson parries the question to praise Bullion, who is so good at the art of ‘shepherding the track’ that it has shown her how hard it is to manage. But then that glint comes back — she called it hubris earlier in the interview, I see it more kindly — and she leaves me with the thought that one day someone else will put out another very, very good album produced by Avalon Emerson.
“Maybe I could do it,” she smiles. “But it seems like something I would have to work up to.”
‘Written Into Changes’ is out now via Dead Oceans. Buy or stream it here.
You’ve followed in this footnote because you’re more interested in seeing a photo of Elmo the dog than you are reading my article, right? Of course you are, you’re so right for that. Here you go.
‘Eden’ has incredible synth blast that hits on the final word of each line on the chorus, which might be my favourite ‘tiny detail’ on the album. So I asked Avalon about it: “I love that part, too. There was a lot of discussion about making the big orchestra hit really blast through in the mix and master. It’s a Roland JV-1080, I believe. It’s like a 90’s rack mount synthesiser that’s kind of cheap but very cool, it’s like a rompler … I was like, ‘We’ve got to get that in there’.”
'Corners of scare' is one of the best turns of phrase I've ever heard used so casually, and I'll 100% be using it when I start my hardcore band.