by Daniel Colussi | Scout Niblett’s music is a breath of fresh air. It’s too primal and grunged-out to be called airy, but listening to the raw, jagged sounds of her albums over the years has consistently freshened my palate. Sometimes you just want to kick out the jams, and for over ten years Emma Louise Niblett’s music has explored vulnerability, exorcism and knuckle-dragging-riffing as a means of pure expression, using plenty of fuzz and distortion in the process. It’s not music that’s going to be tapped to sell iPods or Volkswagens (though Stella McCartney found use for one song), but ten years, six albums, and many singles later Niblett has carved her own niche somewhere along the outer borders of indie rock. Her newest album, It’s Up To Emma, does not disappoint. I reached Niblett as she vacationed in Norway . This is what she told me…

First of all, tell me about how the cover image of It’s Up To Emma came about. Was that a spontaneous cover or does it tie in with the content of the album? Well, the cover wasn’t intended to be a cover. It was just a photograph that got taken in a photo booth. But when I looked at it and was starting to work on the record already I thought, Oh that looks like it could be the cover! It just seemed to fit in with the songs on the album.

Is it fair to say that this is kind of a breakup album? Or is that reductive? Yeah, I think that’s pretty accurate. The songs kind of write themselves really, to be honest. I don’t really ever sit down and try to write songs about particular things in my head, I just kind of let out what’s been going on in my life. And I was going through a break up and though I wanted there to be songs about other things on the album there just wasn’t anything else coming out. Every song that I’d written in the last two years was about that situation. Kind of…yeah, it’s just what happened.

Tell me about writing songs. It’s interesting if you say that a song just comes out of you and your not directing it about a specific thing. How does a song happen for you? Well it’s not very…it doesn’t happen on a regular basis, it happens quite sporadically. And it usually happens when some sort of emotional build up is going on and I kind of just take myself away and give myself space to just play the guitar or the drums or whatever. And then through the backdrop of the music comes vocal melody, and then after playing them sometimes straight off the bat lyrics will literally pop out. And then there’s a level in which I just keep doing that until a song actually emerges. And then there’s obviously some editing going on, like Oh that doesn’t sound that great, what could I say instead? That goes on afterwards, but the actual atmosphere and the intention of the lyrics, their psychology, is always coming out without me doing much.

One song that I really enjoyed was the last track on the album, What Can I Do? It’s a great album closer, it’s an epic, beautiful song. Tell me about that song in particular. That song was one of the ones that – well, the recording process in general was completely different than any other record I’ve done because it took a long time. It took seven months from going in the studio to actually me finishing the mixes at home. It took months to do. And that song was one that every time I went into the studio I would add more to it. And it was usually vocal harmonies or…I actually did the guitar solo at home, because we started out with someone else trying to do the solo and I didn’t really feel, I wasn’t happy with it. So I decided to do some E-bow solos in the studio and then I went home and replicated the same notes just at home and put them in the mix afterwards. That song was one of the ones that evolved every time I went in. So it ended up becoming quite epic sounding which it wouldn’t have if we’d just done it in a few takes in the studio. And originally it had no drums on it…the drums were added really last minute.

That’s really cool. I was going to inquire about the guitar solo in that song because it has this cool Robert Fripp/Brian Eno quality to it that’s really pleasing. The strings are nice too. Did it feel like an album closer to you while you were working on it? I think when it was finished it, because of how it evolved. And it homed into this kind of epic sound that I thought, this has to be the last song.

I watched your video for Gun the other day and I enjoyed it more than I usually enjoy music videos. It really grabbed my attention. Well, the concept was that I knew I wanted to be Snow White (laughs) and I knew that I wanted to dress up as Snow White and I wanted the video to be really light hearted. I wanted there to be a huge contrast between the visual element and the song. Basically, I tried to do something that was really set up where people were handing me the different parts of the costume to put on, but it was so set-up that I just couldn’t…I’m not really an actor at all and I’m actually quite self conscious when I know that people are watching, although I’m not like that on stage at all. So that idea didn’t work. So the next day I decided to completely scrap that idea and get my friend to film me as Snow White in downtown Portland. I just wanted to see me in an environment where people were going to react to me randomly. So I didn’t feel like I was being filmed, it felt more that what was being filmed was other people watching me. So that was the idea, and luckily, accidentally, completely randomly, there was a Cinco De Mayo festival going on that day with all the fairground rides and kids going completely crazy because they were seeing Snow White. All of this stuff was completely random and thank God we went on that day and were able to capture all that. It was a lucky accident.

OK. Last question: what is Spooka music? (Laughs) Well me and a guy I was playing with back on the first record, we found music genres kind of hilarious. We were looking up what emo went, I mean we knew what it meant, but we were fascinated that there was this uniform for certain bands that play a certain kind of music. So we wanted to make up a genre and act say that that’s the genre that we are (laughs). So we came up with this word spooka, but it really didn’t catch on!

Scout Niblett with PG Six and Jody Glenham at The Cobalt, Friday Aug 23rd.

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Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine and a contributing writer to Ion Magazine. A veteran employee of Zulu Records and tuneage aficionado, he DJs on an infrequent basis (about four times a year) and is a musician around town who plays in several ensembles.