Today, 19th April 2024, award-winning Australian singer/songwriter and composer Emily Barker releases her new single ‘With Small We Start’. The track is the latest to be taken from her upcoming album ‘Fragile as Humans’, due for release on May 3rd through Everyone Sang/Kartel Music Group. The song is the album opener, and sees Barker contemplate connection, and the power and beauty in keeping life small. The thoughtful lyrics are supported by her gentle vocals.
Barker comments, “I’d been spending time with my dad in Australia, who loves to drink red wine in the evenings and sit in his leather armchair reading crime thrillers. I can’t remember if his bookmark had a photo of the northern lights on it or if there was one on the cover of the National Geographic magazine sitting on the coffee table, or if I made that up entirely but can picture either of those as truth. I remember thinking how I’d quite like to see the northern lights one day and then how Dad, by contrast, is so content with where he is, what he’s doing, with the bonsai plants he tends to daily, with the vegetables he’s growing, and with getting a decent crema on his coffee in the morning. I realised how much wisdom and beauty there is in that way of life, how contentment is about attitude. There’s so much power in keeping life small – connection on a local level, keeping plants watered, family and friendships loved.”
This song follows the release of ‘The Quiet Ways’ which ruminates on the realisation of how rich quiet time can be and how much there is to learn from it, and the single ‘Feathered Thing’; a gentle track written while Barker navigated cumulative grief following a miscarriage. With oscillating piano and distant drums, ‘Feathered Thing’ gradually transforms into an instrumental dervish of vibrant strings and cymbal crashes. Throughout, Barker’s vocals float and hover like a slipstreaming feather. “It’s basically about grieving an idea or imagined future,” she clarified of the song, the central image inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.’
Her first new release since 2020’s critically acclaimed ‘A Dark Murmuration of Words’, which Uncut called “a kind of Australian equivalent of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake” while NPR Music raved as “One of the most literate and probing folk albums of the year,” ‘Fragile as Humans’ finds Barker turning her lyrical gaze inwards. The expansive themes heard on the previous album are replaced by an empathetic concern for matters more personal, familial, and closer to home. Along with producer Luke Potashnick, Barker set up camp for the recording sessions at The Wool Hall in Beckington, UK, a gorgeous 16th century stone building that was first converted into a studio by Tears For Fears in the early ‘80s, then later owned by Van Morrison (Joni Mitchell, The Cure, and The Smiths have also recorded there).
‘Fragile As Humans’ is a deep dive into the human condition, an unflinching self-examination of grief, pain, loneliness and loss, but at the same time sparkling with hope and optimism. It was written and recorded as Barker’s time living in the UK was coming to a close before moving back to Australia. Inspired by some of the contemporary songwriters she admires (Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey, Feist, to name a few), the filmic style of ‘Fragile as Humans’ is centred around the idea of experimentation and pushing dynamic boundaries: it can be intimate at some points then atmospheric at others, an exercise in restraint in order to create tension.
“Making this record was a beautiful way to wrap up my 21 years of living in the UK before heading home to Western Australia.” As a teenager, Barker left Western Australia, with an acoustic guitar and a backpack, first arriving in the UK in the summer of 2000. She has previously written entire albums about longing for home, but ‘Fragile as Humans’ was inspired and written in both hemispheres: during a writing residency in Stroud, while people-watching at London’s Kings Cross station, and upon returning to Western Australia following the state’s strict, pandemic-related border closures.
“If I could choose one word for people to hold in their minds as they listen to this album,” Barker muses, “that word would be: compassion.”
Track Listing:
01) With Small We Start
02) Call it a Day
03) Wild to be Sharing This Moment
04) Loneliness
05) The Quiet Ways
06) Feathered Thing
07) Fragile as Humans
08) Sad Songs
09) Life is for an Hour
10) Acisoma
