Music Features

Insides out

The projective folk of Mr. Sister

By MATT PARISH | December 5, 2008

SING YOUR LIFE: “I have no control over the songwriting process at all. It’s really just things that I’ve been going through strung together by melodies.”

Tom Waits once said that somewhere down the line cars replaced animals in a lot of popular music. He blamed this on that turning point when people started to identify with driving to work more than with walking or riding a horse anywhere. The everyday interaction with animals other than domestic pets has become a whimsical thing of the past. Which leaves those musicians who still write numbers with furry protagonists in a bit of a throwback situation, their songs almost instant period pieces.

Amelia Emmet, whose Mr. Sister is one of the creakiest, most chilling folk projects to pop up in Boston in ages, tried the nature scene for a while, but she bid it farewell after what amounted to a tough stint in real life this last year. "I just don't even play them out anymore because they aren't any good. Those are my Joanna Newsom songs — all about birds and foxes and things."

Emmet, 23 and newlywed, has undergone a kind of personal renaissance with her music, and a lot of that has had to do with getting her head out of the clouds. She's found herself flat in the middle of a hungry scene armed with an unearthly voice and a small notebook full of songs. We meet for coffee and tea to chat about the whole deal in the Brookline JP Licks — which, it turns out, was where she worked all through her painterly stint at MassArt.

"I was really happy being the depressive art student. I was having anxiety and panic attacks and struggling with 'self-image' issues. After graduation, having that finally taken away from you really makes you wonder what the point of it ever was, though."

Emmet began experimenting with songwriting her freshman year at school, cobbling projects together with different partners and playing out at places like the All Asia. She would find her footing in songs about her own day-to-day experiences; lately, many of these have centered on her mother's battle with cancer. "I have no control over the songwriting process at all. It's really just things that I've been going through strung together by melodies."

Sounds simple, but her writing benefits from an effective subconscious. There's a great interior editing process that holds every song to a tight pop skeleton, no matter how prickly it gets on the surface. And there are all kinds of innuendos and allusions that she'll admit she didn't even realize were there to begin with.

"I find things in songs months after I write them that are so obviously about things close to my personal life." Even the blatantly personal ones wind up sneaking in unintended images. "The song 'Swollen Arm' is completely related to my mother's cancer and dealing with losing a part of yourself, when up until this very moment I've always felt it was about my cranky uncle who has no arms."

She leads with a powerful voice that does indeed bring to mind Joanna Newsom with its fluttering, kite-like quality, though with less creepy flower-maiden squeakage. She's like a time-warped Billie Holiday channeling some old candlelit cabaret show of . . . Irish folk tunes. For the moment, she's settled into a reliable rogues' gallery of local back-up musicians who include Faces on Film's Mike Fiore and Hallelujah the Hills' Elio DeLuca and Brian Rutledge, all contributing to the hodge-podge feel of her guitars and accordions with keyboards, drums, banjos, and horns — though the real contribution seems to be more of a psychological confidence boost. "It's easy to lose track of whether anything you're writing is any good or not. Having them be so eager to work on things is very reassuring."

In the meantime, Emmet has moved from her grungy old Allston digs to Hyde Park, where she enjoys her own attic art studio and has found a brand new coffee shop for employment, some neighbors for whom she's a nanny, even a couple of new kittens. There might be some hope for those critter tunes yet.