- Words Josephine Amstad
Swedish artist Emma Elisabeth battles with the ghosts of her past, captivating with her new single “Tray Full of Ash”.
Growing up surrounded by instruments and music, after graduating from the prestigious Kulturama in Stockholm, Swedish singer Emma Elisabeth decided to embrace the lifestyle of a travelling musician. Trailing around London, Paris, the US and even Japan, she eventually settled in Berlin – at least for now, anyway.
Finding inspiration wherever she settles, whether from her own life, the people around her, the mundane or the magic, Emma is constantly writing and evolving her craft. Through her carefully crafted indie songs, she captures the carefree spirit of the seventies and infusing it with a brooding northern-hemisphere sense of melancholy.
She reveals the first single from her LP called “Tray Full of Ash” accompanied by an equally striking music video. The song is about “emotional time warps and ghosts”, Emma explains. “The lyrics deal with holding on to the past for too long, so much that it prevents living in the present. How people from the past turn into “ghosts” in my own head and heart because I can’t let go, turning into nothing but dust and old memories. And this feeling of both wanting to let go and hold on while trying to break out of an emotional time warp. It’s haunting and at the same time hopeful, and somehow both embraces the melancholy and shines a light on the way out of it.”