Emma Tricca - A Journey Through the Eyes of the Exploring Folksinger

Ahead of the release of her fourth solo album, we spoke with Emma Tricca, the Italian folksinger based in London, about how the record came together, the influences running through it, and how the way music is lived is changing between Italy and the UK. The album continues the partnership begun on “St. Peter” with guitarist Jason Victor (Dream Syndicate, Steve Wynn & The Miracle 3), bassist Pete Galub and drummer Steve Shelley (formerly of Sonic Youth), the band with whom the artist will soon be touring again, including a stop in Italy a week after the album's release.

Hi Emma, when OndaRock last spoke with you it was just after the release of “St. Peter” in 2018, and now we find you with your fourth work, “Aspirin Sun”, which is also your first release for Bella Union. Quite a leap. Was it something that happened suddenly, or were talks already underway?

It happened very suddenly. We were already working on the record, it was practically ready, and about a year and a half ago Simon Raymonde wrote to me. Obviously, when I got that email, you can imagine… There are a lot of people who pretend to be someone else, and that was my first thought, because I never would have imagined Bella Union coming to look for me. Really, I'm not saying this out of false modesty, it's a miracle, just like this whole album has been. In every interview I've done, I've called it a "miracle record." Simon wrote to me one evening in January, I think it was the first week of the month, and told me he was sorry he'd never heard me before. He asked if I'd like to collaborate with his band, Lost Horizons, and over that weekend, in between chats, I also told him I was working on this record. Between the lines, he made me understand he would have released it even without hearing it. It's the kind of thing that maybe happened back in the Sixties, but my whole career has been a bit like that. I've never gone out looking for people on purpose, but there have been situations where they and I ended up in the same room, a matter of synergies.

Sometimes coincidences matter a lot, and these days maybe even more so. I don't know what your relationship with social media is like, but even through that world it can happen that an artist like Simon…

Exactly, and that's definitely the case with Simon, because we have a lot of people in common. I'm terrible with social media, I just don't know how to use it. Aside from posting nonsense, sometimes I disappear, sometimes I put up a couple of things, but mostly I feel like an idiot using it. It's not my medium. Sometimes it's fun, I discover great things related to what interests me too. But I'm just not very good at it.

As for the making of the album, it started quite early, around 2019, right?

Yes, around August 2019.

It must have been a bit of a difficult process too, what with everything that happened in between, the lockdowns because of the pandemic. How did it unfold?

I wouldn't say difficult, because like I said before, it's a "miracle record": in the first week of December 2019 I was staying at a friend's place in France, having come back a few months earlier from New York with an idea for an album. Since I had plenty of time before going on tour with Robyn Hitchcock, he suggested I go back to New York to work on it for at least a month in January. So that's what I did, I booked the ticket right then and there. I arrived in New York on New Year's Eve, and by the following week we'd already started recording; I came back to Italy at the end of January with those 10/12 songs recorded.

So there was already a solid sketch, essentially an album.

An album that clearly still needed defining and singing, but there was an album, meaning the band was there. And afterwards I went on tour with Robyn Hitchcock, came back to England around the 10th, and gradually the news started coming in from Italy and everything shut down. The difficult part was a collective one, because of all the delays with the vinyl, the world came to a stop, and that was the biggest struggle. But if you're asking whether it was hard to make this thing work, no. We already had a body of work in place, all I had to do was go into a studio here in London, whenever it was possible, and sing and arrange the vocal parts. So there was a further development caused by the pandemic: the sound would probably have been a bit leaner, or different. I don't know. But that's also part of the essence of this record, the essence of the rhythm section, Pete's style.

Speaking of everything shutting down, there in England there was also the Brexit factor. What changed in terms of living and making music? I imagine the scenario has "evolved" even further…

Or devolved, if anything. There are big difficulties, and not just for British musicians, for whom it's hard to go to Europe. England has always been an important gateway when it comes to the big names in newspapers and the press. You come through here for "worldwide" promotion, then in America there's other stuff like Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, The L.A. Times, but the likes of Mojo, Uncut, the hard core of the music press, is British. You do promotion here and then you work a lot more in Europe, partly because of how much bigger the territory is. That's fallen away, it's been partly cut off. With Covid on top of it, a lot of venues closed, so it's an enormous struggle now, and I found that to be true in Italy too. It wasn't easy for us to put together dates because of the lack of venues. If only it could still be called a jungle out there, it's not anymore, it's a fight. So it's hard for British musicians to come to Italy. I also had friends who had promotional tours booked here in England at the start of the pandemic, when the Brexit situation hadn't been fully settled yet. They were never able to come back. Costs have become prohibitive, and there's probably also a bit of "canny opportunism" from venues, always tending to be afraid, driving fees down, maybe also so they don't have to raise ticket prices. In short, it's a huge mess, but I think you know this very well already.

Yes, unfortunately, I've seen it with other artists too: some just couldn't come, also because of costs, because what they had to invest for Italian dates was greater than the actual earnings, so they kept dates elsewhere instead of here. Costs are probably different, and these countries invest differently. There would be a lot to change from that point of view.

I can absolutely confirm that.

Going back to the record, "Aspirin Sun" carries forward the psychedelic influences you'd already introduced with "St. Peter", and that's palpable right from its cover art, very different from your previous ones, as well as from the videos for "King Blixa" and "Christadora House". Within a body of work, how important is the visual side for you, both in terms of the "packaging" itself and in terms of what you want to communicate to the listener?

It's all very important, it's all part of the work. In the video for the latest single, which came out a few days ago ("Autumn's Fiery Tongue"), we brought back some elements from "St. Peter", like a bow on the package. But everything has changed considerably, it's work that goes hand in hand. You push the sound, you push the visual side, because everything has to represent what the record contains. It's not a gimmick to lure people in, it has to be coherent with the music it's presenting.

So there was a kind of choral development, and I ask because, beyond musical influences of this kind, I've also noticed a lot of cinema in your work. You mentioned Wim Wenders meeting 8½ by Fellini, as well as figures like Jodorowsky and Buñuel. The theme of the journey comes up in that context, as it does with the beat poets. So your relationship with cinema and poetry really stands out.

Yes, absolutely, it all goes into the same pot, one thing can't exist without the other. Then again, I also come from a strong Italian tradition: the cinema of the Fifties and Sixties, we can mention the usual Pasolini and Gregoretti, moving on to De Sica, Fellini, and crossing the Alps, Godard. As for poetry, the crepuscolari, and there's one major influence for me, which was Ungaretti. All of this has always been part of my history, my sensibility, but then again, even when we talk about the "usual suspects" of Sixties Greenwich Village, what do we take away from that? Besides having the substance, the music, the songs, we also have some incredibly powerful images. The famous cover of Bob Dylan's "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" with Suze Rotolo, not to mention the Ramones in front of the historic CBGB. Images of Newport, I don't think there's anyone more psychedelic than Bob Dylan when he went electric. Images are still part of this whole story, as an influence.

On that note, an album, a book and a film that you consider personally important.

There's definitely "The Hissing Of Summer Lawns" by Joni Mitchell, because it contains multitudes—this record has everything, from folk to jazz to progressive, a whole world. As for the book, there are actually two: "Il compagno" by Cesare Pavese and "Se questo è un uomo" by Primo Levi, because they too deal with complex human conditions that come through in every part of them. And then we said a film—today I'd say "Dont Look Back". We're talking about a documentary (on Dylan), and it ties directly into what we were just discussing.

Let's talk about the genesis of a track that caught my attention: "Rubens' House". There's something labyrinthine about it, and speaking of influences, I found a lot of Dream Syndicate in it—I imagine Jason had a bigger hand in it, especially in the track's coda. How did this song come about?

This song is an impression I carried with me after visiting Rubens' house. As I wandered through those rooms, I got this image of the labyrinth, of the richness, of women dressed in silk playing with animals, beautiful peacocks, falcons, and so on. The song came out of a visit to Rubens' house while I was on tour with Nick Mason, and these impressions were so strong that I carried them with me for a long time. And Jason is just Jason. That's what he does, so of course he brings his Dream Syndicate influences, what he feels, what he is, he brings it to me, but it's Jason. He did the same thing on the last track of "St. Peter". As for my collaboration with him, Steve and Pete, they have free rein, carte blanche.

They've effectively become your family, this bond has grown really tight over time.

Yes, there's a strong friendship there.

The theme of loss stands out on the record, but there's also a lot of hope.

Exactly, I was thinking about that just this morning, because everyone tends to focus on and keep repeating: "But you're so focused on loss, on loss...", when actually it's a record about rebirth!

You can really feel that, you can sense it strongly. There's also a nod to a season like autumn, when the leaves fall and the landscape "dies" only to renew itself, so there's a rebirth, and there are also some bold colors.

Autumn is my favorite season, the one where I feel most at ease. I love autumn. Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" carries a powerful meaning, and there's the awakening of autumn after the intoxication. There's also this condition, where you wake up after having changed and having had this shock, because losses really are physical shocks. Traumas that sometimes we don't know how they'll unfold, so you wake up and try to understand, while you're still in this somewhat confused state, which is actually a psychedelic state.

That's something I can understand, having been through it myself.

Then again, this is one of those things that, as they say, you'll never know what it's like until it actually happens to you.

So the way you connect the journey to the theme of memory and the fantastical also develops from there, in a way, an attempt to escape that state. In the setting of the "Cristadora House" video there are faraway lands—it's a journey into the imaginary, but also into the real.

Yes, and the director Francesco Cabras, who is extraordinary, conceived this video precisely as a journey of the soul. It was filmed on three continents, and all these elements were put together with extreme sensitivity to the subject, which, as we said before, touches all of us. It's a journey of the soul, of what happens up to the rebirth, when you remove the veil.

And in fact I was really struck by the closing on that image. The idea of the mariachi band in "Space And Time" is interesting too.

Yes, it's not exactly a mariachi band, it's something similar. There and in "King Blixa" we find two moments of light and rebirth within the record, I wanted to indicate the rise back to the surface. I wanted that point of light, even if you end up submerged again afterwards.

In "King Blixa" I noticed these intermittent images, bodies of water, natural landscapes alternating with movements as if you were trying to get out of the water. And some similar scenes are also in "Cristadora House", where the desert stands out.

Yes, in "Christadora House" the world's most iconic deserts are shown, and the incredible thing is also the animation of a painting, if you noticed it, which was painted by a great-uncle of mine. This painting was another little miracle: I knew that my father's uncle had had a fair amount of success as a painter in New York, but I hadn't realized just how highly regarded he was as an independent artist. So much so that a New York art dealer told me he had a painting at the Smithsonian in Washington. The crown jewel of modern art museums. I looked into this painting and when I saw it I was floored, because it was a painting of a building in the East Village that I basically walked past every day. This happened right in the summer I was in NY in 2019 - I went back to where I was staying with friends in Brooklyn, sat down, and this song came out all at once. So it was a bit of a retracing of steps. I then showed this painting to a photographer friend of mine, who took the shot for the back cover of "St. Peter", and she pointed out to me that I was more or less in the same position, meaning the painting had been made from the same angle the photo was shot from.

That's a very peculiar coincidence.

Yes, people can make of coincidences like that whatever they want, but it's an important one. I would have liked to reference the painting somehow in the video, but I had to ask permission from whoever it belonged to, especially since music would be added to it. So I wrote to the Smithsonian and they replied within two hours - they were incredibly kind and gave me their consent to use it.

Is there an emerging artist on the London scene you're following that you'd like to point our readers toward?

I wouldn't say he's exactly emerging, since he's been around for quite a while, but someone who's definitely made an extraordinary record recently is Duke Garwood ("Rogues Gospel", released in November 2022), and I recommend him to everyone without reservation.

ALot of influences were woven into the record, dream-pop in general, alternative, alongside the classic folk foundation. "Autumn's Fiery Tongue" is almost a fairly driving alt-country track. There's a very American landscape to it.

I wouldn't know if it's exactly alt-country: you make things, and then it's up to posterity to decide, isn't it? To me it feels almost tribal, with an incredibly strong, driving rhythm. But yes, it might well translate into something along those lines. Behind this record, as behind everything I do, there's never one precise idea guiding it. There are references, because maybe I'm listening to one record more than another, it could be jazz or classical music too, not necessarily singer-songwriter stuff, and then it all comes out and gets thrown into the pot, the moment you start talking about sounds and records with the producers. I think that when you talk about sounds, it's mostly a matter that comes up during post-production and mixing.

In mid-April, besides the date at The Grace in London, you'll be back in Italy with stops in Bologna, Udine and Rome. When you're away, what do you miss, and what do you most enjoy finding again when you get back to Italy?

Pizza.

I had little doubt that food would come up here.

Actually, scratch that, it's Roman supplì - there's a place in Trastevere where I always take my friends from abroad to eat these supplì, which are out of this world. Another thing: every time I go back, I visit near my great-grandparents' house in Abruzzo for the baccalà of Catignano (near Pescara). There's a restaurant that makes salt cod every way imaginable, my uncle always takes me there. I've just opened a door into my family for a second. There's something else I have to mention too - not so much home cooking, even though that bit about Catignano is absolutely true, but what I really do systematically whenever I go to Rome is let myself be enveloped by the art of that city. I always go see Caravaggio's works at San Luigi dei Francesi, I take a walk around Monti, around the Colosseum. Even though I know every cobblestone in Rome, every time I go back I discover it anew. Rome is a wild thing, and no offense to our Florentine cousins - with all the love I have for Florence - but another city I love enormously is Bologna. I love its cosmopolitan spirit, the porticoes, the places where you bring your own bread, mortadella and wine and all that. I know I keep coming back to this, but it has its own international character - actually, those places remind me a lot of the Rome of the 1950s, when these things used to happen. Lucio Dalla meeting up with other artists, going out to dinner at trattorias, scenes straight out of Fellini. Bologna represents the Italy that has stayed culturally true to itself, with a very strong identity, with that kind of spirit and intellectual conviviality, something that in other cities seems to me to have been somewhat lost.

Thank you so much for your time, Emma, and good luck with the record and with everything else!

Thank you all so much!

(04/02/2023)

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