Emma Swift – The Resurrection Game
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Emma Swift has shared a video for “The Resurrection Game,” the deeply personal title track from her eagerly awaited new album
“This is a song about love and loss, about how there’s no escaping grief, it comes for us all, about how the more we love, the more we have to lose,” says Emma Swift. “I wrote it after attending an experiential therapy retreat in Northern California called the Hoffman Process. I went to Hoffman because I’d been feeling stuck, and my friend Sarah recommended it to me. It’s a bit of a hippy thing to do, but I’m a bit of a hippy at heart.
“I’m not sure if this kind of retreat is for everyone, but it did help me unearth some complicated feelings, particularly around the way I was brought up, and the inherited beliefs and patterns I was carrying around unconsciously. Naturally, these feelings started to become songs…
“In Calistoga
Where the redwoods grow
I’ve come to
To excavate your bones…
“Redwood trees are towering beauties, ancient and resilient. They are the tallest trees on earth, and can live for thousands of years. The Scottish naturalist, John Muir described them as the cathedrals of nature. I like that. One of the reasons they grow so tall is because they’re able to move and bend with the wind. I learned a lot just by being near them. Mostly about my own flickering life, how small it is in comparison.”
Swift’s first full-length collection of all original material and eagerly anticipated follow-up to 2020’s Blonde On The Tracks – which earned worldwide praise for the Sydney, Australia-born, Nashville-based artist’s inspired reimagining of eight classic Bob Dylan songs through her own unique musical perspective – The Resurrection Game arrives everywhere on Friday, September 12 via her own Tiny Ghost Records. A wide variety of formats are available, including digital, CD, premium D2 black vinyl, cassette, limited-edition lavender vinyl, and limited edition blue swirl vinyl. All vinyl editions were pressed at Denver, CO’s Paramount Pressing and feature deluxe packaging with a gatefold sleeve and rice paper inner bag.
The Resurrection Game was further heralded earlier this week by the premiere of the poignant “Beautiful Ruins,” accompanied by an official lyric visual streaming now on YouTube.
Among the album’s many other highlights are such recently released singles as the rhapsodic “No Happy Endings” and the languorously romantic opening track,
“Nothing and Forever,” the latter joined by an official music video shot on 16mm Kodak film in Malibu, CA by musician and filmmaker Paige Stark.
Shifting gracefully between intimate confession, philosophical musing, and elegiac storytelling, The Resurrection Game sees Emma Swift fusing timeless singer-songwriter touchstones to her own extraordinary experiences with an exquisitely melancholic song cycle born of a personal crisis which left her shattered and forced to pick up the pieces of her inner life. Strewn with keenly incisive wit and heartbreaking accuracy, songs like “How To Be Small” bridge the gap between traditional folk songcraft and self-revelatory confessional poetry, the exactitude of her devastatingly candid admissions lifted aloft by the subtle strength of her deep-blue vocals and an evocative breadth of gorgeously baroque musical flourishes.
“I am a big believer in the redemptive power of art,” Emma Swift says. “Though many of these songs come from a an immensely difficult time in my life, what I’m trying to do here is to alchemize the experience. To make the brutal become beautiful.”
The seeds of The Resurrection Game were sown on the heels of a seven-week “nervous breakdown” that saw Swift sectioned in her native Australia. Over a year of recovery followed, a “very fragile” period in which she grappled with what had happened through therapy, medication, and eventually, her art. Working with producer Jordan Lehning (Kacey Musgraves, Rodney Crowell, Caitlin Rose) at Chale Abbey, a residential studio built within a stone barn dating back to the 16th century located on the downs at the southern tip of England’s Isle of Wight, as well as Lehning’s The Duck in East Nashville, Swift assembled a cadre of Nashville’s finest, most in-demand players, including pedal steel master Spencer Cullum (Steelism, Miranda Lambert, Angel Olsen), guitarist Juan Solorzano (Devon Gilfillian, Sheryl Crow), bassist Eli Beaird (Merle Haggard & Willie Nelson, James Bay, Luke Bryan), and drummer Dom Billet (Yola, Phosphorescent), with Lehning handling keyboards and other instruments.
Together Swift and her collaborators conjured an unabashedly melodramatic, “deliberately lush” musical milieu brimming with imagination and communal energy, Lehning’s ornate arrangements creating an atmosphere so intense and cinematic that Swift’s tragic tales of catastrophic psychological collapse ultimately prove buoyant and exhilarating. Despite the myriad unpleasantness of her experience, Swift tells her story with raw clarity and the power of contemplative hindsight, her remarkably self-assured vocals capturing her undeniable anguish but also, within such songs as “No Happy Endings” and “Going Where The Lonely Go,” romantic joy thanks to the understanding and sustenance provided by her husband, legendary British singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock.
Grounded firmly in enduring musical traditions yet utterly contemporary in viewpoint and execution, The Resurrection Game immediately confirms Emma Swift as a singularly gifted singer and songwriter of immense skill and spirit. Swift trusts to her core that the act of creating something so passionately personal, of giving in completely to her life-altering heartache and despair, is the truest path towards greater connection with her art and the world outside.
“I believe that there is a space for songs about real pain,” Swift says. “In this moment in time, we live in a world where we’re encouraged to anesthetize what ails us by any means possible. But this record is more about spending time with your sadness, of leaning into that sorrow and facing it head on.
“Hard times are a part of the seasons of any person’s life. You don’t have to have an acute mental health crisis to understand this. Everyone experiences grief, pain, tremendous suffering, at one time or another. I wouldn’t want to live through that particular season again, but I feel duty-bound to honor it. And so I have.”
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