Artist Spotlight: Jemima Coulter
Influence comes from the times in life that are, in the moment, the most earth shattering. For Jemima Coulter, this inspiration derived from a tempestuous trip to Marseille, where they followed a love interest, only to discover that the overwhelming urge of passion was not quite reciprocated. Love reaches a juncture of no return, at which point, Jemima fucked it all off and made their devastatingly demiurgic debut album, Grace After A Party.
Making up one half of Hailaker, the hazy duo that emerged in the alternative folk space in the late ’10’s, this is Coulter’s first solo venture, and it certainly doesn’t disappoint. Delving through styles like folk, rock, electronica and indie, Jemima’s gentle tone fades in and out of the ambient and ambitious soundscapes, softly guiding the sonics to their giving and often unexpected conclusions. It’s delicately anthemic, musically intricate and deeply emotive - a startlingly confident debut from an exquisitely talented musician.
I connected with Jemima to discuss stepping out as a solo artist, the elusive constraints of industry success, and their bold and beautiful new album.
Who and what influences you?
I don’t listen to huge amounts of music, I’m not really a music-head in the way that some people love finding new artists and researching weird genres.. my friends are always showing me the coolest, weirdest, most beautiful stuff but at the moment I’m going through a musical dry patch and I’m not listening to a huge amount. Artists I’ve enjoyed the most and found the most inspiring in the last year have been John Martyn and Sea Oleena. My creative intake mostly comes from other stuff if I’m honest - conversations, reading, films, dreams.
What are your musical origins?
My family is very musical, I have 3 other siblings and we played together lots when we were growing up. There was lots of value given to musicality and singing in our house. I started playing around with music software on my friends computer when I was 12 - went down that rabbit hole and I’m still down there.
If you weren’t a musician, what would you do?
I probably would’ve ended up going into banking lol.. that was a real choice on the cards at one point. But now, if I gave music up, I’d probably dive into furniture making properly and then paint in my spare time, do a masters in something.. sounds quite nice actually..
The Hailaker project is stunning, how did that come about?
I made an EP when I was 18 that Ed heard from a mutual friend of ours, he was very much in a co-writing period of his career and invited me to do some writing with him. So one weekend in August 2016 I drove to his house 3 hours away… Well, I think I broke down halfway, and had to be rescued by his dad. We hadn’t met before we started writing together, it was like ‘Hi how are you? Let’s write a song’ . And then we wrote 3 of the songs that were on the first Hailaker album that day. So it started like that and just hasn’t stopped. Hailaker was one of those things where you’re yanked from your current existence into a new situation and it’s a bit weird and out of your comfort zone, but you sense somehow it’s super important for your future… even if right now you’re sitting in a small bald man’s house arguing about drum sounds.
You’ve only recently launched your career as a solo artist. How does it feel now being wholly in the spotlight as an individual?
Well, I’ve always made music as a solo artist, even while Hailaker was going on. There were things that I was really pushing for that we couldn’t do because Ed didn’t have time - playing shows, spending loads of time on the visuals, the things outside making music, and I just ended up getting frustrated because I wanted to spend loads of time on these things, but was running into a wall with it. It’s the product of 7 years of work really, with all things I’ve always wanted to do on top: make loads of visual art with music to create a world that goes alongside an album. It feels good.
How has your collaborative experience set you up to succeed?
Ed and I have really opposite styles of writing and producing so I had loads to learn from him and he had loads to learn from me. He’s a lot neater than I am for example, and I’ve really learned the importance of song structure from him, I literally hadn’t even thought about it before we started working together. But yeah, it’s exposure to new ideas. I think if you’re a songwriter, producer, make it all yourself kind of person, you can so easily get trapped into bad habits, it’s really helpful to work with someone else who does it a different way and be guided into new processes.
Do you feel like the industry boxes you into a genre? Do you think genre is still relevant?
The music industry has to balance a lot of risk in investing in new artists and what genre provides is a way of applying strategies, whether that’s creative or financial, where a label, publisher, PR etc. can say ‘we know what works for someone like this’. In that way I think genre (or maybe being identified as ‘similar to’ other artists) in the industry is inescapable because it’s about managing risk, and so you are squeezed into a box to minimise your risk to a label as a financial investor. Sorry, maybe this is a cold way of viewing the industry. I think interestingly though, there’s a lot of artists at the moment who are making really genre-varied music, like having albums that cross whole swathes of styles. But their image is very boxable, very strong and especially as a new artist I think there’s pressure to be similar to something, if not musically, then definitely image-wise if you want to be successful. This feels super relevant thinking about Spotify and Spotify playlisting - being able to be grouped into a popular playlist can go a long way. I’m not sure if genre is as clear cut as maybe it used to be, everyones referencing everything else sonically now but there’s certainly still tangible groupings- label rosters, scenes, radio station playlists, and those are all definitely rooted in genre.
The album is a gorgeous piece of work! What was the creative process?
I had hundreds of song snippets that I’d been working on over the last 5 years and I’de been keeping an eye on them, tracking in my mind what I thought were really special ideas. So I basically went through my phone and listened through hours of voice memos to find the bits that I’d remembered as being good. And then hear what the ideas were around them and if there was anything I’d missed. I built the songs from those really. I always write melodies and do a bit of initial production before writing lyrics, and I found myself with a backlog of lyrics to write so that was a bit of a hurdle. I ended up drawing from anything and everything around me and so each song became a serious exercise in me delving into feelings and combining it with the imagery that was on my mind at the time. I really wanted to capture a moment, a sense of an atmosphere that was connected by all the things I was reading about and thinking about and pin it all down in words, a tantalising task!
What are you trying to convey with the project?
I wanted to create a world that felt like a dream or a story where you enter into a snapshot and things happen for a reason and time is endless and weird things happen that appear connected. Like magical realism but in music. I think the last few years in the world have felt to me like everything is getting harsher, more conservative, more pragmatic, more business-minded, more grey, more cut-throat. It’s not the world I was taught about when I was younger, that was a place where anything was possible and everyone was there to help you, there were things unknown and an element of adventure to everything. It’s also not the world that people write about in fiction really, there’s always a purpose and connectedness to things and reading it allows you to escape a little bit to a place where something amazing could happen at any moment. I think that’s what I was trying to do, find determinism and mysticism in the world when it feels like everything is so money oriented and monotonous.
It’s a really vibrant project, both in the lyrical ideas that you portray and the soundscapes that you’ve devised. Was that an intentional aim, and if so, why?
Yeah! I challenged myself to make everything stand alone - lyrics captivating enough to read, melodies good enough to listen to without production, and production dynamic enough to listen to without a vocal. So I think there’s an element of everything being distilled to contain enough muchness to exist on it’s own and then when it’s put together there’s a lot going on. It’s how I like to listen to music - think of it like a house that you’re walking round where there’s hundreds of tiny details you miss the first look: something buzzes past your ear, something moves in the corner, the colour of the walls change slowly. That’s how I think about the recording of the music, very visual and almost architectural. Nightmare to mix though, Ali did a great job.
What’s to come from you?
A UK tour with Wyldest in late September and a UK tour with Novo Amor in April 2023. Other shows here and there. There’s a Hailaker album and other songs I’ve contributed to coming out this year/next year. I’m working on the next solo thing.. but who knows when that’ll surface.