Emily Wells : Symphony 6: Fare Thee Well & The Requiem Mix

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Vivaldi Meets Hip-Hop.

I stumbled upon Emily Wells as the opening act for Joseph Arthur at Tribeca's new music venue City Winery. She took the stage seeming like some brainy, violin toting grad-student-in-black and then proceeded to completely blow me away with her voice, her beats, her originality and her quiet moxie.

Wells' music falls in the vein of highly inventive artists like Sufjan Stevens and Andrew Bird who are classically trained and then turn classicalism on its' sorry ass-- without ever abandoning it. Managing to dip in and out of folk, classical, hip hop, and rap, it was her "symphonies" that had me diggin' around for a pen and pad to start taking notes. (That, and her cover of Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy".) Who was this girl?

Wells started playing the violin at age 4, and by the time she was 18, was being courted by Epic Records as a "Norah Jones with street cred". She turned them down and has continued to develop her career as an independent artist. You go girl!

She is known for looping her own music LIVE, which means that you will never hear the exact same show twice and she feeds off of the audience's energy as she experiments with sounds, beats and instruments. It's impressive. (BTW, Andrew Bird used to do this too, before he got all big and famous!)

Emily was part of 2008's pretty fabulous all chick Hotel Cafe Tour with now notables Ingrid Michaelson, Thao Nguyen, Rachel Yamagata and others.

Check out both 2008's Symphonies album as well as new tracks on her 2009 EP Dirty.






Emily Wells on MySpace
Emily Wells on FaceBook

by Emily Wells from The Symphonies: Dreams, Memories & Parties

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