Emmy The Great “We Almost Had A Baby”
With it’s dream-like symphony of ’50’s pop twinkle, angelic girl group harmony, and singer-songwriter Emmy The Great’s cutesy baby-doll vocal coating the ears with such cavity-inducing sweetness, a casual listen to “We Almost Had A Baby” will surely have one immersed within the fond remembrances of the pure, naive days of early teen-dom. But once you really tune in beneath it’s swaying surface to the words tenderly floating out of Em’s mouth, the realization quickly hits that at “Baby”’s center, there’s very little actual sweetness being put forth.
A deeper dig reveals Emmy to be a burgeoning nutcase so longing after a music-playing lover that helped transitioned her from girl to woman before rudely ditching her, that she wishes that she could have been impregnated with his child during that one period-less scare a while back so that their lives would then forever be intertwined. “I would have liked to have something above you,” she coos, salivating over the idea of getting the last laugh after being so cruelly burnt by him over and over again. Caressing her stomach as if by that action alone, she could magically conjure up his father-ed fetus, she imagines phoning him up in the middle of his country-western tour with the “happy” news just so she could dish out the alert that “I’m in control and I’ll let you know/ If you have to come and choose a name”.
Emmy The Great? With this wry, heart-bruised lament wrapped in candy-coated, malt shoppe décor, she’s more like Emmy The (lovable) Psycho!
From her upcoming 2009 debut, First Love, on Close Harbour.
DL: “We Almost Had A Baby” (alt) (snatch the 7″ here!)
Below, check out the video for “Seattle”, a collaboration between Emmy and the latest musical alias of Norman Cook, The Brighton Port Authority:
Holy crap. How have I never heard “Seattle”?