Emily Stranger’s Labor of Love
Seattle Artist Emily Stranger Talks Knocking on Doors, Social Media, and “Joe Biden!”
On the night of 2020’s presidential election, Emily Abrahamson and her producer, David Miner, held their phones skyward, hoping to get enough of a signal to catch an update on the results coming in. They’d gone up to a cabin Emily’s grandparents built in the ’70s, one of many spots these two had repurposed into a make-shift studio during the pandemic.
“There’s barely any service at all out there,” Emily tells me, “but eventually something picked up. My friend sent me this video of them celebrating and people cheering on the streets. It looked like this big party and I was like, man I wish we were there. I want to have our own party here.” Her latest single, “Feel Good” is the result of that. In it, you can hear the sound file from her friend’s video. “Dave and I have some cheering over that too. You can hear a little ‘Joe Biden!'” she laughs. “We wanted to make it sound like we were with them.”
Though the song’s premise is a celebration, it also offers a moment of reflection. Emily, who goes by the stage name Emily Stranger, has a gift for doing this through her music—simultaneously confronting reality and attempting to square it with the way she’s feeling. She manages to capture intersections between the head and the heart in full effect. And while childhood favorites like Avril Lavigne and Paramore’s Hayley Williams may have guided the artist to her current sound, Emily has carved out her own space, playing at the boundaries of a laid-back chill hop and grunge-tinged, heavy electro-pop.
She attributes a lot of that to her partnership with her producer. “Dave plays every instrument imaginable,” she tells me; “amazing saxophonist, can pick up a guitar, play bass, classical piano. You name it. He’s a genius. I feel very lucky.”
Emily had taught herself guitar at 14, but the basic chords she knew left her in a seemingly inescapable indie-folk pocket of music. “Everything I played sounded like that, no matter what I tried. . . When I met Dave, he managed to take my songs from their indie-folk state into the dark electronic stuff that I wanted to be making. It’s so cool, what you can put together when you have the tools and the people who know what they’re doing.”
The two have been working together since 2015, and in the last few years they’ve started to get some traction with Seattle’s local scene. “One day, a buddy I worked with at Trader Joe’s told me, ‘I’m kind of friends with this DJ at KEXP.’ He was like, ‘you should give him your CD and see if he’d be interested.’ And I think I told him that was stupid. But then I went and did it,” she laughs.
The DJ, Troy Nelson, happened to have another set at a bar Emily and her coworkers frequented after shifts. One day she worked up the courage to give him a burned CD of her solo work, the case inked with her contact information. “I was so nervous I don’t even know what I said to him. I think I blacked out. But he emailed me the next day and said basically my buddy and I have a small indie label in Seattle, Killroom Records. Let’s chat.”
It took some time back and forth figuring out the contract before she and Dave signed, but in 2019, they rereleased The Fix EP under Killroom Records. They’ve since been putting final touches on Emily Strangers’ debut album release. “We mastered it last summer. That was really fun. Dave and I would just drive around in his wife’s Honda Civic and blast the music. We’d say ‘oh, this needs to come down a little bit, and what if we add a little of this here.’ Eventually, it got to a place where we were both really stoked on it and we felt like, ok, this is done.” The album, Labor of Love, is slated for release later this year.
“At the end of the day, it’s what I love. I feel like I’m kind of caught where a lot of artists are—trying to balance my time and build a life that feels fulfilling.”
—Emily Stranger
Watching it all come together is exciting, but the road hasn’t been easy. Like many of the artists I’ve spoken with over the last year, Emily has found that Seattle isn’t the most viable place to make music a career. Not for lack of talent, but of support for the local acts finding their feet. You’re left knocking on a lot of doors that won’t open until you’ve hit certain benchmarks. “The grind can be so exhausting,” says Emily. “It feels like you’re crawling up a mountain with your bare hands, and it’s like crumbling from under you. You get three steps up and you look around and realize you don’t know where to go. Get another few steps and slip a little bit. I don’t know if it’s ever not going to feel like that.”
At 33, Emily has imagined what music scenes elsewhere might offer her. Having lived in Seattle for a little over 10 years, her ties here are both a blessing and sentencing. “It takes a long time to build your community,” she says, “especially in music. I’ve been working at it for such a long time. To go to some other city before I’ve even like, made a name for myself feels kind of silly.”
And anyway, the real issue is in promo stuff, she says—that’s the worst of it, and would still be regardless of where you’re based as an artist. “Social media will literally be the death of me. It drives me so fucking crazy,” says Emily. “Promoting myself just feels fake, even though I believe in what I’m doing. It still feels inauthentic to talk about myself.” But these days, knowing how to market yourself and gain an audience on social media is arguably as important as having a sound people want to hear.
We all know there’s an unspoken aspect of social media that makes it feel like a competition. But for those whose success relies on an audience, that competitive aspect matters. “People care when you’re booking,” Emily tells me. “They’ll look at your numbers, they’ll look at your engagements. I have less than a thousand followers. All of them are friends, family, people that I’ve gathered over the years from doing live music, playing shows, and I just sort of feel like I’ve hit a wall there. . . maybe I should make it more of a priority than it is, but I don’t want to have to think about that. I just want people to listen to my music, listen to the words, and if it speaks to them, share it with people.”
Creatives of all kinds have to run a sort of cost/benefit analysis on their lifestyle. Money is always a part of the conversation—and whether it’s being spent on studio time, videos, or travel, as a new artist, most of the time, you’re going to be losing it. “I think I spent like $5000 on music and videos in the last year, and like, I didn’t make more than like $200 back,” says Emily. “We put in so many hours of practice, so many hours of writing and workshopping songs, putting sets together. For all the work you put in, you’re just like, is this even worth it sometimes?”
“It is worth it though,” she tells me. “At the end of the day, it’s what I love. I feel like I’m kind of caught where a lot of artists are—trying to balance my time and build a life that feels fulfilling. Music is what makes me happy, even if it’s tough sometimes.”
A Playlist From Emily Stranger, To You:
“Winter months in the Northwest are a bit on the gloomy side,” says Emily Stranger. “My headspace and emotional state feel like they’re all over the place these days. For this playlist, I’ve included a bit of everything, though it’s heavily centered around hip-hop. Lately, that tends to be the genre I most often lead toward as a listener. So, you’ve got your tracks to bump when you’re fuckin’ up or just having one of those days, a few with more of a hopeful vibe when you need to get out of your head, some tracks to crank up when you need a confidence boost, then a few that just make you feel good.”
For More
To learn more about Emily Stranger (which you should—she’s awesome, I checked) you can find her on social media, streaming services like Spotify. Check out her latest single “Feel Good,” “The Fix” EP, or the “Runaround” music video.
Photo Credits: Courtney Baxter Photography, David Miner