Recensie: Emma Swift – The Resurrection Game
https://writteninmusic.com/albumrecensie/emma-swift-the-resurrection-game/

#Music #Roots #EmmaSwift #TinyGhostRecords #Hemifran

Emma Swift Sings “Beautiful Ruins”

Listen to this track by Nashville-based classic pop songwriter and singer Emma Swift. It’s “Beautiful Ruins” a single from her second record, 2025’s The Resurrection Game. That record is the follow-up to her superb and critically acclaimed 2020 debut album Blonde on the Tracks, a selection of curated and gorgeously rendered Bob Dylan songs. That release accomplished a few things for Emma Swift, not the least of which was clearing a creative block to make way for original work that retains a similar mood and atmosphere of reflection, rumination, and crystalline melancholy.

“Beautiful Ruins” is one of the highlights on her follow-up album, serving as its third single. It finds Swift conjuring the classic pop sound of the late 1960s, but also sounding completely timeless. This tune blends a sumptuous orchestral folk pop sound behind Swift’s pure and Sixties British folk-influenced lead voice. Her singing comes off as an interior monologue, lending the song a quiet and contemplative intensity. True to that approach, her lyrics deal in images and emotional evocations rather than a straight narrative. There is a definite sense that this material is highly personal. Yet there are elements to it that make it more universally resonant, too.

The album came out of less than ideal circumstances. Emma Swift suffered a nervous breakdown, finding that she needed space and time to heal and reflect. The new songs that appear on her second album came out of her process of recovery, lending a facet of meaning to the title The Resurrection Game. Some of the time she spent recharging and reflecting was in her native Australia. Swift writes in her Substack:

Where “The Resurrection Game” song is set in Northern California, this one takes place in regional Australia, in the wheat belt between Sydney and Melbourne. It’s inspired by my early life, and also by the Irish poet Louis MacNeice, whose poems were hugely influential in the making of this record.

~ Emma Swift, Nothing and Forever (August 13, 2025)

Like Louis McNeice before her, Emma Swift conjures the themes of mortality and hope in this song that seems to come from her interior reflections, and sounding like a cathartic release as she sings it. The reference to coming from the place of many crows that pick at her bones is suggestive of the struggles she faced. Yet even in those opening lines, there is a distinct tone of gratitude at having come out on the other side of her harrowing experiences with that much more insight on her own identity and what is valuable to her. The song explores the dynamics of how events and turning points, good and bad, are interwoven into the fabric of a life to make it unique and ultimately something to be celebrated.

“Beautiful Ruins” collects opposites—beauty and ruination being two— and places them in the same space. As gloriously forlorn as the song is in terms of delivery and tone, it’s also coupled with an undeniable sense of hope. The music and the arrangement helps to draw this into focus, with a Joe Boyd-like quality that can be heard in a similar way in a song like Nick Drake’s “Northern Sky”. That comparison is not just because of the soaring string arrangements as matched with acoustic instrumentation heard in both songs.

Like that earlier song, this one is sung in a voice full of blue melancholy, but also one that tells a story of how beauty can be found even in the middle of struggle, often being all the more vivid because of it. “Beautiful Ruins” goes beyond the reductive idea that sad music, or songs about what it feels like to be sad is meant to make the listener feel that way as they listen. In truth, it can make the listener think about how happiness and sadness in all their variations and combinations are so intertwined that they become extensions of who we are. When we cast our memories back, each happy one or sad one is revealed to contain elements of both.

Emma Swift’s song suggests that maybe all feelings are like that under most circumstances, experienced as they are in combination, but always present. We hold them inside of ourselves and they live there together. Wherever we find ourselves, those feelings stay with us, waiting to be manifest as we take in the world around us. In this, our hardships and joys and our emotional reactions to them aren’t separate from each other or from us. In a subtle way, “Beautiful Ruins” suggests the idea that the episodes human beings face in our lives are also inextricable from who we are and who we become. Our life experiences shape the way we learn to cope, change the way we see things, and affect the ways we express ourselves. They make us who we are.

When we build things up, sometimes events lay it all to waste, and we have to start again. When that happens, we pick through the rubble to salvage the good in what we find so that we can build something new and more true to the people we’ve become. “Beautiful Ruins” ultimately is a song about being glad to be alive so that we can do that work, and be able to tell stories about the things that have happened to us. In singing it, and in hearing it sung, the gap between devastation and delicate beauty doesn’t seem quite so wide. Sad songs, or ones of struggle like this make us feel less alone, whether we’re singing, listening, or both.

Emma Swift is an active singer and songwriter today. You can learn more about her at emmaswift.com. You can also follow her on Bluesky.

Visit the Emma Swift Bandcamp page for new releases and touring information.

Enjoy!

#2020sMusic #EmmaSwift #orchestralPop #singerSongwriters #songsAboutIdentity

Emma Swift announces first album in 5 years with new single "No Happy Endings"

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://theneedledrop.com/news/emma-swift-announces-first-album-in-5-years-with-new-single-no-happy-endings/

My June #playlist features favorites (Reed, Littmann, JAPW, KP) + new to me musicians including, it says here, Natalie Portman.
#AlexG #BloodOrange #CaseyMQ #Darksoft #EmmaSwift #Fab5Freddy #Humbird #JamesJamerson #JamesChance #JanePenny #JoanAsPoliceWoman #KingPrincess #LRain #LouReed #MarinaAllen #NataliePortman #NicholasNicholas #PetShopBoys #PleasureSystems #PostMalone #Robyn #SteveSobs (#EricLittman) #SufjanStevens #Vagabon #AppleMusic #Playlists #NowPlaying

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/jun-2024/pl.u-e1XKKTBdVAB

Emma Swift Sings “I Contain Multitudes”

Listen to this track by superb singer, songwriter, and major Bob Dylan fan Emma Swift. It’s “I Contain Multitudes”, a cut from her excellent 2020 release Blonde on the Tracks. That release is a collection of her interpretations of Dylan’s material across eras. She embarked on the project during a trying time in her life as she struggled with a bout of depression, a condition she’s suffered from for many years. On top of that, she had writer’s block. Setting aside the burden of having to come up with original material, Swift decided that recording some of her favourite music would help her to reset her love for singing and recording. Bob Dylan’s music was at the top of the list.

In kicking off what turned out to be a whole album of Dylan interpretations, Emma Swift became a part of a wider musical tradition. Interpreting Dylan’s material has produced a treasure trove of superb music from artists across the decades and the musical spectrum, proving his work to be highly adaptable, inviting and even challenging as singers and musicians strive to imprint each song of his with their own musical signatures. It’s a challenge that many have risen to, starting in the Sixties and continuing with great aplomb into the 21st century.

Swift’s record stood out when she released it in full by August of 2020, making an impact even among old guard critics and notoriously fussy Dylanologists. Maybe it’s because Swift was bolder than most when it came to her choice of material. Avoiding the obvious go-to Dylan songs throughout her album, this song was a more recent composition. In fact, it was literally the most recent Dylan song by the time Swift’s version came out, with the original appearing only a month before hers. With the boldness of a move like that, the song had to deliver the goods. Emma Swift does this on several levels at once, making her interpretation a stand-out in the grand history of Bob Dylan covers.

Bob Dylan released “I Contain Multitudes” in April of 2020 as a precursor to his newest record Rough and Rowdy Ways on which the song also appears. “I Contain Multitudes” borrows its title from Walt Whitman. But its subject matter is pure Dylan, delving into a set of themes that have informed and characterized his approach to fame, personas, stage presentation, and even the voices he’s used throughout his career to keep fans, and perhaps even himself, on their toes.

In stylistically and even lyrically re-jigging of his own material over years and decades on stage, his work follows the folk song tradition that there is no canonical version of any song. Instead, every song of his (maybe barring “Love Minus Zero/No Limit“) is a canvas for spontaneous performance rather than a sacred text that one must adhere to line for line, note for note, style for style. “I Contain Multitudes” carries a related idea; that everything in the universe is also constantly on the move and nothing is truly fixed. This includes one’s own sense of self, fashioned by perceptions, contexts, circumstance, the passage of time, and even one’s mood in a given moment.

That brings us to Emma Swift’s interpretation of this song. Her version seemed to land from out of nowhere as a single on the very heels of the original in May of the same year and near enough to Dylan’s 79th birthday, no less. Were this any other artist but Bob Dylan, that move on Swift’s part might be interpreted as an act of artistic brazenness, or even as a kind of a stunt. But this Dylan song could be considered his most upfront expression of the well-traveled themes found throughout his catalogue; the nature of identity, wearing masks and discarding them, and bristling at attempts to impose interpretations as hard-coded graven images. On that score alone, this Bob Dylan song cried out to be covered right from the jump.

Emma Swift’s version is remarkable on several fronts with all of this in mind. To start, she was the first to do it which is an achievement by itself. Covering “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” or “Mr. Tambourine Man” is one thing. But this was another beast entirely on a logistics level alone. She only had a little over a month to learn it, get inside of it, lay it down, and then release it. Tonally, she hits this song dead center, deftly communicating its core message with nuance and precision; that the world is constantly in flux, and by extension so are we all.

“I sing the songs of experience like William Blake
I have no apologies to make
Everything’s flowing all at the same time
I live on the boulevard of crime
I drive fast cars, and I eat fast foods
I contain multitudes.”

-Emma Swift, Bob Dylan’s “I Contain Multitudes”

As far as tone and texture, her voice and Dylan’s could not be more different on their respective versions and otherwise, although Swift’s seems just as out of time as anything Bob himself ever laid down; a classic country-folk voice with just a dash of torch singer ennui, evoking mythical musical landscapes across epochs. Swift finds the gravitas from inside her own interpretative heart and lays it bare here in what amounts to a story about feeling misunderstood, and wanting to connect in an authentic way. In doing so, she captures the central human conundrum that being truly known can often feel impossible as much as we all seek it. In the lonely period of depression as she was making this, no wonder the song resonated so well with her.

Most of all, her performance reaches the brass ring when it comes to reinterpreting the work of another artist. She makes this song sound as if she’s written it herself, unchanged gender perspectives and all. The effect of that makes this song more of an affirmation of the whole human experience, and less of a song about one very famous man weary of fixed identities projected onto him. In Swift’s artistic eye and through her voice, “I Contain Multitudes” becomes something more universal. If Bob Dylan wrote and sang it as a statement about his own complexity, Swift sings it here to reflect everyone’s.

Given that she undertook the project as a means to ride out her depression, her version’s sense of universality is truly remarkable as a vital and life-affirming work. What might have been thought of as just an audacious artistic coup in releasing a Dylan cover in such close succession to the original becomes something more valuable and viable; an act of pure expression that’s infused with affection and great generosity that carries an essential truth along with it; that we are all people of contradictions and of many moods. We all contain multitudes. And that’s OK. In fact, it’s wonderful.

Emma Swift is an active singer and songwriter today. You can learn more about her at emmaswift.com.

For more on Emma Swift, her admiration of Bob Dylan’s work, and how his songs helped her to get herself going artistically during a very challenging period, have a read of this article from thebrag.com.

As to Emma Swift’s struggle with depression and the toll it’s taken on her that includes her finances, she launched a Go Fund Me campaign. At the time of this writing, that campaign remains open. Learn more about that and consider donating to it right here.

Enjoy!

#2020sMusic #BobDylan #coverVersions #EmmaSwift #songsAboutExistence

"Die Tonalität ist natürliche eine andere – Frauenstimme, Männerstimme, und so komisch wie Dylan singt sonst eh niemand. Die Schönheit des Ansatzes liegt in der Differenz der Stimmen."

Diese Differenz ist nicht zu unterschätzen. Meine zwei Lieblingsalben der letzten drei Jahre waren "Blonde on Tracks" von #EmmaSwift und "Standing in the Doorway" von #ChrissieHynde – also zwei #BobDylan-covernde Frauen. Und jetzt auch noch #CatPower. 😍

➡️ https://taz.de/Cat-Power-covert-Bob-Dylan/!5975674/

"Bailouts for bankers
Handouts for the rich....."

'Avalanche and Landslide' featuring backing vocals by #JaimeeHarris

Video made by the awsome #emmaswift

👇🏽
https://youtu.be/i1Iupxp4oz4

#americana #folkmusic #rootsmusic #folk #singersongwriter #americanamusic #music #protest #protestsong #musician #guitarist #songwriter #singer #song #musicvideo #animation #video #protest #stopmotion @americana #tootradio #injustice #collectiveaction #collective #together #socialjustice