It’s more than a decade since Emma-Lee Moss, known professionally as Emmy The Great, first captured our imaginations with her delightful debut album First Love. Since then, the solo singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has called several places home: New York, London (where she spent her teenage years), Xiamen, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong (where she was born). Her latest LP, April / ??, sees Moss explore her the impermanence of her life, the transition of one place of belonging to another, and the changing and uncertain state of these places right now.

Writer sees Moss delve into another of her talents too – as a journalist, she has been published by the likes of The Guardian, Vice, British GQ, and Wired – as she sings against a gentle finger-picked guitar: “Every day I write down how I feel / Stop now and then to take a meal / you can join me if you like / I see you looking through the window some nights / these days it comes out in a flood / I take my heart out and I write down all it does / It has been quite a life”.

The album’s lead single – Dandelions / Liminal – is a jaunty affair, while the string-laden Chang-E tells an epic tale. Explaining the song on her official Facebook page, she wrote: “Chang-E tells the story of how the goddess in the moon intersected with the Apollo 11 astronauts (true story), and the video, beautifully animated by Renee Zhan, tells Chang-E's legend as I heard it as a child.”

Okinawa / Ubud is a beautifully sparse track with strings and xylophones that merges wonderfully into Your Hallucinations, while Mary is a sweet and merry little track with a deeper message (“By certain scales, a life goes by so very fast / Some days go easy some will wear you like a mask”). Heart Sutra closes the album and, in charming fashion, features the giddy laughs of Moss’s baby daughter.

April / ?? is a beautiful and emotive folk-pop collection, littered with compelling lyrics. Written mostly in Hong Kong and recorded in 2018 before the protests, it’s also a compact but delicate snapshot of a time and a place that has dramatically changed in a very short space of time.

Watch the official video for Chang-E here.

April / ?? tracklist:

1. Mid-Autumn / ??

2. Writer

3. Dandelions / Liminal

4. Chang-E

5. A Window / O’Keeffe

6. Okinawa / Ubud

7. Your Hallucinations

8. Mary

9. Hollywood Road / April

10. Heart Sutra

Author: Joe Sharratt

Joe Sharratt is a writer and journalist based in the UK covering music, literature, sport, and travel.