Emily Fairlight

Emily Fairlight has a proper folk singer’s background having been, among other things, a teenage runaway adventurer in Australia and India, a circus school student, a barista and a runner turned jack-of-all-trades at a digital visual effects company.

Fairlight – who currently resides in Dunedin – has been composing and performing for over a decade now. She has played throughout NZ and Australia, and her third trip to the USA saw her record Mother of Gloom with Doug Walseth at The Cat’s Eye Studio in Austin, Texas, aided by local musicians including Cully Symington (Bright Eyes, Okkervil River) and multi-instrumentalist Kullen Fuchs. The recordings were mixed by Ben Edwards’ at his Sitting Room studios near Lyttelton harbour where New Zealand folk and country sensations Aldous Harding, Delaney Davidson, Marlon Williams and Nadia Reid created their breakout works.

Although its New Zealand rural Gothic/Texas borderlands feel make “Mother of Gloom” an elusive creature, the prevalence of acoustic guitar and intimate sharing of lived experience point to what Fairlight self-deprecatingly calls, “doom-folk”.

Her vocal style – a stark, haunting tone with a powerful vibrato, teak-hard yet soft as crushed velvet – elicits comparisons to PJ Harvey, Bridget St John, Emmylou Harris and Cat Power, musicians with distinctive voices and the lyrical power to conjure a kind of experiential realism.