Hear First is Talkhouse’s series of album premieres. Along with streams of upcoming albums — today’s is Stella Emmett’s Admirer — we publish statements from artists and their peers about the mindsets and impressions that go into, or come out of reflection on, a record. Here, Emmett writes about admiring the world from her bedroom window (accompanied by illustrations from James Fitzpatrick) playing off the title of the new album, which you can listen to right here.
—Annie Fell, Talkhouse Associate Editor
If I have a still moment, especially at night, especially with the right music, I can hold time in my hands like a smooth orb. I can return to the other side of the bedroom window and take a breath there. I can hear the humming tree frogs of rural Connecticut, feel the yellow carpet under my bare toes. I remember, with infinite fondness, journaling in bed as the sun set. My mother in her room downstairs, my sister occasionally just down the hall. My dad in his house only 15 or 20 minutes down the road. I have only begun to grieve the passing of this time in my life — and for me it is a profound loss, the greatest loss I have experienced yet. Not life altering like a death, but unsettling like a family secret.
How could I have known how swiftly my life was going to change? Maybe a part of me did sense it — I cried so hard at graduation I surprised myself. It was a blunt and awkward ending, my family arriving as if in a dream from all across the country, and vanishing just as fast. And then college was over. Through it all, one thought: Where does this fit into the story of my life?
Tonight, all over the world, millions of girls will look out through their bedroom windows and think a million different things about the world outside. I picture them like owls peering out from softly illuminated burrows in trees, the woods thick and dark all around, but each girl safely within her own small, warm world. Surrounded by books and journals and paints. The way it should be.
In still moments, when I can hold time in my hands like a smooth orb, I never fail to find myself back inside this bedroom — the room where I became myself. Don’t we always go back to the places that made us? The places that reveal who we really are and what we really want? Maybe what I’ve always wanted, despite my best efforts, is to return to the other side of the glass — to remain a watcher, an admirer.
(Photo Credit: left, Joseph Charles Viola; right, Lucie Murphy; illustrations, James Fitzgerald)
