The Dylan Review spoke to songwriter Emma Swift about covering Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and her own creative process. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Dylan Review: As we speak, you’re back in Nashville after playing the historic Bearsville Theater in Dylan’s old stomping ground of Woodstock. How was it?
Emma Swift: It was fantastic, it’s a beautiful theater. Albert Grossman is buried in the backyard. There’s a lot of really cool memorabilia around. Lots of old photos of artists who lived or played there, like Janis Joplin and Dylan. It’s pretty magical.
DR: Does all that history affect the performance, or is it just another gig?
ES: All gigs are special, everybody brings their own different energy. Last time in Woodstock—and the town is blessed with wonderfully unique places—I played at Levon Helm’s barn. And that was pretty cool too, because they had lots of Levon’s old musical equipment, and photos of The Band on the walls. Everywhere is a treat to play.
DR: You played another storied theater last summer—Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa—for “Going Electric,” a concert of Dylan covers put together by Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo and Wilco’s Nels Cline for the Dylan Center. What was that like?
ES: That was a really cool evening at another amazing venue. It was interesting, that gig, because it was like there were two supergroups involved. Mikal [Jorgensen] and Nels from Wilco, and then Lee and Steve [Shelley] from Sonic Youth. So that was the band! I was really lucky. They were celebrating the anniversary of Dylan going electric, but they also wanted us to perform a kind of preview of Dylan before he went electric. So they asked me to sing “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
DR: Is it difficult to prepare for a Dylan cover like that?
ES: The hardest thing in Dylan’s songs, at least for me, is the phrasing. Sometimes it can just take a long time to get inside the phrasing. It’s not like karaoke, you can’t just pick up a mic. I really have to be inside the song, and know the song, before I can sing it. I couldn’t just do it with a teleprompter.
But it’s funny too. It’s like as a fan, some albums are more appealing to you wherever you’re at in your life. If you’re going through a breakup you might be super into Blood on the Tracks. Different things appeal to you at different times. So that affects what one might choose to do.
When I made my covers record [Blonde on the Tracks (2020)], there’s no way I would have put “The Times They Are A-Changin’” on it. But now I really enjoy singing it, because I live in America and it’s pretty crazy here at the moment. It’s got a whole new meaning.
I think the intent of that song when Dylan sang it was positive, the times, they are a-changin’! And now, when I sing “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” it feels a little more desperate and concerned. We’re caught up in the hamster wheel of history, and not necessarily going somewhere we all want to go.
So singing a song like that ten years ago, I probably would have said no. Now, I said yes. I love playing that song.
DR: Can you remember when you the first heard a Bob Dylan song?
ES: I’m a child of the 80s—I was born in 1981. So I arrived just in time for Infidels, which I love. But my first conscious memory of Dylan, when I was a kid, was of him being the grumpy old uncle in the Travelling Wilburys. So I guess my early memories of Dylan are not what many people would expect. It’s “Congratulations” and “Tweeter and the Monkey Man.” So even though he’s one of the most iconic solo artists of all time, I met him as being part of this supergroup. And then, I guess, I remember hearing “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone” after.
DR: For those of us who grew up with the later Dylan, lots of those newer songs are our classics. I think that’s why your cover of “I Contain Multitudes”, on Blonde on the Tracks, excited fans, because Dylan cover albums usually focus on the 60s and 70s.
ES: I loved recording “Multitudes.” Rough and Rowdy Ways means so much to me, as it does to so many Dylan fans, because it came out in that odd pandemic time. I love that song.
There’s nothing new in covering Dylan. Many people have done it before me, and a lot better than I have. I’m just continuing the tradition of loving his work and wanting to sing his songs. But with “Multitudes” I was able to be the first person to have recorded it. So that felt magical, in a way.
When I look back on Blonde on the Tracks now, I’d definitely be inclined to record a few more contemporary songs. When we played at Bearsville Theater a couple of weeks back, I played “Sweetheart Like You,” which I really enjoyed. And I also really like “Too Late,” which is an outtake from Infidels. I don’t know when I’ll record another Dylan project—I would definitely like to—but I’ll shake it up a bit.
DR: You shared your “Multitudes” only a month after Dylan first released it as a single. How soon after hearing the original did you know you wanted to cover it?
ES: Pretty much the second I heard it. There’s something really appealing about “Multitudes” for me. I majored in English Literature at college when I lived in Australia, in Sydney, and so dead poets have always been fabulously appealing to me. The line about Edgar Allan Poe, and juxtaposing it with the Rolling Stones, and Mott The Hoople’s “All The Young Dudes”: I really like the post-modern magpie quality that Dylan has in that song. From the second I heard it, covering it seemed like a no-brainer.
DR: It’s an unusual song, in that Dylan often seems to be singing about himself—“I fuss with my hair,” “I paint landscapes / I paint nudes”—but it sounds like the song spoke to your character as well.
ES: It’s what the best songwriters do, isn’t it? They take a hyper-specific experience, or an examination of one’s own character, and then send it out and see how many people connect with it.
I mean, so much of myself is made up of all the things that I like. So if I’m writing my own version of “I Contain Multitudes,” it may not have Mott the Hoople, or the Rolling Stones, but it might have, I don’t know, Sinead O’Connor and the Pogues. Fragments from my own life that I find appealing.
DR: You started work on Blonde on the Tracks several years before releasing “Multitudes.” What was the genesis?
ES: I thought of the title first—Blonde on the Tracks—and then I sat down and tried to rehearse the songs and, this is going back some years now before the pandemic, I recorded six songs in two days in Nashville. But my art practice at the time was very haphazard—I’ve improved a little since then—I recorded it, then abandoned it and went and did some other stuff. Living in Nashville, and Nashville being an important place in Dylan mythology, I wanted to record a whole collection of his songs. I didn’t want to do just a one-off.
And then when the pandemic happened, and I didn’t have anything to do, I was able to see the project through to completion. I added “Multitudes,” and also “Simple Twist of Fate,” and packaged it together.
Actually one of the inspirations for Blonde on the Tracks—which I forget—was Dylan’s Triplicate, when he started covering standards. I found that inspiring.
DR: Did recording Blonde on the Tracks in Nashville influence your approach? It’s a town with a specific sound, in terms of both Dyan’s history and country music.
ES: Nashville wears its country music hat for publicity purposes, but musically it’s pretty diverse. I guess the best way to describe that record is “adult contemporary-slash-Americana-slash-indie,” so I don’t know if it would have been different had I recorded it somewhere else.
That said, everybody in the room was a big Dylan enthusiast, right down to the engineer, John Little. He had a small recording studio on Dickerson Pike, in East Nashville. It was very DIY. And very different to, say, Dylan’s experience recording on Music Row. Not surprisingly, I had a much lower budget. But John’s studio had all of these old copies of Rolling Stone lying around, with Dylan on the cover. Everybody was having fun with what we were doing.
DR: Listening to the album, some arrangements aren’t that far from the original, and others like “Sooner or Later” sound more modern. How do you decide whether to keep a cover faithful, or mix it up and rearrange it?
ES: You know, I don’t really know. I think it’s just something that happens. It’s like when you see Bob Dylan live and you just don’t know how he’s going to play the song—like, how will “I’ll Be Your Baby” sound tonight?
When we went into pre-production—I say “pre-production,” it wasn’t very sophisticated—I was sat around my kitchen table with Pat [Sansone] and Robyn [Hitchcock] playing acoustic guitars, and we worked on what key I would be singing in, because I sing in a different vocal register [to Dylan], and we worked on the tempo. We would just sort of move things in and out to see how it felt.
Recently, I’ve started workshopping More Blonde, More Tracks—or whatever the next cover album will be called—and there’s a couple of really interesting Dylan covers that I’ve been listening to where the tempo changes. I don’t want to say what they are, so I won’t give it away, but I’ll definitely be having fun in that regard.
I’m a ballad singer, you know? I love slow, sad ballad-type music. I grew up listening to Dusty Springfield, Linda Ronstadt and those kinds of singers. And my voice, for whatever it may mean, has a sad timbre. If I did a rollicking version of “Maggie’s Farm”, that might be really enjoyable live but it would sound ridiculous on a record.
I’m a big Brian Ferry fan; I love his Dylan cover record Dylanesque and his interpretations. The great thing about Bob Dylan is that, aside from the majesty of the lyrics, the melodies are so exquisite. They’re glorious, and as a singer you can really stretch out. It’s a wonderful place to be.
There’s a reason why so many people cover his songs. They’re so well constructed. They are open to interpretation, because there’s so much there that can be emphasised or pulled back. He’s very enjoyable to cover.
DR: How did you approach singing a song as long as “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands?”
ES: It was like running a marathon, but I liked the challenge. That song to me is, aside from “Visions of Johanna,” my favourite Dylan song. “Visions” probably sits above it now. But at the time of recording, “Sad-Eyed Lady” was the one and it felt like a mountain that I just had to climb.
I didn’t know if I would succeed or not, but I’ve always found that song particularly moving and devastating—just this great love letter. I really wanted to sing it. And it was, I’m not going to lie, pretty difficult. In truth I’ve never played “Sad-Eyed Lady” live, partly because I don’t know if I can play all of the verses, but also because I think there’s only a very select group of Dylanophiles who would enjoy the experience. And everyone else would go “oh another verse!” He’s really showing off on that song, it’s fantastic.
It’s very much against our contemporary culture, with our short attention spans, and people who say, “please don’t write a song over three minutes, because it definitely won’t get played on the radio and you won’t get on any algorithmic playlists.” I like the way that Dylan always made art on his own terms and went against the grain. He said, “Well, you know what? If this has to be on a whole side of an LP, so be it. I’m Bob Dylan!”
It’s amazing, his ability, and how he was rewriting the rulebook on how to make an album.
DR: Did that approach influence the making of your latest record, The Resurrection Game? It’s a cohesive album—with string arrangements linking each track—more than a collection of singles.
ES: Totally. I think of music in terms of albums. I know that makes me very old-fashioned, but it’s definitely the way that I work. Everything was written intentionally to belong together and sit side-by-side.
Having those kinds of cinematic strings is very un-Dylan; it’s going in a very different direction but one that I enjoy. Working more within the realm of Scott Walker, and Harry Nilsson who I really love. When I was growing up I had a very small record collection that I got from my Dad, and I used to play all these records.
So I wanted to have cinematic strings, inspired by Scott Walker, Harry Nilsson and then Burt Bacharach and David Lynch films. That was the reference.
DR: We have this romantic idea of songwriters like Dylan pulling songs out of thin air, but in his manuscripts he’ll revise songs for pages. How much unseen craft goes into penning a song cycle like The Resurrection Game?
ES: I spend a lot of time writing, and I spend a lot of time revising too. And that’s fun for me. I enjoy the revision; I like to work things over in my mind.
The world that we live in wants things instantly. It’s, “hey, here’s a song I wrote yesterday. I’m going to perform it on my Instagram!” I’m incapable of doing that as a person, because I have to live with the songs. I have to bring the idea down from wherever it comes from, and then I have to sit with it and finesse it.
I start with titles. For a long time I’ll just have a title, and it’s like, “okay, where is this going to go?” I could definitely stand to be more prolific and to let things go. I don’t think I’ll ever be Leonard Cohen, working for seven years on “Hallelujah.” I’ll never write anything that good and I’ll never spend as much time trying to write anything as good. But I don’t rush things either.
DR: Your new single “You Got Here First” has an obvious Dylan connection, with the lyric “I’ll keep the copy of Blood on the Tracks / You can take ‘Mack the Knife.’”
ES: It’s funny, I guess, because most people who found out about my music have come to me by the music of Bob Dylan. So I thought it would be fun and sweet to put in a little Dylan reference.
DR: Currently, you’re working on an album of Lou Reed covers. Does that require a different process, compared to covering Dylan?
ES: It’s totally different. Oh my goodness! It’s going to be called Sweet Hassle—another pun in the title—and the “Sad-Eyed Lady” of this record is [Reed’s 11-minute song] “Street Hassle.” It’s been really fun to work on. It’s been very different to the Dylan album in that it’s a lot more stop-and-start.
What’s fascinating for me is trying to work out what Lou Reed songs to cover. He was, again, a fantastic lyricist, but not as great with melodies. He has this very charismatic attitudinal vocal delivery. And when you’re covering a song, unless you’re going to be in a Lou Reed tribute band, you can’t really copy that. Or at least I feel like I can’t. So it’s been challenging, but ultimately a really fun process.
There were no strings on the Dylan record, and there were strings all over The Resurrection Game. There’s some strings on this album. I’ve got a version of “Candy Says” and “Berlin” with strings. “Street Hassle” obviously has strings, because, when Lou did it, it had strings. But then there’s some really interesting textural elements on this album. There’s a fantastic woodwind player in Nashville, David Williford. He plays the clarinet, but he puts it through loop pedals. There’s just some weird shit happening that I’ve not done musically before, and I’m very happy and excited.
DR: Does covering Dylan and Reed affect your own approach to songwriting?
ES: Totally. One of the ways you learn to write, or that I’ve learned to write, is by covering other people’s songs. You get inside those songs and figure out what works and what doesn’t. That’s helped me as a songwriter enormously.
And I’ll always do that. I’ll do a covers project, then an original project, then a covers project and so on. I’m not a prolific writer, but each cover project is like going to school. What can I read to teach me about songwriting? What can Dylan teach me?
I’ll definitely do a Leonard Cohen project, that’s definitely coming down the line. And Neil Young too, probably. I’ve got a deep fantasy about going to Hansa Studios in Berlin, where David Bowie made so many iconic records. I don’t yet have the budget for that; it’s fully in the dream realm.
They’re all dudes—it’s not because I don’t like women songwriters. I’ve got a lot of female songwriting heroes. But, you know, Joni Mitchell’s already sung her songs in a female voice. So I don’t think that I have anything necessarily new to reveal in her songs, except that I’m singing them—probably not as well as she does.
DR: Besides the Lou Reed album, what else is in the pipeline?
ES: I released a single, “You Got Here First,” and there’s another single coming out soon and they’ll be bundled into a short EP, called Down and Out In Party City. I’m going to put it out on 10” vinyl if I can. And then I’ve also recorded a bunch of songs from The Resurrection Game, as well as some Dylan songs in a live studio session.
As I increasingly rush towards middle age, I feel like a lot of the procrastination that I suffered from in my thirties is now giving way to a more prolific period—I’m trying to get stuff done, mostly because we never know how long we’ve got. But also, it’s a tremendously fun way to spend time, going out and making stuff.
DR: Like Dylan’s Never Ending Tour?
ES: Right! I am going to see Dylan soon. He’s not playing a Nashville date in the Spring, but he is playing in Louisville, Bowling Green, Chattanooga and Knoxville. They’re all very close to Nashville, so I’ll be at one. I’m very excited—I can’t wait to see these upcoming shows.
