Miss Maple investigates
Canadian songstress Emm Gryner has toured with David Bowie and released a collection of Irish rock covers. Her new album might just be her most ambitious, and mysterious, yet.
Colm O Hare, 29 May 2006
Would the real Emm Gryner please stand up?
That might seem a tad unfair as an opening salvo in a piece about yet another singer-songwriter from across the Atlantic. But even the multi-tasking Canadian songstress would herself admit that she spreads her talents further and wider than most. A veritable one-woman industry, the part-Philipino, part-Irish Toronto-based Gryner never seems to rest on her laurels.
Where to start? Well, she’s an award-winning solo artist in her native Canada, the shimmering single ‘Summerlong’ from her major label debut Public being a fully-deserved radio classic.
Since then she’s put out seven or eight albums (“I can’t remember exactly how many but it’s something like that”). Performing live with or without a band she swaps with ease from guitar to piano to bass as the mood takes her.
She now runs her own record label, Dead Daisy Records, which, apart from putting out her own solo releases, has four other acts on the books.
When not touring or recording in her own right she plays bass and sings with Toronto based outfit, Hot One, who’ve an album due out later this summer.
She’s also in demand as a backing singer to the stars – she has toured the world with David Bowie and is an occasional member of Swedish superstars The Cardigans, as well as clocking studio time with Rob Zombie, Lou Barlow, the aforementioned Bowie and the late great soul legend Curtis Mayfield.
In Ireland for the second time in six months doing TV and radio promo appearances she even managed to find the time to give a lecture to the students of the Ballyfermot Rock School.
Sitting in the bar of a south Dublin hotel, she seems quietly unfazed at the whirlwind she seems to permanently occupy. The most obvious question has to be: how on earth has she managed to acquire such an impressively chock-full CV for one so young?
“Well, I’m not quite as young as I look,” she laughs. “I’ve had the luxury – or the cruelty if you want to put it that way – of doing this for the last 10 years. It’s hard work trying to run everything and I regularly put in a 12-hour day but it’s what I want to do. I’m also a Gemini and my attention span is very short, so perhaps that’s something to do with it.”
Page 1/3 <Previous 1 2 3 Next>
©Hot Press 2011. Why be a member? | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy