EMMA DANNER OF RED RIBBON
Emma Danner a.k.a Red Ribbon likes to live on the edge and her life is testament to that fact. An assortment of interests and experiences have all culminated into what has ultimately been delivered in the form of Planet X. This is an album that is a consolidated output from her life in the form of where she has been as an individual, the space she currently inhabits and as the medium to lay down the foundations for the rest of her life.
Through these wide ranging experiences and kaleidoscope of emotions, Emma has produced an equally varied and eclectic record that is in equal measure captivating as it is hugely relatable. Through the tracks on the album such as High, Way and Renegade, the record reads as a diary. Each detailing a moment, a period, a person, all with a sense of time and place that has been crystallised in Planet X.
The first audio gift to be delivered, Renegade is a song “about how you’re your own worst enemy and you can’t escape yourself, no matter how far you travel,” has a pulsing tempo that mimics the heartbeat of someone on the run, sound tracking the anxiety that motivates a constant wanderer. Hold, meanwhile, features an eerie string section and wistful melody that creates a foreboding atmosphere for Emma’s brooding, meditative lyrics. “It’s about wanting to relieve the intense material desire that I have. I want all of this shit that I don’t need, but I think if you can get rid of that inclination, you can finally be free in a way,” she admits. “Before moving to LA, I remember listening to the mixes for Hold in my car when I got hit by a truck. To me that was an external force that can somehow speak to the meaning of the song.” The frightening accident took part of Emma’s vision in her left eye and totalled her vehicle.
High deals with chasing pleasure and the pain that comes with that pursuit. “It’s another song with a double meaning,” she says. “It could just be about drugs, or it can be about whatever in your life makes you high.” The song’s lyrics are abstract enough to be universal, but are also deeply personal. “I lost my first love to an opioid addiction and I was a drug user of opiates in my youth. My whole life I’ve been trying to figure out what one can do to expand their consciousness outside of drug use—not that I’m hugely anti–drug use or anything—but for the sake of staying alive, what can you do?” Danner explains. “There’s a little bit of fear around feeling good in that song as well. If I follow this thread of happiness, will I lose my way?”
The self-titled and final single off the record Planet X derived from time touring with The Berries back in 2018 and getting caught right in the middle of the Californian wildfires. A scary and life threatening experience, something that our Australian audience can very much relate to having endured the worst fires in the nation’s history in 2019. Understanding how this moment translated into the track itself and how one musically captures such an event is explained by Emma as she mentions that “While I was in Brooklyn in February 2020 recording the majority of Planet X, the Australian fires were already raging. I worked as a farm hand outside of Melbourne for a while. Your East Coast feels a lot like the American West Coast to me. One thing that struck me is how similar the cowboy Wild West feel is in both our histories. Rough-n-tumble big hats riding horses’ whiskey drinking saloons. We share that iconography. Every time I travel up and down the coast here there are more black sticks where trees should be, and each summer it gets harder to breathe.”
With a little more clarity around these tracks and a deeper understanding into the life and times of Emma, looking further afield into the peripheral elements of the music, collaborators and production, serves to unearth more intricacies into the record. Having been steadily drip fed one amazing track after the next starting with High, Way, Renegade and finally Plant X the question as to whether there was a distinct order in which Emma wanted these singles to be released is succinctly stated in “I worked with the director Ambar Navarro for the first Planet X music video, and she selected Renegade to work with visually. Her creative opinion held a lot of weight to me and that is why Renegade came out first.”
As The album was largely produced by Randall Dunn who has worked with the likes of Sunn O))), and Pallbearer, acts very much in the heavy spectrum and not necessarily a stylistic pairing that leaps to mind for Red Ribbon but is intriguing to know if this choice provided a completely different take on production that ultimately added to depth of the record? To which Emma explains “the first track recorded for the album was Hold. I travelled to Tornillo Texas in November 2019, where I met Randall. That night I got lost alone in what felt like a million miles of infinite pecan trees. When I found where I was going it was to the studio filled with Pallbearer listening to the playback of their four week session. It sounded amazing. So Randall and Morris were just coming off of that session, and into Red Ribbon.”
It is these unscripted and seemingly unrelated moments that can in turn be an enduring source of inspiration and as a case in point, Emma recalls one of those moments where a musician imparts a piece of knowledge that sits with you forever as she reminiscences how “Carlos Santana told me every time you play the guitar it should be like you have never touched it before. No one wants to hear polished bullshit. I return to this idea a lot, it was really good advice.” Such cherished remarks and memories continue when Emma is quizzed as to a particularly memorable gig she has played and what it was that made it so remarkable “I played a show under the interstate freeway. I remember the view of Seattle in the distance as the sky shifted from blue to navy. People climbing fences.” Although not all shows end in settings that will remain forever etched in memory but are a product of circumstance as “sometimes when I play alone it is because I have to. I consider myself really lucky to get to play music with other people.” This is in light of the fact that some shows Emma performs has a myriad of performers on stage and it is for this reason, no two shows she performs are the same.
That variability is exciting as it is daunting because it is fair to say that music has been the one underlying constant in Emma’s life and the prism through which the world is viewed, analysed and reimagined. Such a heavy reliance on music can be an alienating yet liberating form of expression and as she moves through her years, it is fascinating to find out if making music become more or less the vehicle that drives her, to which she humbly marks “I would say I’m less floundering or embarrassed about being a musician. I used to think I wasn’t allowed to pursue it. Now I understand it as my purpose.”
Such a profound comment speaks volumes and must be regarded as unequivocally the biggest driver in her life. When something so fundamental and so influential is known and deeply understood, it is from that point that everything flows with certainty, confidence and is buoyed by an unrelenting energy that cannot be stopped. All of which oozes from Planet X and will surely be but one more record and recollection of what goes into Emma’s life and what comes out in the form of beautifully crafted and honest music.
