FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Emma-Jean Thackray

FEATURE:

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: Lewis Vorn

Emma-Jean Thackray

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THE incredible…

and super talented Emma-Jean Thackray has a run of dates coming up that takes her around the world. Her new album, Weirdo, has been nominated for a Mercury Prize this year and most be among the frontrunners. I am going to end with a review for an album which has earned acclaimed across the board. If you do not know about Thackray, then I would first suggest checking out Grounding with Emma-Jean Thackray and her experiences with ADHD, OCD and autism and how this has affected her world of intrusive thoughts and also shaped her next album. Thackray is a giant of London's Jazz scene, a BBC Jazz FM award-winning artist for her debut album, Yellow, and she also runs her own label, Movementt. She has collaborated with major artists and institutions, including the London Symphony Orchestra. In terms of pedigree and talented, there are few as respected and reputable as the great Emma-Jean Thackray. I am revisiting her after I spotlighted her back in 2020. Five years is a long time, so there are a few more recent interviews I want to get to. I am going to concentrate on interviews from this year. A more up-to-date look at Emma-Jean Thackray. I will start out with Fifteen Questions and their interview. There are some interesting observations and answers that I wanted to highlight:

“When did you first consciously start getting interested in singing? What was your first performance as a singer on stage or in the studio and what was the experience like?

I sang as a small child. I was always walking around singing little songs that I made up, and my parents would get very annoyed, constantly telling me to be quiet.

I actually don’t remember my first time singing on stage or in the studio; I feel like it’s just something I’ve always done.

What were some of the main challenges in your development as a singer/vocalist? Which practices, exercises, or teachers were most helpful in reaching your goals – were there also “harmful” ones?

I think the hardest thing to have control of is your intonation. I think a lot of singers can focus too much on the ‘emotional’ side of performance (in pop / rock etc) and forget that you should have complete control of your voice as an instrument.

I think it’s great to transcribe other singers and match them exactly - every syllable, every phrase, and blend with them perfectly.

What are the things you hear in a voice when listening to a vocalist? What moves you in the voices of other singers?

I’m listening for their technique, their intonation, how they’re using vibrato, how they’re leaning into different syllables for different effects. I’m listening to their mouth / tongue position and how that changes the sound. I’m listening to all the minutia of what goes into a performance; that’s how you convey emotion and capture the listener.

What moves me is a singer who has total control of their voice, and therefore total control of the listener.

As a singer, it is possible to whisper at the audience, scream at the audience, reveal deep secrets or confront them with uncomfortable truths. Tell me about the sense of freedom that singing allows you to express yourself and how you perceive and build the relation with the audience.

I’d be terrified to scream and damage my voice, but I do like to play with dynamics to tell a story.

I’m definitely revealing deep secrets and singing about uncomfortable truths. I think that’s why my music resonates with people, especially the new album Weirdo, because I’m being so honest.

I’m singing lyrics that most people would only write in their diaries and not say out loud.

I'd love to know more about the vocal performances for Weirdo, please, and the qualities of your voice that you wanted to bring to the fore.

My music draws upon lots of different genres, and my vocal performances are doing that, too. There’s more controlled, intricate, jazz like moments (eg “Let Me Sleep”), as well as more full, soulful moments (eg “Save Me”), and there’s a lot of grunge / rock in there too, so my voice has to have a bit more power and grit in those moments (“Weirdo” / “Stay”).

There’s also moments of being a bit more playful and being influenced by P-funk ("Black Hole").

For recording engineers, the human voice remains a tricky element to capture. What are some of the favourite recordings of your own voice so far and what makes voices sound great on record and in a live setting?

I’m really happy with the vocal recording across the whole of the Weirdo album. I wanted to capture my vocals as organically as possible, so I’m focussing on the performance, rather than thinking of how to tweak or hone things in post-production.

I used a large-diaphragm tube microphone for some drive and saturation, and not much else, just a bit of compression at the end of the chain.

For me, you should do as little to the vocals as possible; let your performance shine. That’s when vocals sound the best, in my opinion”.

I am going to move to The Line of Best Fit. Weirdo is an album that helped Emma-Jean Thackray find her way back from incredible grief. She is at her most open and moving on Weirdo. No wonder that it is award-nominated and won incredible praise from critics and fans! Someone who everyone needs to follow. I have been a fan for years and have seen her grow and evolve into this incredibly special talent whose music and words no doubt are helping so many others who live with and have experiences with grief and neurodivergence:

“Exerting total control over an album is something Thackray has done before – though, as she admits, she has always downplayed it in public. With Weirdo, however, a proudly solipsistic approach was the only one that made sense. “Because of the nature of what I’ve been writing about, I needed to put myself at the centre of everything, whereas before I’ve not really centred myself,” she says. “It’s just been about the music, and I just happened to be here, like some sort of vessel. But because this is such a personal record, in terms of content, I had to be like, ‘I’m in the middle of this. This is my inner world.’"

Doing so was a form of therapy for Thackray. “It was just about trying to follow my own needs for the first time in so, so long, only thinking about myself. And it was really important to do that,” she says. Without considerations such as which string players to hire or how to direct a percussionist, Thackray had the space to slowly rebuild her days. “I just had to think about myself, like, ‘Ok, I’m gonna wake up. What do I feel like doing? Do I feel like playing some guitar? Do I feel like going for a walk?’ It was just getting back in touch with myself and what I was feeling.

“I think it was all part of the process for me,” she adds, “just processing what happened and trying to heal.”

Bare-faced lyrics are certainly a hallmark of the album. “Wanna Die” does what it says on the tin – “I don’t wanna die / Except for all the times I do” – while on “Maybe Nowhere” there’s a perversely sober sense of reason: “Maybe I’ll join you / In the beyond / Why should I stay? / Just paying some guy’s mortgage anyway.”

It’s undoubtedly weighty stuff, but Thackray sees a dark comedy in the album’s contrasts. “Wanna Die”, for instance, sets those gloomy words against an unexpectedly peppy, jazz-punk backdrop. Same goes for the album cover, which, aside from the toaster, also stars a tiny rubber duck. “That’s the kind of sense of humour I have,” she says, “trying to bring both sides of life to something: the bleak and the silly."

There’s a sly absurdity in the tracklisting, too. The songs “Tofu” and “Fried Rice” sit next to each other; the former repeats the word “tofu” over a tangling beat, while the latter sees Thackray simply stating she’d rather eat rice than go outside. The next track, “Where’d You Go”, however, deals with the existential unknown of what happens when someone dies. It illuminates one of the weirdest parts of grief: how it forces us to grapple with the commonplace and the unfathomable as if they were equals.

“I just really wanted to show people every part of what was going on,” Thackray says. “It wasn’t just me questioning everything and being super cerebral.” And so, when for three months rice was the only thing she wanted to cook for herself, “every single day,” Thackray wrote a song about it. What might seem like a symptom of malaise actually “became a routine that was really nourishing.” “It was a way that I was taking care of myself, without fully understanding that,” she explains”.

There are two more interviews to get to before a review. However, I would also adviser you check out this Wonderland interview from the start of the year. It is such a busy time for Emma-Jean Thackray. With a busy diary and fascinating literary ahead, she is going to be bringing Weirdo to fans all around the world. I want to include these particular sections from a recent interview from The Guardian, as we get to learn some background to Weirdo. However, Emma-Jean Thackray does hate being put in a box or easily and lazily defined:

“The West Yorkshire-born bandleader, 35, is often boxed in as “London-based trumpet player Emma-Jean Thackray,” she says with gentle defiance. “That annoys the fuck out of me, it feels reductive.” In actuality, she’s inspired as much by Madlib as she is Miles Davis; she’s a producer and musical polymath who uses the “jazz language” as a basis for her eclectic multiverse of broken beat, P-funk, spiritual jazz, hip-hop and beyond. Her 2016 debut EP, Walrus, signalled her unique grasp of groove, its rhythms intricately constructed from layers of brass and percussion. By the time she released her debut album Yellow in 2021, she had refined her complex arrangements into a cosmic jazz-funk sound that was ambitious yet jocular – referencing, as Sun Ra did, spiritual transcendence along with astronomy and weed.

Growing up, “I was a complete outsider. When I was a child, I didn’t know that I was neurodiverse.” She’s not spoken about it much until recently, but Thackray is autistic and has ADHD. “I was constantly confused, thinking that everyone had been given a rulebook that I hadn’t been given,” she continues. “I’ve had the word ‘weirdo’ thrust upon me, as an insult. So I’ve tried to reclaim it now and to be proud; it makes my art different from anyone else’s.”

Thackray started writing second album Weirdo in 2022 as an exploration of her neurodivergence, and a way of “embracing difficult mental health” after tour burnout. But its themes took a devastating turn the following year when, she says, “my life fell apart”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Brownswood Recordings

In January 2023, Thackray’s partner of 12 years died suddenly of natural causes. She details the desperate lows she reached with piercing directness on songs like Save Me (“I’m not whole any more / Broken pieces on the floor”), and, more playfully, the George Clinton-channelling Black Hole, featuring the comedian-musician Reggie Watts (“I’m in a black hole of despair / Only the beat can pull me out”). The songs are like a grief diary, she says. “I felt so lost. I didn’t know who I was any more.”

Thackray had previously believed “that there was no life and death”. She’s been a student of the east Asian philosophy of Tao since her teens – her 2020 EP Um Yang 음 양 referenced the Taoist concept of duality and harmony and she has Tao symbols tattooed on her thumbs. “For me, energy is never destroyed, it’s only transferred through people; they live on and are always a part of you. And then you’re confronted with [loss], and the anger stops the philosophising. I thought: the universe is just this cruel, horrible thing. There’s no balance, only pain.”

After “six months of doing nothing except playing Zelda and staring at the wall,” she summoned the strength to sing again, knowing that making music would be the way to “get back to myself”, to find “renewed trust in the purpose that I always had”. Weirdo was about the shift “from really not wanting to be here, and then finding my way back to music,” she says. “I’m not saying I don’t have really bad days, or weeks, months, whatever. But throughout it all, there was the want to make music. That’s the only way I can feel emotionally regulated.”

She credits her neurodiversity for her multi-instrumentalism and voracious stylistic approach. On Weirdo, there’s scarcely any trumpet. “Having had this sort of a death and rebirth, I feel like a completely different person to before,” she says, “so picking up the trumpet feels slightly alien now.” Instead, she’s singing far more and going heavy on guitar, too. The distortion and grunge sonics echo a childhood obsession with Kurt Cobain, her “special interest for a while before Miles Davis”, as well as Radiohead”.

The final interview I am including is from NME. The Leeds artist discussed her neurodivergence and how celebrating that were the seeds of Weirdo. This is an album that has connected to so many people. Even if it is personal, the words and music definitely speak to people. One of the most powerful and important records of 2025. I hope that it does win loads of awards, as this is such a standout year for Emma-Jean Thackray. Go and follow her on social media:

“I’m dead stoked for everyone,” she said of the 12 artists honoured. “It’s so nice to be amongst so many fantastic records. There are a couple on there that I thought would be shortlisted, a couple that were surprises to me. A good mate from college on there as well [Joe Webb].”

‘Weirdo’, featuring cameo appearances by Reggie Watts and Kassa Overall, sees Thackray making sense of her life as an artist and young woman with ADHD and autism, while also grappling with grief.

“I’m just a little weirdo,” she admitted. “I’ve always been a weirdo, my entire life. The seed of the record was about accepting and celebrating my neurodiversity. Then of course, it became about something else and evolved, but he very first seed of it was about me being a little weirdo.”

Asked for advice for anyone who may be worried about entering or navigating the music industry with neurodiversity, Thackray replied: “Be yourself. Throw yourself into the music – that’s the most important thing – and the music will take care of you”.

I am going to end with a review for Weirdo. The Quietus stated how Weirdo has not only saved Emma-Jean Thackray’s life: it will save so many others too. That is why I was compelled to spotlight her once more. The Quietus started by saying how the “genre-busting iconoclast makes a fearless leap forward”:

“In interviews ahead of the release of this second full-length LP, Emma-Jean Thackray has spoken more than once of how making it saved her life. That anyone could craft work so head-spinningly euphoric, so joyous and life-affirming, as a deliberate response to the unmooring felt following the death of their partner and amid an ongoing war with their own mental health, is a kind of miracle. But that’s just the start of what’s marvellous about this magnificent record.

In many ways its sound and style – typified by a questing musical omnivorousness, so an absence of any specific approach rather than the adoption of any single one – is a logical progression from Yellow, Thackray’s first LP proper, released in 2021. But Weirdo still feels like a stylistic surprise. In part this is the result of her decision to go back to an earlier mode of working, playing everything herself and recording at home, which was how she made her first EP, Ley Lines. Because her own talents are broad-based and numerous, and because she knows, understands and loves far more musics than those that easily fall within the jazz bracket she’s usually seen as operating in, Weirdo emerges as both an expected next step for Thackray, and at the same time the career equivalent of a high-speed handbrake turn.

You can’t pigeonhole it easily. For starters, Thackray uses her signature instrument – the trumpet – only sparingly. This feels a very consequential decision, the clean, strident, soaring sound almost entirely held back until towards the end, adding a sense of emergence and survival when at last she allows us to share its sonic uplift. It isn’t just her playing every instrument in the 1960s-TV-show-pastiche video for ‘Wanna Die’ that puts you in mind of OutKast circa Speakerboxxx/The Love Below: few artists have managed to inhabit as many genres at once, not just on a single album but within individual songs. If you wanted to give Weirdo a category, you’d have to make a new one up. Let’s call it a disco and P-Funk-inflected pop singer-songwriter album, then: but because it’s been made by a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist who’s grown up in British jazz’s emergent egalitarian improvisational tradition and has been surrounded and supported by what will surely be seen in due course as some of the greatest and most free-thinking musicians of all time, the results are therefore both expected and surprising, and never less than wonderful.

An unwavering commitment to excellence in musicianship and a lightness of compositional touch combine on every piece here to always exhilarating effect. Even the most complicated arrangements take flight with apparent effortlessness, in large part because they are fused with lyric-writing that prizes directness of communication over self-conscious poetics. Again and again Thackray hits hard and heavy through her startling and disarming economy of style. “I’m not whole any more, broken pieces on the floor,” she sings in the chorus of ‘Save Me’, a made-for-the-dancefloor belter which starts out like Afrobeat and ends up in Philly soul territory; the chorus of the helter-skelter, falling-over-itself ‘Wanna Die’ stacks words of only one or two syllables until they teeter into near collapse in an enjambed ending that disrupts what Stewart Lee would identify as the rhythm of the joke (“I am doing fine / I’m not gonna cry / I don’t wanna die / Except for all the times / I do”), simultaneously making it even funnier and even more of a punch to the guts.

Simply reading the track listing is enough to tell this perfectly executed concept album’s consistent, involving and ultimately empowering story. Some of the songs were written before her partner’s death and before Weirdo’s narrative existed: but it’s impossible to tell which ones without having them pointed out, testament to the thoroughness of the work completed here, and vindication of Thackray’s decision at the outset to tell Gilles Peterson and the rest of the Brownswood staff that they would have to leave her alone to get on with it and content themselves with hearing it when she’d finished the whole thing.

The individual songs are widescreen epics in their own right – even the ones where, if you judged them by their durations, you’d expect them to be interludes or skits. The record’s slightest moment – ‘Tofu’, two minutes and thirteen seconds of cyclical keyboards and snare rattle framing a descending vocal containing only the beancurd of the title and the occasional “oh” – works perfectly in its context, ahead of the even shorter ‘Fried Rice’ (“I wanna make fried rice / I don’t wanna go outside … Maybe then I’ll be alright”), comfort eating as shorthand for, and potential way out of, the depths of solitary depression. ‘What Is The Point’ lists things that you have to do but which don’t seem worth the effort when the person you normally do them with has gone, and stops abruptly in the middle of a purposefully directionless Minimoog solo, still short of two minutes.

Throughout, the writing and the execution are peerless, and not without considerable risk. ‘Where’d You Go’ – a full-length song, comprised of a series of questions not so much rhetorical as obvious, drives right up to the edge of banality until, just before halfway through, one final devastating query turns the thing on its head; the second half consists of a multi-tracked mantra (“I’m chasing shadows / Don’t know where you’ve gone”) underpinned by a superbly understated trumpet solo, deliberately buried a couple of floors down from the top of the skyscraper of a mix. ‘Maybe Nowhere’ – the result of Thackray “wondering what it sounds like to die” – starts out a loping beast built from moderately overdriven bass grumble, glittering guitar and room-shaking drums, and ends in a cascading overlap of instrumental layers that retain precision and clarity even as volume and intensity build to a final shuddering disintegration. ‘Remedy’ achieves its penultimate-track intention of signposting a way out of grief’s clutches by first adopting then subverting the cliches of self-help, standing transcendent on solid bass guitar bedrock as it shimmers into a sunlit coda that sets the spirit into a lark-like ascent.

She deals throughout in uplift and empowerment, both lyrics and music shining blazing floodlights into the darkest corners of her most despairing moments, showing us the routes she used to climb her way out and allowing us to follow her when we want or need to. It will not only be Thackray’s life that this superb LP will save”.

This is an artist I really admire and know is going to be making music for decades more. Go and check out her Grounding podcast and pick up a copy of Weirdo if you can. Such a stunning album and remarkable artist that we should all salute, embrace and celebrate. If she is not there already, then make sure that you…