At the Heart of Change

Ecomusicology

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EMILY WELLS IMMORTALIZES MESSIANIC MUSES IN REGARDS TO THE END.

Words by Crystal Hammon Photo by Rachel Stern

The pandemic shutdown of 2020 had an unexpected flipside for composer, vocalist and instrumentalist Emily Wells. At first, Wells felt disoriented and unfocused, but she quickly discovered that her ability to focus and to “hem” herself into her practice were changed for the better. “On a spiritual level, I was extremely grateful to be an artist as a way to work through ideas, as a way to distract my mind, as a way to be engaged in something bigger than myself,” Wells says.

That period of isolation fell neatly into a cycle the former Indianapolis resident has followed since her career took flight in the early 2000s. Loosely speaking, the pattern is this: a year or so of making a record followed by a year of touring to promote the album. She had just finished a year of touring in 2019, and 2020 was slated as a year of making.

Her latest album, Regards to the End, reveals what was on her mind as she got acquainted with the woods near a home she had recently purchased. “I would take walks at the beginning of spring, and I was starting to build a relationship with these woods and individual trees, and all the little shoots of green that were springing up,” says Wells, who learned to play violin via the Suzuki Method and played with the New World Youth Orchestra when she was a teen. “There was all this chaos in everyone’s life, and yet the woods were exactly right, as if they knew exactly what to do.”

While capable of “extreme amounts of fear around climate dystopia,” Wells draws hope from the higher power and intelligence she finds in the natural world. As proof, she points to The Year Earth Changed, the 2021 documentary film that chronicles how quickly the earth began to heal as a result of the pandemic shutdown. “That was such an incredible lesson in how much impact we are having on the planet,” she says.

Could hardships like the AIDS crisis and the COVID pandemic could be primers for curbing climate change? Wells thinks so. Her reflections yielded elegant tracks like The Dress Rehearsal, which opens with these lines:

“All day the trees are praying I go down in their splendor Then I am praying too, then I am praying too”

This year Wells is back on the road, promoting Regards to the End in the first live performances since the pandemic began. The album’s David’s Got a Problem and Love Saves the Day are inspired by the work and writing of people like environmental activist David Buckel, who self-immolated in 2018 as a political protest against global warming, and David Wojnarowicz, an artist and AIDS activist who died of AIDS in 1992. “David Wojnarowicz is someone I feel extremely close to, and that’s in part because of the kind of artist and writer he was, very much at the surface and present, but it’s also because his work is available to me because he made it,” Wells says.

In her ethereal, heart-wrenching voice, Wells delivers lyrics that waver between hope and dread. If you’re moved to action or your conscience is pricked, she is okay with that, but it isn’t her intention to proselytize. Wells doesn’t feel obligated to make climate change a theme or use it to define a listener’s experience. Music, she says, can be a lot of things: purposeless play, comfort or a rhythm for dance.

At the same time, she admits that working with conceptual structures is helpful to her creative process. “If that means that my audience or listener wants to engage in those structures with me, and through that, some kind of consciousness or faith is aroused, then I dig it,” she says. “Maybe that’s empathy. And isn’t empathy the heart of all political movements and change?” ■

Learn more about Emily Wells and her new album, Regards to the End, at https://www.emilywellsmusic.com Ecomusicology

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