Artist Fri Aug 21 2009

Emily Wells Delightfully Suprises

Emily Wells played a beautiful set at Millennium Park on Monday as part of the city's Edible Audible Picnic series, but if you couldn't get out of the office for lunch that day, you have another opportunity to see her tomorrow night at Schubas.

Wells is a multi-instrumentalist (and by multi I mean everything from violin to toy piano to sampler) whose music I can only seem to describe with that one word: beautiful. You might think merging two genres as different as classical and hip-hop would be bizarre, but she somehow makes it just that--beautiful--but with edge. She is talented enough to have turned her nose up at a lucrative major label deal at the age of 17, opting instead to hold on to the creative control that we as listeners are lucky that she did.

On Monday she ruled the equipment switching from instrument to instrument, accompanied only by her drummer, Sam Halterman. Songs started off slow, with her building up the backing tracks that they would explode into as they formed. Her symphonies were sometimes dark and always dramatic, her quivery voice making them all the more haunting, but at the end of the show she switched gears into lighter, more upbeat songs like "Passenger" and "Take It Easy San Francisco."

One interesting thing I read about Wells was that on her last full length album, The Symphonies: Dreams Memories & Parties, she didn't simply play one single violin track over and over to create depth; she actually recorded up to 21 separate tracks to craft her very own symphony. Right now she is touring on the heels of her new EP Dirty, which if you're wise you'll pick up at the show, and if we're lucky, maybe her next album will have "Passenger" on it.

Emily Wells plays at Schubas Saturday, August 22. Tickets are $8 ($10 door). Show starts at 10pm. Horse's Ha and Leroy Bach open. 21 & up. 3159 N. Southport.

Photo by Anne Carmack.

— Michelle Meywes / Comments (0)