Emily Barker (born 2 December 1980)[1][2] is an Australian singer-songwriter, musician and composer. Her music has featured as the theme to BBC dramas Wallander and The Shadow Line. With multi-instrumental trio the Red Clay Halo, she recorded four albums: Photos.Fires.Fables. (2006), Despite the Snow (2008), Almanac (2011), Dear River (2013), before commencing a solo career with The Toerag Sessions (2015), Sweet Kind of Blue (2017), A Dark Murmuration of Words (2020), and Flight Path Rhymes (2021). Other projects include Vena Portae (with Dom Coyote and Ruben Engzell), Applewood Road (with Amy Speace and Amber Rubarth), and Room 822 (2022) with Lukas Drinkwater.[3]
Emily travelled to the UK in 2002, and was first based in Cambridge where she collaborated with guitarist Rob Jackson. They formed a band called The Low Country which released two albums, Welcome to the-low-country (2003) and The Dark Road (2004), tracks from which enjoyed plays on John Peel's BBC radio show.[4]
In 2006, Barker released her first solo album, Photos. Fires. Fables. before releasing albums under the alias Emily Barker & the Red Clay Halo.
Emily Barker & the Red Clay Halo filming the video for "Little Deaths"
The song "Pause - The Shadow Line" from Almanac was the theme tune for a major 2011 BBC2 drama serial, The Shadow Line and received a physical release. Martin Phipps again adapted the song for the title sequence.[5]
In 2012, Barker recorded a new version of "Fields of June", which had first appeared on Photos.Fires.Fables. and was released as a limited 7-inch white vinyl on Xtra Mile Recordings.
In July 2013, Dear River was released, charting at 99 in the official UK Albums chart.[6]Will Hodgkinson from The Times gave the album a four out of five star review, saying it contained "heartfelt songwriting... bridging the gap between folk, country and Fleetwood Mac".[7]
2014-present: Solo success
In 2014, Barker worked with Dom Coyote and Ruben Engzell and created Vena Portae.
In 2015, release the EP Anywhere Away which was the soundtrack to the UK movie Hector, released in December 2015.[8]
In May 2017, Barker released Sweet Kind of Blue which peaked at number 88 on the UK Albums Chart.
In 2020, Barker released A Dark Murmuration of Words. This album was inspired by a concern with the impact of climate change on the natural world. Barker explained, "Last year the climate crisis was very much at the forefront of all of our conversations and thoughts, wondering what we can do to adapt, and feeling helpless and guilty and angry and upset and all these things."[9]
In an interview with Bernard Zuel, Emily Barker elaborated saying, "It was really a response to a lot of what was going on in 2019 with the collective awakening of the environmental crisis. And it was terrifying. It's something that I'd been aware of before, and I was brought up by parents who were very conscious of that anyway, but I think a lot of people really looked at the personal impact in a big way and started realising the scale of this emergency. It's so hard to compute but for me, writing songs helps me to make sense of things that I can't process."[10]
In 2020, Barker covered the Billy Bragg song "Can't Be There Today" as part of a campaign to save musical venues during the COVID-19 crisis.[11]
In 2021, Barker released an alternative version of A Dark Murmuration of Words in 2021 – called Flight Path Rhymes. She discussed the reworking of the album saying "Recording A Dark Murmuration of Words was a wonderful immersive experience that involved my live band and multiple conversations with producer Greg Freeman. It was only as the album was coming together that I realised how all the songs intertwined...how, despite their different subjects, there was an underlying theme that tied them all together."[12]
In January 2022, Emily Barker and Lukas Drinkwater released an album of covers called Room 822.
Discography
Studio albums
List of studio albums, with selected chart positions
The WAM Song of the Year was formed by the Western Australian Rock Music Industry Association Inc. (WARMIA) in 1985, with its main aim to develop and run annual awards recognising achievements within the music industry in Western Australia.[22][23][24]
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