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Avalon Emerson
Written into Changes
1. Eden
2. Jupiter and Mars
3. Happy Birthday
4. Written into Changes
5. Wooden Star
6. God Damn (Finito)
7. How Dare This Beer
8. Country Mouse
9.I Don’t Want to Fight
10. Earth Alive
Change, they say, is the only constant in life. Fittingly, multi-hyphenate musician Avalon Emerson sounds at home harnessing the steady flux of her existence on Written into Changes, the memoiristic second album released under her Avalon Emerson & the Charm moniker. A product of five years of constant travel—including multinational DJing, moving from Berlin to Los Angeles to New York, and touring her self-titled 2023 & the Charm debut album—Written into Changes revealed itself not just geographically, but over time. It is a work of rigorous invention and revision that found the working versions of some songs hopping genres before settling into their final forms. The album’s themes of personal evolution and shifting relationship dynamics “came into clarity after they were all done,” according to Emerson.
The making of Changes was, appropriately enough, very different from that of & the Charm. “For the first album, the songs were pretty soft and kind of bedroomy,” Emerson observes. “And then playing them on a big kind of festival stage was a learning experience. Coming back into the studio for a second round, it was important to think about the dynamics and energy of what we were making and how they might be performed in the future.”
This body of work is band-driven but groove-heavy and dance-adjacent. The first song created for Written into Changes, the psychedelic “God Damn (Finito)” was started on the road and the blissed-out first single “Eden,” was created almost immediately after the tour wrapped. The break-beat-assisted latter track has a “baggy” sound that’s reminiscent of dance-rock hybrids of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The witty “How Dare This Beer” was written in loving tribute to the Magnetic Fields, down to the “euphoric and sparkly” hi-fi production that nonetheless has a low-fi feel. “’87 to ’94 is my idea of the best era of music,” says Emerson. “And with Nathan, our musical taste overlaps quite a bit.”
Nathan is Nathan Jenkins, aka Bullion, who co-produced & the Charm and returned to handle the bulk of its followup. Among the others on board were Rostam Batmanglij (formerly of Vampire Weekend), who co-produced “Jupiter & Mars” and “Earth Alive”; Emerson’s longtime friend Keivon Mehdi Hobeheidar, who plays bass on several tracks and cello on a few others; Jay Flew, a multi-instrumentalist who was involved in the initial writing sessions; and Emerson’s wife Hunter Lombard, who plays guitar. Much of the initial recording took place in Braintree, England, in the winter into spring of 2024. Emerson refers to her time there as a “a beautiful and focused retreat with Nathan and Jay.” The tracks with Batmanglij were cut in Los Angeles. Synth touches were added at the Synth Cabin at Rosen Sound in Glendale, California. Instead of designating a set band with every member adhering to a defined role, the “& the Charm” moniker describes a “collaborative entity” of musicians who work on this arm of Avalon’s creative output.
While the collaborative creation of Written into Changes diverged considerably from Emerson’s dancefloor-tailored solo productions, the influence of dance music is splashed all over it. Emerson’s work as a DJ inspired her to give “Eden” a longer intro and building conclusion.
“Happy Birthday” is one of the album’s songs that changed considerably over time – with an early draft starting out with an 80s no wave vibe before taking inspiration from Todd Terje and finding its identity as the euphoric groove that sits on the album. (“‘Inspector Norse’ is one of the best dance music songs that has been made and I wanted to bring that vibe in there,” says Emerson). And regardless of tempo or style, Emerson was fixated on her music’s low end as she crafted it. “Bass was definitely a priority,” she says. “Within the first 10 words that came out of my mouth when I was talking to Nathan Boddy, who mixed the record, were, ‘Let’s make sure to get that right.’”
Though the music on Written into Changes was in many ways a group effort, Emerson wrote its lyrics and melodies. Some are ephemeral—the “mosaic of vignettes of modern life” that comprises the trip-hoppy “Wooden Star” came from a running document Emerson keeps of imagery and turns of phrase. But most of the material on the album was sourced from Emerson’s personal life. “I was a bit abstract and oblique in the first record,” she explains. “So it was a goal with my lyrics this time around to be a little bit more direct.” The title track, one of the artist’s favorites, is about her move from Berlin to Los Angeles right before the covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020—when she sings, “Fist tight, knocking at your door,” she’s addressing Berlin directly. The frenetic “Happy Birthday” has a sunny spirit anchored by gently devastating lyrics like those of the refrain: “Too young to die / Too old to break through.” Emerson notes, “At a certain point you realize going through life is as much about living with disappointments as it is about celebrating the good times. Hopefully you have good people around you with which you can do both. With this song, and with a lot of my favorite songs, there is a contrast between something that’s kind of deep and pretty dark, then also a more joyful side to the music. It’s a nice foil.” That track arrives having been club-tested—Emerson has already dropped it into her sets at clubs like Panorama Bar at Berlin’s Berghain and New York’s Nowadays.
Both “Eden” and “Country Mouse” are odes to Emerson’s relationship with her wife, Hunter while “I Don’t Want to Fight” and “Earth Alive” are “about realizing you can’t change people and trying to take them for who they are, and sometimes that means loving them from afar,” she says.
Written into Changes is an album about not just accepting change, but embracing it with a full wingspan. Progression is a theme both on record and behind the scenes, so that “written into changes” describes a conscious approach to expression and life itself.
