Back in late 2020, in the darkest, pre-vaccine period of the pandemic, Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift was riding the crest of an unexpected wave from her kitchen table in Nashville, Tennessee.
Her self-released debut album of Bob Dylan covers, Blonde on the Tracks, was an indie hit, breaking into the top 10 in Australia and appearing on multiple end-of-year lists worldwide. Elvis Costello and Bernie Taupin (Elton John’s lyricist) were among her many notable admirers, as was legendary rock critic and noted Dylanologist Greil Marcus – who famously opened a review of Dylan’s contentious 1970 album Self Portrait with the words: “What is this shit?” His review of Swift’s album, for the LA Review of Books, was considerably kinder.
“It would be devastating if I got What Is This Shit [part] II from him,” Swift giggles, from a car en route from Seattle to Portland, as her tour winds down on the west coast. Despite the five-year interlude, most fans are seeing Swift for the first time: it’s taken that long to release her second album, The Resurrection Game – her first of all-original material, a lush affair lying on a king-sized bed of strings. It’s the musical equivalent of slow food. “I wanted it to sound as intricate and decadent as possible,” she says.
Swift has always moved slowly. Her debut EP was released in 2014. She started recording Blonde on the Tracks in 2017 with her husband, the English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, completing it with a luminous cover of Dylan’s just-released I Contain Multitudes.
It would be easy to assume that the five-year wait for The Resurrection Game was another severe case of the same writer’s block that first compelled Swift to make an album of covers. It would be equally easy to think she felt pressure to prove herself with her own material.
Neither are true. Swift is already well advanced on a new album of covers by another of her heroes, Lou Reed. “It’s called Sweet Hassle,” she reveals – a pun on Reed’s Street Hassle to equal Blonde on the Tracks’ play on Dylan’s divorced-dad epic, Blood on the Tracks.
The second reason for the half-decade gap in releases was much more serious. After a mugging in London, Swift suffered a mental health breakdown. She repeatedly sought treatment in the UK, only to be told – in Swift’s telling – that she wasn’t “crazy enough”.
In fact, she was in the midst of a major psychotic episode, which an unabashedly candid Swift compares to “a three-week long, pretty fucked-up acid trip”. Eventually, she returned to Australia, where she was hospitalised for more than six weeks.
Unfortunately, the treatment that followed was worse, with Swift suffering such severe anhedonia that she describes it as akin to living in a cement block: “I became the black-box warning that medications come with.”
And so she disappeared. It’s apt that her record label, which she shares with Hitchcock, is called Tiny Ghost. For over a decade, Swift has been like an ephemeral musical presence that occasionally glows, then goes dark.
Swift had started recording The Resurrection Game in early 2023 on the Isle of Wight, before her breakdown. When she was ready to return to the project in 2024, the experience had changed her perspective, to the point where some songs no longer worked.
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Having a nearly complete album was one of the things – along with Hitchcock and their two cats, Tubby and Ringo – that kept Swift going. “It was like this beautiful half-finished painting, and the part of me that wasn’t broken wanted to finish that off,” she says.
The time out ended up paying off, as the final pieces fell into place. One of the last songs she wrote for the album was No Happy Endings: “Desperate times call for desperate pleasures / And I’ve never done anything in half-measures,” she sings.
She finished recording a year ago, but again, Swift was happy to wait, not feeling ready to promote or tour the album. She likens the experience to being put through a blender; after coming out the other side, she says, “you’re like, OK, who am I? How do I fit in?”
Can she create art from a healthier and happier place? Swift says that her voice has a naturally sad timbre, so she is a natural singer of sad songs. It’s no surprise, then, that she was drawn to Lou Reed: “Like, Lou is just a fucking bummer, man!”
Creatively, though, she’s on a roll. Apart from Sweet Hassle, there’s an album of duets with Hitchcock, featuring original material written by both. Just don’t expect it any time soon. “I’m not King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard; I can’t put out a record out every six months.”
Hitchcock, who has always been enviably prolific, helped spur her on. Part of Swift’s problem, she says, is that she never felt entitled to make music; she grew up in an environment where “people didn’t grow up to be singer-songwriters.”
The Resurrection Game is about Swift’s revival, and the redemptive power of art. “Would I want to live that experience again? No. Do I regret that it happened to me? Also no. Life can capsize you at any time, for any number of reasons, and you’ve just got to roll with it.”
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The Resurrection Game is out today (Tiny Ghost)
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In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org