Transcription of Emilia Dahlin for the show Musical Journeys #211
Lisa: I was first introduced to our guest, Emilia Dahlin, at a Tedx that happened a few years ago here in Portland. I’m really glad that we are able to connect and bring her in to speak with us today because she’s a pretty inspiring lady. Emilia Dahlin is a singer-songwriter based in Greater Portland. Born on a small farm south of Boston to a musical instrument collecting father and accordion playing mother, Emilia was destined for a life of music. She started piano, formally, at the age of five and trained classically for the next 13 years. It was Christmas day, 1996, when Emilia decided she wanted to play the guitar. She went up to the attic, pulled out a warped and worn guitar that once belonged to her great grandfather, and started to play. She never stopped.
She now lives in Gorham with her husband and son. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Emilia: Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Lisa: It’s such a lovely story of your life. I loved it that your father was a musical instrument collector and your mother was an accordion player. Those both have very different musical connotations in my mind.
Emilia: Oh boy, I don’t know. I mean, in some ways there were a lot of different genres and styles that I grew up with in the household. My mom is actually a really big Broadway fan, lots of musicals, Tommy tunes, and my dad really loves classical music and he has gone more towards Celtic and so there was always just a lot happening. Then we had my uncle who was a radio DJ in the 70s. He got his collection of vinyl, Led Zeppelin, Beatles, just classics from that era. I feel really lucky that I was immersed. In some ways I feel like it set me on this path early on.
Lisa: It was Christmas Day, 1996. What was it about that particular day that was so specific?
Emilia: This is going to sound really cliché in some ways…
Lisa: You can be as cliché as you want to.
Emilia: … For a sing-songwriter. I received 10,000 Curfews which was the Indigo Girls Live CD that day. My sister Ingrid had given it to me. I was listening, and they’re incredible songwriters, just so gifted and great musicians as well. I was listening and I thought, “I want to do this. I need to do this.” I knew that we had a couple guitars laying around which belonged to my great grandfather and so I decided that was the day. We had a few books laying around, instruction books, and that’s when I started.
Lisa: So this is actually more of a family business than just your mother and your father. It sounds like … great grandfather guitar, I mean; you’ve got some music running through your veins.
Emilia: Yeah, so my Italian great grandfather, he got to play clarinet at Giuseppe Verdi’s. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Verdi.
Lisa: Yes.
Emilia: At his birthday party when he was just a kid. So yeah, I’d say it runs in the family a bit.
Lisa: When I heard you speak at TedEx a year ago you were talking about the work you did travelling around the world and actually doing work with different groups, playing guitar, singing songs, and it was a very, it was like a, I don’t know like almost a musical missionary thing that was happening. It was really pretty fantastic.
Emilia: Thanks. I can’t say there was a mission in mind. I was travelling with a group of people and we were visiting sustainable and intentional communities in different places in the globe that had been longstanding there for 50 years and more, and really looking at the challenges and the successes of how a really strong community is built. Wherever we were music was the thing that brought everybody together.
Having a background in music I got to really plug in and pull people together a little bit in that way. It was just, it just cemented for me this idea of the power of music to really connect people, and in places where I could not speak the language at all, and these little islands in Indonesia, people, we really connected through music. It’s also amazing to hear when I was in the favela in Sao Paolo, Jason Mraz being pumped out through the speakers, and people who couldn’t speak English but they were singing along to the music, and in Indonesia people understood the rhythmics. It is incredible to hear the reach of songs in music that goes out into the world. Yeah, powerful stuff.
Lisa: So how did that work? If you couldn’t speak the language, and I’m assuming that you were playing songs that you knew. Did you also pick up songs that were from wherever it was that you went?
Emilia: Yeah, so we would teach each other songs. Even though you might not understand what the words are saying or exactly how to say them you can pick it up. There was a lot of just teaching each other or figuring it out, picking up my guitar and just noodling around until I could contribute in some way or participate.
Lisa: What about musical instruments? Did you pick up any musical instruments that were part of the culture of wherever you went?
Emilia: I did not. I got a couple of really small percussion instrument, but we were living out of a small bag. I had Doug Green of Green Design here in Maine lent me a little traveler guitar, a little backpacking guitar. It was light enough that I could take it with me. That was about the only thing that I had room for to travel.
Lisa: That’s interesting. I didn’t realize that they had traveling guitars. It kind of makes you seem like an itinerant musician.
Emilia: Backpacker, some look like little sticks, they’re very, very thin guitars so it’s pretty cool.
Lisa: You’ve been working with Seeds of Peace I believe and this kind of extends on this multicultural global interest that you have. Tell me about that.
Emilia: Before I left I always had this belief in the power of music to bring people together and that’s playing at a bar and the old sport or it’s playing in some kind of a multicultural setting where it’s really bringing people together. I think that serves in their own ways and really important ways. I had been touring really hard for over a decade before I went on this trip and was really, really getting tired. Also from feeling like something was missing. Being a DIY musician and doing a lot of your own booking and managing and promotion it was getting tiring for me and feeling like I was missing a little bit of that mission piece, like what can I do that’s greater outside of myself through music to do something positive in the world.
I had gone on this trip and when I left I was kind of at the height of my career and I had just released this new CD that I was really proud of, Rattle Them Bones, and I had just opened up for Ani DiFranco and I was touring around. It was a good time. I thought, “Okay, if I leave now is this going to be the end of things? Does this … Do I lose my momentum?” But I felt really strongly that I needed to find a different way to engage. So when I came back a good, dear friend of mine, Deb Bicknell who is a facilitator … You’re smiling.
Lisa: I’m smiling because I went to high school with Deb Bicknell.
Emilia: Oh you did?
Lisa: Yes. It’s a small world Maine thing.
Emilia: Yeah, and she’s famous around here a little bit. A lot of people know Deb for being an extraordinary person. She and I got together and she said, “You know, I have this idea. I just had this incredible experience in Gaza where I was brought to this place and they played music and I finally felt like I was home. I was in this really unfamiliar place and it just brought everybody together. And I’ve been wanting to do something like this here.” I had also been feeling like that. So we got together and we called this project, it was The Transcendence Project, the idea that music gives us this ability to transcend, our personal boundaries in some ways aren’t geographic boundaries and political.
Deb had been working with Seeds of Peace, for a while, we’re just listening for, okay, well; we want to do this thing. How is it going to manifest? And how it ended up manifesting is that we collaborated with the educators’ course through Seeds of Peace. This one particular year, so this was now 2012 I believe, 2012, they brought educators from nine different countries in conflict from the US, Pakistan, India, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, there was somebody there from Gaza. I don’t know if I said Jordan. I want to make sure I have everybody. You can go on the website and check it out.
Speaker 5: You did say Jordan but can you maybe just list the last couple or list one more or …
Lisa: Or you can just say nine different countries such as, give a few.
Emilia: Okay, thank you. There are nine different countries in conflict from the US, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Pakistan, India, and these are all people who engage the arts and the peace working work that they do in the world. 35 different people came to the camp here in Maine and they were having their own experience in the camp. What The Transcendence Project brought to it was a performance. We were brought in to help cultivate and foster this performance that would become a public performance and offering an opportunity for people here in Maine.
We had 10 days to get together these 35 people from nine different countries will all different disciplines from … They were writers and poets, singers, percussionists, and musicians, cellists, viola players, and we had no plan whatsoever of how we were going to do it. So we got everybody together in a room and over the course of 10 days these songs rose and these kind of theatrical dramatic pieces as well and readings. We were in Portland and put on this performance at the end of 10 days and it was a pressure cooker. Before the curtains opened we had no idea what was truly going to happen on stage. It was absolutely beautiful. It was a breathtaking evening with just an incredible show of creative solidarity.
People were really moved by the experience and over the past few years we’ve all kept in touch and decided this music, these writings, this work has evolved from this piece, how can we carry it forward and how can we become kind of a clearing house … Not a cleaning house … How can we become a resource for other people who are out doing this kind of work, using the art as a catalyst for social change in the places where they are?
So Shoshana Gottesman who is the viola player and has worked at Seeds of Peace, she wrote a grant to continue this work, and it was funded. She’s been kind of the catalyst who’s roped everybody in, and I will say, trying to record. We re-recorded these songs. It was really difficult trying to get a singer from Gaza to record. I mean this is … We don’t … I feel like it’s hard to imagine here in the US just trying to move across borders can be incredibly challenging for a lot of these folks and in some cases really dangerous. What they’re doing and the people that they’re collaborating with is considered dangerous in some ways. So people are really putting themselves on the line for this vision.
We’re just releasing a website. We’re calling it, We Make the Road by Walking. There are writings. There are recordings. We’ve put it out on Bandcamp. It’s free. It’s by donation only so we really wanted to make it accessible. It’s connected to a link on the Seeds of Peace website which is again a resource for educators where they can find more material, ideas, and just hear the story of about what we’ve been doing. That’s the long version of We Make the Road by Walking. If you go to Bandcamp and type in “We Make the Road by Walking” you can find the CD.
Lisa: You also have your own personal live music CD coming up. Now you’re going to play a song for us which I’d like you to tell us about.
Emilia: This is a newer tune. It’s entirely inspired by Maine. Part of the reason why I’ve chosen to stay here in Maine is just I find it the natural beauty of Maine is so inspiring to me. We were living on a friend’s farm for the summer up in Montville, Maine, which is near the mid-coast and this arose over two days. The moonlight streaming in the window and the owls and the birds that were around, and just feeling a lot of gratitude for this natural beauty that I get to experience around me here. (singing)
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Lisa: Well that was very beautiful and I can imagine that your son probably enjoys hearing you sing that to him. You are the mother of an 18 month old at this point.
Emilia: I am.
Lisa: And he keeps you pretty busy I think.
Emilia: He does. I’ve got to say it’s been a real struggle to keep my identity as an artist during the past 18 months and keep a creative practice. I sing my way through my days. Always singing. But to really sit down, and I think people, anybody who has a creative practice can understand that it takes time and in some ways discipline to really continue creating work. It’s part of the reason why the new CD feels … Live recordings is really exciting. I am still getting out and playing and hoping to do more of that. I’ll be performing at Federal Street Folly which is part of the Press Hotel on October 2nd. It’s the first Friday. So the first Friday at Federal Street Folly, it’s a great alliteration, it’ll help you remember. Yeah, I’m feeling excited about, feeling like a song writer again.
Lisa: I must say for those of you who are listening and heard the Aaron Frederick interview there might be some echoes here because Aaron is actually Emilia’s husband. We actually had a conversation about what it was like to have a small child in the house and how it shifted one’s ability to I guess exist in the world in the way that one was used to previously. I’ve heard this before. It’s funny to hear it from your standpoint and also from Aaron’s standpoint.
Emilia: Anybody who’s a parent can understand. It’s just a major adjustment. You’ve got to reprioritize and it’s also just a shift in identity I think becoming a mother and thinking, “Okay, who was I, who am I now, who do I want to be, and who can I be,” are questions I’m asking all the time.
Lisa: Hey, I feel it. I have my own three children and I think it’s interesting how often I go out in the world and I am Campbell’s mom, Abby’s mom, Sophie’s mom and my oldest is 22, so that’s been a couple of decades which is about half of my life of being somebody’s mom. I totally understand what you’re saying. I think it’s interesting for you because at the end of the day I can leave my house and go to my job and I can be that person at that job. If you’re a creative individual who’s trying to be working creatively out of your home, then I’m guessing it’s not so easy to do that.
Emilia: No, in fact, when I leave here I brought my guitar and I’m going to the park, I’m going to the east end and I’m going to bring my guitar and I’m finding space away from home. That’s what I need for my own creative process. I think that’s been a really important part of figuring out how to do this, is okay, how can I support my creative process best? And for me that means being away from the responsibilities that I have and finding quiet space and being outside too.
Lisa: You also do work as a teacher. You are an artist in residence at a local school and this is something that you find pretty gratifying.
Emilia: Yeah, it’s been incredible, it’s been great. My role as a teaching artist started through The Telling Room here in Portland. I just have a huge amount of respect for the work that The Telling Room does in the community. They had pulled me in to do a songwriting workshop. I had also done that with Rippleffect. I had started doing this a little bit more with kids. I’d go in and we’d talk about some of the literary tools and basics of songwriting and then within a few hours we’d whip a song together and it was a lot of fun.
I started working with the Maine Academy of Modern Music as well and the founder and director Jeff Shaw is on the PTO over at Ocean Avenue elementary school, as well as Gibson Fay-LeBlanc who’s former executive director over at The Telling Room, so the PTO over to grant that was funded through the Maine Community Foundation and in part by the Maine Arts Commission to fund arts enrichment throughout the year for these 450 kids, K-5, a very diverse vibrant school. They had writing, they had dance, and they had some sculpting as well.
I went in to write songs with all 450 kids, so I was working with in tandem with Dr. Mack who’s the music teacher over there. We wrote a song over the course of the year, a song for each class, so 21 songs. We’ve written 63 songs throughout the past three years, some of them not as complex as others obviously with the kindergarteners, and some of them very complex and I think sophisticated for an age group that you might not otherwise think that they’d be up for that kind of a challenge. Every year there’s been a different prompt but it’s been really gratifying.
As part of that we’ve brought in musicians and song writers from the community, so we’ve brought in The Fogcutters, a 19-piece big band to play for these kids. They were blown away. Sontiago came and rapped. Sam James came in and told stories and played and showed them all his guitars, The Resonators. It’s been really exciting and a way to engage the community here. I think for some of these kids it’s the first time that they’ve been exposed to live music like that. The kids have loved it and the school has been really welcoming. I hope I get to continue that work with them.
Lisa: Because you’re talking about this I’m interested because I’m thinking about the different ways in which we communicate. Obviously we’re in a multimedia world these days, so we’ve got social media, we’re very image, very photo driven. The songwriting piece though it’s not necessarily something you immediately jump to. We think about sharing music but we don’t necessarily think about writing a song and sharing our story through music.
Emilia: It’s a really wonderful way to engage and talk about imagery, creating imagery only through words and through the feeling of the song. We talked a lot about literary tools and how to create really strong imagery, and storytelling. As humans we’ve been storytellers, every culture throughout history, and I think there’s a piece that’s really … Stories are important and for a lot of different reasons, for legacies, in terms of history, in terms empathy and being able to understand each other, and compassion, that is what stories do, they bring us in and allow us to live in somebody else’s shoes or experience somebody else’s experience.
I think all kids should be storytelling more and I think as a culture it’s becoming a lot more popular and kind of in vogue when you think about the moth and all these storytelling events that are becoming huge and it’s simple but I think it’s because it’s part of what we do as humans and crave in a way.
Lisa: I have recently done some … I guess some studying up on linguistics because I love language and I love the idea of languages. I had no idea that there are more than 6000 languages in the world. We think of some standards but what some people would call dialects, they’re actually languages. It’s just that they aren’t maybe as codified, they aren’t as written down. Also this idea that if the world were 24 hours old then it would only be 23 and a half would be when we started to write things down, so there is this amazing oral history tradition and probably part of it is carried through with song. You have this long legacy behind you.
Emilia: Without a doubt. Without a doubt. We’re doing it digitally but I still firmly believe there’s no substitute for resonance and what happens when you hear a voice and it comes from a real body with emotions and we are all, we receive it in a different way when it’s actual sound.
Lisa: Emilia I know people are going to want to hear you at the Press Hotel at the first Friday that’s coming on October 2nd and they’re going to want to get your Live CD and they’re going to want to learn more about Seeds of Peace. Do you have a website?
Emilia: Yes, emiliadalhin.com. My name is spelt with an E, it’s E-M-I-L-I-A, Dahlin is D-A-H-L-I-N so emiliadahlin.com. I also have a Facebook page. You can find me in the digital world pretty easily, but I’d say the website and Facebook page are probably the best ways to find out about what’s going on and about The Transcendence Project Seeds collaboration.
Lisa: You can also see a picture of Emilia and her beautiful child and her lovely husband. They’re all in the Old Port Magazine Active Life. This is with Aaron Frederick. You can listen to the conversation we had with Aaron not so long ago. We’ve been speaking with Emilia Dahlin. She’s a singer-songwriter based in Greater Portland. It’s really been wonderful to speak with you today and thank you for all the great things you’re doing to bring music to the world.
Emilia: Oh I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I’m grateful.