A riveting interviewee, but a piece that was a mountain to climb

I have finally published my interview with Vermont based singer/songwriter, teacher and activist Emma Back over on The F-Word.

This piece has had a really long gestation period and has been beset by problems right from the beginning.

None of this was Emma's fault, I hasten to add. She proved to be a charming, thoughtful, insightful woman with a lot to say about the craft of songwriting, about community, singing, performance and activism, not to mention the highly dystopian world we happen to be living in.

But sometimes, even with a brilliant interviewee, and interview, you end up feeling like a piece is doomed to fail, to never see the light of day.

And so it was in this case.

We actually did the interview one evening (my time, afternoon by her time) in late April. Initially we had a go at doing it via Skype but the connection kept failing at her end so, after a few aborted attempts, we went with FaceTime because it was working on her phone. I'd never used FaceTime before so it was a new experience for me and, save for the fact we couldn't see each other, the batteries in my walkman died about two minutes in and I had to frantically replace them, oh, and occasionally the connection would cut out for a few seconds, we muddled through.

Emma is a very engaging and positive woman, despite everything she's been faced with over the past few years. She genuinely believes that music is a healing force for good and appears to inhabit a space as a community musician that has evolved organically, and that allows her to play to her strengths.

Her debut album, Little World, was released in late May and the original idea was that I would have the interview ready to go up on The F-Word about a week before the album's release.

This didn't happen for a number of reasons.

Firstly, about a fortnight after our interview I reached something of an impasse with my health and with my day job, which meant I had to stop transcribing the interview and cease most of my writing work altogether in order to concentrate on reaching a more stable situation with my health. This took a really long time and, ultimately, it's an ongoing process. In the interview I talked a lot with Emma about issues around balancing health with creativity and workloads so it was quite apt, or ironic, (depending on how you look at it) that I would be placed in a situation where I was fighting a similar battle while working on the piece.

Then, there was the editing process. For reasons perhaps linked to the above, both this piece and my last big interview piece for The F-Word have been very slow to finish, but also massively long winded once they reached the editing stage. We have a two edits process at The F-Word and, in the case of this piece and the interview I did with Vivien Jones of Kookie magazine, the second edits came back with the equivalent of lots of red pen and 'must do better' on them.

'Do better' I did, eventually, but, compared to my recent Florence + The Machine piece (which pretty much wrote itself and didn't come back from the second edit with any major changes), it was a very, very hard slog.

I'm hoping that the strain and stresses don't show up in the final published piece. I don't think they do, and I'm hoping that the piece will do well if only because I think Emma has a lot of really good things to say.

The Little World album is out now, and is available on Bandcamp and Spotify. There are CD's which I think should be available at independent record stores, though I haven't tested this theory.