The Tuning Fork and 95bFM are excited to share that Dunedin-based folk singer and poet, Emily Fairlight will play support for Justin Townes Earle’s three-date New Zealand tour this August.
Fairlight currently lives in Dunedin and has been composing and performing for over a decade. She has played throughout NZ and Australia and recorded her sophomore album, Mother of Gloom with Doug Walseth at The Cat’s Eye Studio in Austin, Texas on her third trip to the USA. The “doom-folk” record, which was mixed at Ben Edwards‘ Sitting Room studios near Lyttelton harbour (Aldous Harding, Marlon Williams, Nadia Reid), was released in May and immediately praised for it’s “dream-like” qualities.
Praise for Mother of Gloom
“It’s a dreamy soundscape, washing over your senses with slowly drifting vocals and a lush backing of instruments.” – Finn McLennan-Elliott – Secondhand News
“…the music, the voice, is ethereal. Dream-like. Draped in a dark, sombre mood they rarely feel to name.” – Peter-James Dries – Muzic.net.nz
“Here is a singer/songwriter fully formed, here are songs that breathe and thrive due to the arrangements and the tender playing.” – Simon Sweetman – Off the Tracks
Emily Fairlight has a proper folk singer’s background: a teenage runaway adventurer in Australia and India, a circus school student who once sang naked at a burlesque night on a whim, a female-friendly pornography-free sex toy shop assistant, a barista and a runner/jack-of-all-trades at a digital visual effects company.
Her vocal style – a powerful quivering vibrato and a stark, haunting tone, teak-hard yet soft as crushed velvet – elicits comparisons to PJ Harvey, Bridget St John, Emmylou Harris and Cat Power, musicians with distinctive voices and a lyrical ability to conjure a kind of experiential realism, although Mother of Gloom can also hold its own alongside the storytelling of Will Oldham and soundscapes of Calexico.
Justin Townes Earle
New Zealand Tour 2019
with support from Emily Fairlight
August 23 – Tuning Fork, Auckland
August 24 – Blue Smoke, Christchurch
August 25 – San Fran, Wellington
Tickets at Ticketmaster
Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins
Nashville-based Americana heavyweight, Justin Townes Earle, returns to New Zealand this August following the success of his latest offering, The Saint of Lost Causes. Last here in 2017 for the Southern Fork Americana Fest, Justin Townes Earle will visit again for three headline solo shows in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington, August 23 – 25.
PRAISE FOR THE SAINT OF LOST CAUSES
“Far-ranging and fueled by both empathy and rage, it’s the opposite of myopic.”
– NPR Music
“Only a confident and fearless songwriter could take on this kind of subject matter and make it resonate.”
– Glide Magazine
