Los Angeles based singer-songwriter Emma Danner is done putting a filter on her songwriting. Following a move from Seattle and Los Angeles and a breakup of a long-term relationship, the artist – who tours as Red Ribbon – felt it was time to take down the self-made safety net and really speak her mind. It’s something evident with the release of her third album, Red Ribbon, on November 1 via Danger Collective Records.
“I’ve always censored myself, but on Red Ribbon, I let myself be more free,” Danner says via the album’s press release. “This record feels visceral.”
Danner’s first album created in L.A. was made possible thanks to new friends as well as legendary producer Rob Schnapf, who has worked with the likes of Elliott Smith and Cat Power. The album features tracks such as “YSFP,” a song Danner wrote just days before her breakup and is an acronym that stands for “You’re So Fucking Pretty.”
“I wanted the raw emotions, the grief and freshness of that time to be palpable in the recording,” she says via press release. “I wanted to hear it in the vocals.”
Scummy Water Tower recently caught up with Danner to talk about the emotional new chapter of the band, finding freedom as a songwriter and how working with Schnapf and playing Smith’s guitar was life changing.
What are some of your favorite albums so far this year?
Ooh, man, that’s a great question. Trying to remember what’s come out this year. I mean, I can’t deny it. I did like the Charli XCX album [Brat]. That was fun to tuck in for the summer and just be like, “Let’s go! We’re doing this.” But yeah, that was a fun one. I can’t remember the last time a record came out and it was like, “Oh yeah, this summertime soundtrack, we’re all on board. That was sick.” I loved that. My memory sometimes fails me when I’m trying to think of lists, but I’ll say that it comes to mind because it’s a big blockbuster.
Your new album is your first release since moving from Seattle to Los Angeles. Why did you feel it was important to move? How did relocating help re-energize you?
So, basically, I was in Seattle, it was pandemic in 2020, and I worked at a [fried chicken] restaurant and it closed. I was out of work in Seattle. I’d been there for a couple of years. I feel like a lot of people moved at that time. A lot of things abruptly ended, so it was a good time to make a new start. So, I decided to make the move to Los Angeles and drove down for that. It was pretty crazy because the day before I was supposed to move, I got in this crazy car accident where I was stopped at a red light and this truck smashed my car up accordion style and was totaled.
So I had to delay the move by a couple days, but I had a pretty intense injury where I couldn’t see out of my eye. Actually, I had some surgery on it this year and it fixed it, which is a miracle thing. So that was kind of a rough start. I got to L.A. super injured, no car, and in pandemic, it was November 2020 and kind of moved blind into this apartment. That was pretty shitty. There was water shut off and some cockroaches and stuff like that. Whenever you get to a new city, it kind of takes a minute to find your footing.
I’ve been here for about four years, but really the beginning of this record started at that time. It started with that move, and I did move down here with a partner who I had been with for many years, and that came to an end, and that also kind of influenced things because I kind of found myself in a new city and where I didn’t really know anyone. I think out of challenges that comes a lot of inspiration. It took me a while to get my footing and through this time I was riding alone and that sort of thing.
But I ended up finding this amazing group of people to work with at a little studio called Mant Sounds, and that’s where I met Rob Schnapf, who worked with me to make this record. That was kind of special and lucky because he has made some of my favorite records. I love Elliott Smith, and I love Cat Power, and he made those, and those are some of my favorites as a teenager. When you’re a teenager, there’s a certain kind of reverence for music that’s really special. So that part of me was activated a little bit with him, and we basically worked on recording this album for a year, but just a couple days here and there. And I’ve never worked on a record that way. I’d only basically been like, “okay, I’m going in for 10 days. We’ll do tracking for six days. We’ll do overdubs for three days.”
So, there’s this immense pressure on this little bubble of time. But with this record, it was nice because when I went through my breakup, for example, I got to take…I started working on the record prior to that, but whenever I got a moment of inspiration, I got to be able to say, “Hey, are you available? Can we track it right now?” So, I feel like I got to capture a lot of the feelings of the little moments of inspiration I was going through versus trying to compress a body of work into a couple of days.
Was Rob the one that put together the backing band for you?
The backing band was made up of my friends, so I put that together basically. So, for example, my friend Monica, she came in for one track, and I have a few different drummers on the album. One of them is Kelsey Hart, who is someone I had met in Los Angeles through just art. Kelsey has an amazing energy, and I was very lonely in Los Angeles, and she was one of the people I met who was a friend to me. So, she came into the studio kind of out of the evolution of that friendship. And I also have a drummer named Pat Showy who played on some of my records years ago, and he’s from Texas. So, he came out for a little bit for a couple checks, and also Adam Halford, who is new, who was new to me, who I had never worked with before, and who I met in the studio.
Then the other musician on the album is, his name is Matt Schuler, and he kind of worked side by side with Rob, kind of as an engineer. So, Rob was working on the production and Matt Schuler was doing engineering work, and he ended up playing a lot of bass on the record. I played a little bit of the bass on the record, but where I don’t, and for the majority of the album, he’s playing on that. So, it was a really nice mixture of friendships that were a decade old, new friendships and new people I’d never met before. So, I love that balance. It was just like, it felt comfortable and familiar and Red Ribbon, but also had new energy to it.
What’s the story behind the band’s name, Red Ribbon?
It’s a Dragon Ball Z reference. But yeah, it’s funny though. Sometimes people will quiz me on Dragon Ball Z stuff, and I’ve got a little bit of knowledge. I can talk about Super Saiyan and shit. It could have other meanings. I like the idea that if you’re at a county fair, it’s maybe second place. If you’re putting your prize pig up in the county fair, blue ribbons are number one and then you get red and then yellow.
So, I like the idea of just kind of being like…oh, it’s a little off. You’re not quite number one. I like that. I love a little bit of an underdog-ness. I suppose that’s the origin, but I’ve just kind of carried it with me since, I mean, I think I’ve been playing under that name since maybe 2012. And in my mind, some of the writing maybe happened before it even had a name, but that’s kind of what stuck, and then I just stuck with it, quite stubborn.
It sounds like one of the biggest goals for the album was giving yourself more freedom to express yourself than you had in the past. Why was that important? What led to that line of thought?
I could go a lot of different directions with it, but I think in my previous work, I was interested in writing in maybe a more philosophical sense. And with this album, I wanted to be really clear and really specific and explicit and not philosophical. So, I would say generally, that’s kind of the gist of the feeling more expressive, particularly with the song “Gang Star.”
I wanted to write about pimp shit. I wanted to write about drugs and sex and things that maybe I had only written about through metaphor or that sort of thing. So, it felt good because it’s just like I feel like I had some previous thoughts maybe I would kind of cloak. I would write about these things, but they would be cloaked in more of a philosophical approach or something. You know what I mean?
So, to me, it felt good to shed that and just be like, “No!” here. Yeah, I’m singing about these more extreme things without having to make it a fucking riddle. You know what I mean? So, I think there’s beauty in both approaches. I love to philosophize with friends and that sort of thing, or alone or whatever, but there’s something really nice about being direct.
I imagine there’s kind of a balance with how personal you want to get with songwriting.
Yeah, I mean, I do really very much write from a personal place. I would love to explore writing about other people and that sort of thing, but a lot of it, I mean, the majority of it, I won’t say all of it, but it comes from a super personal place, for sure.
It sounds like martial arts have had a big impact on your confidence. How so?
For the year while I was working on the album on and off. So I’m new in L.A., I am kind of alone, and somehow I found this boxing gym, which really, I just started going all the time and learning how to throw a punch and how to feel confident if I’m on the block on the corner and I feel kind of funny, maybe someone I’m feeling uncomfortable or something, just knowing, okay, if I put my left foot a little in front of my right foot, then I’m in a good stance. You can kind of be ready and in action in a way. And I think I have a little bit of a hyper vigilance. I often feel like I need to be on guard for something, and it helped me with that because there’s some confidence I gained from learning how to throw a punch. And I’m not an expert by any means or anything, but that helped me so much.
And I think it interestingly aligns with wanting to be more direct and clear in my writing. Something about the more intense energy of that type of martial arts practice, or for me specifically boxing was in line with that. It helps me a lot. And I think even thinking about something like “My body is a Blade,” that track. It’s just the directness of fighting or sparring. It helps me a lot to be able to express myself clearly through my writing.
With going through the breakup during the writing process, how did that shift your view of the songs you had written and then went on to write?
Yeah, so it’s kind of interesting. The first few tracks were written prior to my breakup. Basically. I was in Los Angeles for about a year prior to the split, which for me was tough because it was the end of a five-year relationship, and he kind of just left one night and didn’t come back, and it was really painful. And at that moment in particular, I think I wrote “YSFP,” and I think I wrote that track two days before the split happened. And then I got a call from Rob because I was in the middle of making this album. I was like, “Hey, I really want to get in the studio because I really want to take the pain that I feel, I want it, and I can hear it in my voice. I want to take that and collect it in a jar.”
And as sad as that situation was for me, I guess for better or for worse, it’s inspiring and I got to capture some of that feeling of the pain, and I hope that people can believe what I’m saying. And yeah, some of the earlier songs on the album, when I look at them in hindsight, I can see that…I was more aware of the demise of that relationship than I knew. I can struggle with expressing how I feel, and sometimes I’ll think I’ll be writing about something else. But for example, back to “YSFP,” I wrote it, right just two, a couple days before the split, I found out my friend was getting married.
I was like, “oh, I’m kind of writing it about her.” So obviously it’s not that, and then it’s about the split. “Angeline,” for example, was a track that I had written earlier in the process of recording the album. And I had a catering job essentially for this lady in the Hollywood Hills. She was some Broadway type of star. She had some cardboard cutout of herself when she was super hot in her liquor closet, super trippy. The bathroom was this pink carpet, and it had a miniature grand piano covered in disco ball scales, weird ass, trippy rich lady shit.
I was helping her do a ladies luncheon or something, and it was a Valentine’s Day 11:00 AM thing, and my name’s Emma, and she kept calling me Anna the whole fucking time. She’d be in the other room, and she’d be like, “Anna.” And I corrected her about five times, and then I just gave up and I was like, “sure, I’ll be Anna for today. Whatever. I’m Anna.” So, when I wrote that song following that, I kind of changed the name to Angeline because it felt a little more fun to sing. But I was writing about that experience, but then when I listened to it, I’m like, “oh, yeah, damn, I’m talking about a breakup here.” I’m talking about my relationship and my breakup, even though I’m writing about this lady. You know what I mean? So, it’s like some earlier songs were more aware than I was more aware than I was willing to admit to myself about that situation. So that was definitely interesting.
You deal with some serious topics in your songs, but also there’s hopefulness and humor. Why do you think that balance is important?
That balance is super important. I think a lot of great comedians are kind of sad sometimes. You think about Mitch Hedberg or Chris Farley or somebody like that, and they have tragic endings. And I think sometimes when you have sadness or sorrow within you, then you’re able to hold bigger feelings of joy or happiness. And also, just life is so fricking short. It’d be impossible to get through without making a joke or two. Might as well. Humor can come from a dark place and be this little flicker of light that keeps things going.
What was the biggest way that Rob impacted the songs?
For my last two studio albums, I was working with an amazing producer named Randall Dunn, who has worked very much in the metal world, so Earth, Sunn O))), super heavy music. I met him in Seattle, and we ended up working in both Seattle and New York and stuff. So, working with Rob was a contrast to that. And I think me and Rob, we shared some similar touchstone records, like cornerstone records for us, Big Star or I had mentioned he made some of my favorite records that were my personal, so we shared kind of maybe a little more cornerstone records.
He really put me at ease because he’s quite funny, I would say a lot of the time, honestly. We were just making shit jokes or diarrhea jokes in the studio, which that’s maybe the lowest level form of humor, but I don’t know, he made me have a little bit of fun and feel a little bit relaxed. Because when I first started working with him, I was quite nervous. And his studio itself, like Mant, it’s small and it’s kind of like a cocoon. It’s something about the space. I just felt comfortable. Going into the studio multiple times was inspirational versus cramming all the inspiration into a little 10-day window. That really shaped things a lot.
I would say too, he had a slower approach to each song. We were probably spending two days on a song, give or take, but that is never something I had done. I had always tried to record tracks quickly with the clock in mind, and we really took our time with each song. For me, that’s quite slow. I mean, the songs themselves maybe took longer than that because some of them I’m writing for years or whatever, but in the studio itself, it was slower. It was just slower. The whole thing was slower. And I think that worked out, and I think that’s an approach I want to continue to take. But also, yeah, he’s funny. And he made me feel like instead of the stress of the like, “oh, shit, we got to get everything done in this time,” the pressure, the nervousness, all of that, being in the studio, I felt a little nervous at first, but then that was kind of removed and I was able to have a little bit of fun, a little more relaxed approach.
You got the opportunity to write a song on Elliott Smith’s guitar. What was that experience like?
Yeah. That’s another thing about that studio is it was kind of filled with these beautiful instruments that had been through a lot of things. And for me, Elliott Smith is kind of like Jesus to me, you know what I mean? He is very important to me, and Rob had a super close relationship with him. I didn’t want to press him for that. If you go through something, obviously he had a sad ending to his life, and because they were friends, and I didn’t want to press Rob, I didn’t want to ask him a million questions about Elliott or anything. I kind of wanted to wait and see when he would mention things and just have a careful ear to listen, because outside of the hero status at this that he is, to me, I understood their friendship was grounded in reality and would be like for you or me, if one of our best friends passed away that it would be hard to talk about. So, I tried not to press him for stuff like that information. But sometimes he would say, give me little bits of history and things that were really special. I used a couple different guitars, but the guitar I used, I think I was using Kurt Vile’s guitar a lot. It’s like this blue fender, a little whammy on it.
But yeah, Elliott’s Gibson [ES-330] was used for a lot of tracks, and to me, it was kind of a sacred and holy thing for me because it felt like an honor. I think “Gang Star,” the first little bit of it was just like we had some downtime in the studio, and I was just kind of sitting in the tracking room noodling on Elliott’s Gibson, and I just was able to start writing that song on that. And I don’t know, that’s really fucking special. And it’s one of those things that’s hard to measure for me, but it felt holy a little bit.
And one thing Rob told me about that guitar was like Elliott had nothing, and Rob basically gave him this guitar to use for, I think he used it, you can see it in the old footage from this festival that Elliott was playing. It was beautiful. It was really special to me. I used to work at this music museum, and they had Jim Hendrix’s white Stratocaster, one of the most famous guitars of all time, the one national anthem on where it sounds like bombs dropping, and they keep it in the archive, and when they bring it out, it’s in a protected box. But I think there’s a lot of beauty in having an instrument that is a historic artifact being used for people to pass through the studio to create music still. I think that’s what he’d want. I don’t think he’d want it to be on display, not able to be touched. I feel like he might like it to know that people are still making music on it. It wasn’t treated as precious or anything. It was treated like a vehicle for making music still, which is good.
Yeah. What were some other big surprises making the album?
Well, we did have a lot of late nights, and so we got to play around a little bit. The end of “YSFP” is like, I had a wine glass, and I got to take my finger and do this thing that we tracked that. Just weird stuff like that where I’m like, oh, that’s so fun. It’s not an instrument, but let’s get it in there at 3:00 AM and we’re feeling weird. So that was fun. Yeah.
What are you most looking forward to in the months ahead?
I do want to take these songs out on the road. I feel like there’s the three parts of being a musician or writing, recording and then playing shows. So that’s what I’m really looking forward to and hoping to build to do a little bit. I mean, my last album, it came out in 2021, so it was a pandemic record, a pandemic release.
And so touring was a little bit out of the question. So, I haven’t been able to do a national tour since 2019. I did, I think 2022, I did a little European UK situation, and I’ve done a couple West Coast stuff over the past few years since my last release. But yeah, I can’t wait to do it properly because I was going really, really hard into 2019 on the road with Red Ribbon and with other bands as well. So, I think I have some of that in me still. So, I’m not going to force it, but I hope I can play a lot of live music, number one. That’s the number one thing I’m excited about.
Do you think you’ll be adding shows later this year or next year?
Yeah. I am talking with a festival in New York. I don’t think they’re announcing anything until February, so I don’t know how much I can talk about it, but that is maybe in the spring sometime, hopefully if things go the way, go according to plan and whatnot. So, it’ll be good to be over to the East Coast. And then, I don’t know, I feel like with touring how it has worked for me in the past, it’s like I’ll book one little leg and then you kind of stack it all in a row and build it off of itself. So, I hope I can do that a little bit. And I hope to kind of see some places I haven’t seen since pre-pandemic. I would love to go back to Alabama or Louisiana or the South. I miss that. And I’d love to go up to Wisconsin and the northern states.
You can follow Red Ribbon on Facebook and Instagram and check out the band’s music on their Bandcamp page.
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
