Emma Donovon to Perform in Mojos This Friday With Latest Album
Tickets from Moshtix
Emma will be returning to Perth for one show only on Friday December 13 at Mojo’s in support of her critically acclaimed ARIA-nominated new album, Til My Song Is Done (Emma was nominated for Best Solo Artist). This will be Emma’s first headline show in Perth in over a year since last performing at The Rechabite Hall during the Perth Festival in Feb 2023.
It will be a special homecoming for Emma who is of Yamatji heritage from WA. She regularly performs songs in Gumbaynggirr and Noongar traditional languages, providing audiences with a deep connect to Country and community.
In many ways Til My Song is Done is a return home for Emma Donovan. A getting back to the sounds of country, with the feeling of being on Country.
Before her soul-funk and gospel output with The Putbacks, before her Black Arm Band years and even before the Stiff Gins, there were Emma Donovan outfits of silk and sequins and two-song sets of the biggest country hits.
Little Emma, the 10-years old Aboriginal girl with prodigious talent, would take the stage at the Yarra Bay Sailing Club near La Perouse in Sydney to belt out Loretta Lynne and Tammy Wynette songs, accompanied by the likes of the Koori King of Country himself, Roger Knox, or Col Hardy, the first Aboriginal artist to win a Golden Guitar in 1973.
Nan and pop, Micko and Aileen Donovan, renowned in their own right on the country music circuit, had all the connections with Indigenous country music royalty, says Donovan. Just like they had all the cassettes.
“We’d be waiting for nan and pop to visit because we knew the latest cassette of Uncle Roger or Uncle Col would be travelling down to western Sydney from Macksville with them. A lot of Uncle Rogers gospel music already meant a lot to me. Those cassettes were like gold!”
And there was Little Emma at 11-years old, travelling out to Tamworth with nan and pop and the family country music band, The Donovans, which comprised of Little Emma’s five uncles and her mother Agnes.
It was Agnes that stitched the silk and sequins over the next half dozen years into diamanté-flash stage outfits for Little Emma to wear in the music festival’s busking competitions and talent quests.
“I was pretty shy growing up as a kid, so for mum to style me up in all the little outfits, I’d be like, ‘Oh, shame. Take me.’ But once I’d sing, and once I’d be there and doing a song, it was different,” says Donovan.
Armfuls of winner’s trophies came her way, but eventually so too did a time when 16-years old Emma began to think country music was all too daggy. After all, Christine Anu, Lauryn Hill and Maria Carey weren’t getting around singing country, were they?
Within a couple years, Donovan had co-founded The Stiff Gins, and shortly afterwards went on to sing with the Black Arm Band, and in collaboration with her heroes Archie Roach, Ruby Hunter, Christine Anu, Yothu Yindi and Paul Kelly.
She continues to perform alongside some of Australian music’s most notable names, including Indigenous stars Briggs, A.B. Original, Dan Sultan, Shellie Morris and Spinifex Gum in styles ranging from soul, to reggae, to R&B, and gospel.
Faced with an opportunity to record her first solo album since the 2004 EP project titled Changes, and her first album after eight years without The Putbacks ensemble, Donovan says she was propelled into some deep introspection.
“I wanted to approach the album as a clean slate, but looking back at what makes me who I am,” Donovan explains. “I began by asking myself, who am I? Who is Emma Donovan? And what do I want to do? I want to be the deadly granddaughter, niece and daughter. I want to make my family proud.
Til My Song is Done is honouring that legacy of our family country music ways.
“That’s exactly what this album is for me, like if they’re proud and they’re happy, if the family is honoured, that’s all I need to know. And mum would be proud.
I know this album is just the start of continuing to stand strong not only for my daughters but for all the other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women working in the Australian music industry today.”
Released in April, the album comprises 11 tracks, including October 2023’s first single release, Blak Nation. All songs on the album are written and produced by Donovan and Mick Meagher (The Putbacks, The Bamboos, Kate Cebrano, The Pigram Brothers, Ross Hannaford). The two have a powerful creative connection and have worked together since their shared Black Arm Band days.
The second single, Lovin Looks Like, released in January coinciding with Emma on the road with American blues, country, and Americana singer-songwriter, Charley Crockett.
The sound and feel of the new album conveys Donovan’s musical journey, from singing those big country numbers as a kid, to joining her grandparents, mother and uncles performing church songs at community funerals, to the kitbag of skills picked up her over later collaborations in funk, soul and R&B.
The opening track Change is Coming is a plucky mix of bluegrass banjo that rattles the spurs of outlaw country while ripping out some lead surf-guitar licks. It’s all topped off with a cameo from the acclaimed and equally eclectic-minded, Liz Stringer.
“She’s one of my favourite songwriters. Her 2021 album, First Time Really Feeling, got me through some big stuff in my life,” says Donovan.
Then there’s the dreamy waltz of, Sing You Over, featuring Paul Kelly, with its lyrical dram-trails of lap steel and striking harmonica. It’s a track that Donovan says originated on her ukulele when she was first started thinking about the solo album.
“I think it’s a true representation of me musically, how I know to sing for mob,” says Donovan
“A big mob of us will be at community funerals and we’ll sing all of the old songs that my grandfather wrote and we’ll get in there to have that there for that grieving family and that body. And lyrically the song, I had lyrics from when I was at home and my mum was ready to go and she was ready to pass and I sung for her. I knew she was going to go, and my uncles were like, ‘Come on, sing for her now.’”
There’s the up-beat bright guitar of Liquid Gold with its 80’s-era radio country-pop arrangements replete with hand claps, and the crunchy Americana soft-country rock of Bringing All the Lovin, and the synthy, indie country-pop of I’ll Shine on You, and the yearning slide of Spring Thing, which is a love-lost song to a season:
“summertime over, return of the cool night…”
Til My Song is Done is like travelling the coast ways, the falls country, and over to the western plains on one circuitous, single long drive. It conjures up sun-drenched, solitary highways, suffused with country radio and shafts of bright light spearing through the windows.
It’s an album that sees Donovan return to her creative and performing roots, but it’s more than that. It’s pop and nan, her uncles, aunties, cousins, dad and mum travelling together, working together, singing together.
