Avalon Emerson is embracing her season of change

Music hadn’t been her Plan A, nor was it really even her Plan B. Her mother was a mail carrier, and her father held a variety of jobs over the years. She’d been working in one way or another since she was sixteen. There was no safety net, and she knew she needed to be self-sufficient. Emerson had gone to college for journalism, but when it became “abundantly clear” there wasn’t a path towards financial security there for her, she dropped out and pivoted. Not music, but to coding.

“I was really interested in the Internet," Emerson explains. "I was very optimistic about it. This was 2007...2008 and the Internet was exciting. Now the Internet is just five apps on your phone. My generation was one of the last ones where it was easy to have a hacker mindset, where you can see behind and see how things work and figure it out."

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At the time, everyone was trying to break things down – to innovate, and to build for the better. It’s a far cry, and an almost unbelievably optimistic one, from the digital landscape we know today, but it was something Emerson felt drawn to — until it started to turn. As the tech landscape started to consolidate in the early 2010s, Emerson knew she needed a change. Pocketing a big tax return from her web developer job, she quit, and moved to Berlin. At this point, she’d already started DJing in earnest, but knew she had to pick up other work in the city to survive. Her first apartment was cheap, and life, she says, “was chill.” DJing began taking off, and, soon enough, Emerson quit her day job to pursue life as an artist full-time.

Seasons of change like this are something Emerson has been grappling with a lot lately. Change itself is, in many ways, the connective tissue of Emerson’s new record as Avalon Emerson & the Charm, Written into Changes. It tackles everything from her transatlantic movements to incessant feelings of self-comparison, all written from an intense place of introspection and compassion. The title track, “Written Into Changes,” is about leaving Berlin — though that only happened years later. “The gravity of it didn’t hit me until years later, because when you’re in a place or you have a certain job or a certain group of friends or certain relationships, you don’t really realise that it’s such a self-contained era until you’re decently outside of it,” Emerson tells me.

It was almost as if, after being on the go for so long, she looked up and everything was different. Everything about that formative time in her life — despite still carrying so many of the people and experiences from it — suddenly felt foreign. It’s that struggle to grappling with something already long-gone that Written into Changes cuts away at.

The record is Emerson’s biggest yet, and thus, in a way, a certain creative milestone for her. Her second album released as Avalon Emerson & the Charm, and her first full-length for Dead Oceans, Written into Changes is a foray into a textured, earthier style of music making than Emerson has ever pursued before. So often, she found herself creating tight bedroom-pop cuts or producing out DJ material alone but there were nagging ideas calling Emerson towards more organic sounds, the kind she knew she could really only do with a full band and by leaning earnestly into a proper pop style she’s assumed on this record.

In a way, Emerson has fashioned herself an ideal set up for a working musician. Her 'Charm' moniker is a Hannah Montana-like foil to her life as a Berghain-grade DJ, thus providing her a way to find — to keep the reference — the best of both worlds. Emerson actually started Written into Changes, for example, back in 2023 as she was trying to arrange interludes for her first tour as Avalon Emerson & the Charm. Snippets of those arrangements became “God Damn (finito),” but a burst of inspiration following a New Year’s Eve slot at Panorama Bar in Berlin led her back into a dance music hole. Thus ensued the Perpetual Emotion Machine EP, released last year.

“I’m very thankful that I have this DJ career that I can keep doing, and I still love to do,” Emerson adds. “I don’t know, maybe it relieves a little bit of the pressure on any one album, because I feel like maybe some artists are like, okay, this album is done and the tour is done, so time to get back in the studio and do it all over again. And it’s this totally Sisyphean task of, ‘Alright, that was the hardest thing you’ve ever done, go do it again.’”

Still, life as a DJ can feel like a never ending stream of consciousness. It flows on and on as gig opportunities churn through year after year. Beatmaking is constant, but also often solitary. “With the DJ stuff, it’s like, 99% of the time I’m alone, and I have my little itinerary," she tells me. "I know when my flights are, when I go to the hotel, then I’m in a big crowd of people, but then I go home and I’m alone again. You have to be very internally self-sufficient to do it. And it does get a little rough after a while."

Because DJing is still Emerson’s bread and butter, finding time to slip into her 'Charm' work almost feels, by design, more intentional and communal. Her material with the band shows off her lyrical and vocal abilities in ways that dark club nights just can’t. It lets her wrestle with more intimate ideas, showing off a softer side that is, in a way, a foil to her nightlife persona. The reality of the balance between Emerson’s projects, of course, is somewhere in between, an oscillation between a left and right brain of sorts that breeds creative symbiosis and gives her outlets to flex different musical muscles. Being able to do so ultimately only makes her better in every arena.

Even despite Emerson’s unique ability to straddle two projects and thus somewhat insulate herself from the voracious churn of the industry, it still finds its way into any artist’s head. On “Happy Birthday,” for example, the hook opines: “Too young to die / Too old to break through.” It’s a nod to the difficulty of staying your course, especially in a world that constantly feels like it's crumbling. In such times, it’s easy to look around and feel behind at all times.

“You get to a certain age where you’re like, ‘Wow, I had some really good times, but there’s also been some pretty big setbacks,’” she explains. “It’s hard to see when the only people getting ahead are the ones who have a big safety net or who are able to make mistakes and change careers or have their parents buy them a house and everyone else is left in the lurch. But, we’re trying our best, still. And, you know, at least we are doing it together.”

And, this is also not to say working under the Charm name has been easy or pure escapism – in some ways, it’s been the opposite. “The [2023] tour itself was really intense and kind of one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Emerson says. “Building the playback rig, learning how to get the monitor rig… I did this all myself.”

But even in those difficult times, there’s still a fundamental sense of togetherness that, for someone who spent most of their professional life as a DJ, can feel novel and refreshing: “The live band stuff is hard and you have to carry all this shit and you’ve got to check in," Emerson explains. "It’s a lot of shit, but you’re together. You share it."

Written into Changes started in earnest from that kind of communal space as well. Back in 2024, Emerson took a two-week retreat in the English countryside with British songwriter and record producer Nathan Jenkins – better known as her longtime collaborator Bullion. The pair rented an Airbnb and made as many songs as possible. By the end of their stay, it was apparent a new Avalon Emerson & the Charm album was on the way. “I now understand why artists love to do [retreats], because it’s the best thing in the world,” Emerson grins.

On other albums, songs would be made in between gigs, in Emerson’s bedroom in New York, or on quick weekend studio sessions jammed between a hectic schedule. By starting Written into Changes with an intentional block of time, Emerson allowed herself to get into a flow state that felt productive, easy and natural. Days would start with tea and toast, easing into music making and making use of the luxury of time.

“With dance music, it’s an efficiently atomized process where I can do it all in Ableton," she says. "I don’t really need anybody. Maybe I’ll share a love session back and forth with somebody or pass stems back and forth, but it can still be quite separated. Making the Charm music.”

Having someone else — in this case, Jenkins — gives Emerson a creative unlock to bring in new instruments, try complex melodies, arrange, and rearrange like never before. “It’s still going to be an Avalon song, but incorporating new people from the get-go, at the ground floor of a song [is amazing],” she adds. “Then just being like, ‘You know what would be really cool? If we had a woodwind. Let’s bring in somebody who’s so good at saxophone and clarinet. Let’s tell them what key it’s in and let’s get that down and add it to the song.’”

Compared to the tightness of working exclusively with software such as Ableton, the freedom of letting loose in a proper studio setting felt a bit like “an unending field to play in.

Accessing such intentional creative time also allowed Emerson to dive deeper into the lyric-heavy world she knew she wanted to build with Written into Changes. It is, by her own account, her most confessional work so far: “With this album, there was a new confidence of getting into writing lyrics again,” she says. She’s always kept a document of phrases and ideas that could one day become songs and for this record, she purposefully dived back in to hook on to the best of those ideas and turn them into fully-fleshed out stories, almost like playing with a crayon-box of words.

Much of her writing was about being as direct as possible, sparing little and resisting the urge to blur meaning in metaphor. “I wanted this record to be more clear and the themes to be more lucid. That’s also how you connect with people,” she explains. She cites Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields and Morrissey as key influences for this – songwriters who can create the kinds of music that feel both so mundane and so massive at the same time.

“I’m a huge fan of [Stephin's]. Just the way that you can use normal words — ones that people actually say — but be so vibrant in the emotional vignettes that you can create out of everyday life,” Emerson says. “A combination of using normal, five-cent words, and also just fantastic five-dollar words, using everything that the English language has to offer, that’s what lyrics are about.”

Part of the desire to have a more textured palette on Written into Changes was also to create a bigger live set. “I had all these bedroom-y songs that I wanted to make bigger to where there would be more latitude with how you could do things in a live setting,” Emerson says. “Again, the live show is such a huge part of how people experience music. I’ve been to a lot of live shows, and being on the other side of it, where you’re trying to create this experience for people, you want to have as many tools as possible, to have it be as big as possible.”

That kind of reverence for the live show can be hard to come by. Coming through an era where Internet fame and virality has had such a premium, hearing someone talk at length about the necessary experience of concert-going is deeply refreshing. This, Emerson says, is a constant of her work both in DJing and with the Charm. “We have our little doom feeds that we scroll on, interacting on Zoom, and everything else," she tells me. "It’s definitely important to go into a little space and have this nonverbal time where the music is loud, but we’re all together.

"It does sound so corny when it comes out of your mouth, but it’s so important. And we love it! Just to be in a crowd, spend some hours in the shared, sweaty air of other humans. We do like that. We continue to like that, despite everything else.”

And, as the live scene comes increasingly under threat of consolidation, Emerson sees preserving its integrity as existential. As venues and festivals sold off shares to make ends meet during Covid, the post-pandemic concert era is now becoming defined by those transactions. Major ticketing companies are exercising their own will above, at times, even the wishes of the artists.

Even against those headwinds – as Emerson rightly points out – coming together is still imperative: “It’s almost like one of the last things we have is to get together and be excited about music and be excited about new bands and going out with your friends to see them. It’s one of the last things it feels we have that is not looking at the little glowing screen in your pocket. It feels good to be part of that.”

I bring up her now-home of New York as an especially good place to catch those moments. Especially on the club scene, places like Elsewhere, Basement, the Knockdown Center, Nowadays and Public Records are making the Big Apple feel as close to the true beating heart of the DIY underground than ever before. Emerson concurs: “It’s better than the 90s right now, because people are so locked into the music moreso," Emerson affirms. "It’s a little less the default thing that everyone does because they want to go meet people and get drunk. At, like, Nowadays, people are more fans of the music and following what’s happening with DJs and clubs and scenes. It’s very rich in that way. There’s a lot of dancers now. It does feel very cool. New York definitely does feel like the nexus of a lot of it. I love playing Nowadays!"

To clarify, she does, in fact, live upstate, but easy access to the five boroughs — and her fixture on the DJ circuit — makes her a mainstay in the city. Her life as she describes it sounds like a perfect kind of domestic bliss: Emerson and her wife share a home in the country, the kind of place with room to breathe and room to make music. Collaborators are invited over to produce and to practice. When she needs it, she has the necessary downtime to recharge. Friends, in-laws, nights out, and, of course, Bushwick are all just a short journey away. I get the sense that Emerson has, in many areas of her life, perfected the art of balance. Whether flipping between DJing and lyrical songwriting or moving seamlessly between city and country, she seems to know how not to overburden a good thing.

The decision to move to the east coast at all was yet another one of those major transitions that Emerson unpacks on the record. New York, as with much else, wasn't the original plan, but it has become a blessing in its own way. After six years abroad, it was clear Emerson’s Berlin chapter was coming to a close. Her wife works in film and television, and there wasn’t much she could do out in the middle of continental Europe. Los Angeles thus felt like a natural middle ground, a move home that would afford them both easy career access and community. Unluckily for them, a planned move was scheduled for January of 2020, right around the time news of a major virus was circulating. When everything shut down, staying locked in a new city with no real roots felt disorienting. Emerson’s wife still had an apartment back in New York, so the pair packed up a tiny car, drove across the country, and made a new life for themselves.

“I went from being a Neukölln-based DJ to being a Bushwick-based DJ, not really on purpose," Emerson says, "but it’s just life has plans sometimes. I think going out for touring every weekend and coming back for Bushwick was just a bit too much.” And so, in yet another quick change, Emerson packed up again and settled at their current home upstate, from where she’s currently talking to me. Sunlight has been streaming in all morning, the setup itself looks cozy and idyllic.

Slowly, Emerson is preparing herself to hurtle towards release date. As singles continue to release, the record itself begins to crystallise in her mind as a reality rather than just a concept. “It feels more vulnerable, especially right now,” she admits. “There’s definitely a window where it’s mixed and mastered where it’s done but no one’s heard it yet and you can just live in this dream potentiality.”

There’s also always the fear that words won’t be received correctly, and the now-pervasive urge to obsess over metrics. She’d be lying if she said she didn’t – though, she shamelessly admits that one of the few remaining pockets of humanity she can find on the Internet is her own subreddit, which is filled with a sweet array of nice comments and track ID requests. “Reddit gets a bad rep, and some of the Reddits are bot-land galore, but my little Reddit is so cute, and I love interacting with people on there,” she says and smiles. “There are parts of it that still feel very nice about doing this kind of thing in the public sphere!"