Limelight
Italian-born singer-songwriter taps into her family’s past for some dreamy psych-folk.
“I FEEL THIS is a miracle record,”says Emma Tricca of her latest album, Aspirin Sun. London-based, Italian-born, and currently talking from her rented apartment in Manhattan’s East Village, she’s certainly created a thing of great beauty. Written as she grieved her father, its gentle psych melodies and fingerpicked guitars bring decades, even centuries, of her family’s artistic history to life.
Never is this more evident than on Christodora House, which channels her great uncle. A rebel, he left the family winemaking business to study painting. After the death of his wife and child, he fled to New York to become an artist. On getting an art historian involved, Tricca discovered that one of his paintings from the 1930s, Christodora House, is in the Smithsonian Museum, but the building it depicts is steps from where she’s sitting right now.
“They sent me the link to this painting I’d never seen, and that did something to me,”she says.“It is almost bringing tears to my eyes now, the powerful effect it had on me. Tompkins Square looks so bare, it almost looks like the back of our ancestral home. There’s loads of solitude in that painting, but also there’s hope in the sky because the clouds break, and the light comes jutting through. I wrote the song straight away at my friend’s apartment in downtown New York.”
This mix of art, history, drama and emotion – as well as the hope and solitude of the painting – runs through Tricca’s work. Her mother was a literature teacher who filled the house with books for her to devour. Her dad was an architect, who instilled a love of Renaissance art and Roman architecture.
“One of the reasons why I am so obsessed with fingerpicking, I think, is because I remember sitting on my father’s lap while he w
