For those still looking for plans for Halloween night, might I suggest Emily Wolfe at the perpetually-decorated-for-the-holiday Kung Fu Necktie? “I love to play live, and I love a rowdy audience,” says the guitar virtuoso during a recent phone chat, before adding, “We may dress up, we’ll probably play some covers. It’s a rippin’ rock set… I’d just encourage people to come out and see the show.”
Emily Wolfe is currently touring behind her sophomore LP, Outlier, which dropped this June. And while she’s made a name for herself doing swaggery blues rock (She’s played onstage with Billy Gibbons and Peter Frampton and even has her own signature Gibson model, pictured above.), the singer/songwriter also has a profound passion for pop (and even tells me she’s been listening to a lot of ‘90s R&B recently) and wanted to further embrace that on her second full-length, which was produced by Queens of the Stone Age’s Michael Shuman.
“It was great working with him. He brought so much to the table. He made me okay getting outside of the blues rock arena, kind of like a trust fall… It’s quite a pivot, musically, from the first record. I wanted to keep guitar at the forefront, which was a similarity but, for the first one, I left it a little more open. For this one, I went in knowing what I wanted every single tone to sound like.”
Although she enjoyed her recent time in the studio, Emily Wolfe has been back onstage since July and tells me that, despite the circumstances, it’s great to be back to live music: “It’s different. People are a little shy, but it’s been super fun to play again and get out there. It’s a new kind of era, post-pandemic touring.” And when I ask her about her favorite reactions to her music, she tells me that it is generally those that she gets to hear about at her concerts: “It’s pretty fun to see how people interpret my music, especially at shows, to hear if songs inspire them to write their own or get them through a breakup or something.”
