Happy UK return for Australian Americana artist Emily Barker

Western Australia-based Americana artist Emily Barker is delighted to be back on tour in the UK– a place she lived for a couple of decades.

Transcript

00:00Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt. I'm the Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers and I'm

00:06lovely to speak to Emily Barker, who was fresh off, literally just a couple of hours ago,

00:11off a plane from Western Australia for your latest UK tour. And the lovely thing for you

00:16is that the UK is kind of returning home. You lived here for two decades, didn't you,

00:22until the pandemic. How has that return to Australia been then?

00:27Oh, it's been beautiful. It was quite hard to leave the beautiful summer weather we were

00:32just having, I have to say. But it's been great, great to be closer to family again

00:38after such a long time living away. And the coffee is just brilliant.

00:46They really know how to do coffee.

00:50And you went back because of the pandemic, went back to Australia because of that.

00:55Yeah, I did the pandemic here. And I was in Stroud in Gloucestershire, where I lived for

01:0213 years of my two decades here. And afterwards, just wanted to be back with family after that.

01:10Yeah. But the lovely thing, clearly, the UK still matters to you from the fact that you

01:15are here again.

01:16Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I spent many, many years stuck on a motorway, hoping to get to a gig

01:23on time over this way and have a lot of wonderful fans and some really dear, dear friends here.

01:30I'm sure you'll experience more motorways. Now, you're back on the back of a new album

01:35with a lovely title, Fragile as Humans. What's happening on that album?

01:41That album speaks to our collective vulnerabilities. It's full of binaries, I suppose,

01:47but like disconnection, which a lot of us experience and loneliness. But then on the

01:53flip side as well, the power in connection and community and life and death. And it goes

02:05pretty deep. And a lot of them are written from personal experience. But then I'm looking out

02:11into our collective experiences.

02:14It sounds fabulous. Well, lovely to speak to you. I'm wishing you the

02:18happiest of tours back in your alternative home of UK. Lovely to talk to you.

02:22Thank you very much. Thanks, Phil.