[Cover photo credit to Luke David Kellett]
Award-winning Australian singer/songwriter and composer Emily Barker has announced her new album Fragile as Humans that will release on May 3rd, 2024 through Everyone Sang/Kartel Music Group. Her first new release since 2020’s A Dark Murmuration of Words, Barker has also shared the official video for new single “Feathered Thing.”
Barker was inspired by the opening lines of Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope”:
“Hope’ is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all…”
The idea that ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers contributed to the central image of “Feathered Thing,” written while Barker navigated grief.
When she was first introduced to producer Luke Potashnick (Gabrielle Aplin, Jack Savoretti, Katie Melua) in May 2022, she brought with her a full album’s worth of songs. But after visiting Potashnick’s studio, The Wool Hall, and hearing his production ideas, she was inspired to write one more song.
She adds:
I also needed to process some heavy news.
Barker and her husband Lukas Drinkwater had been trying to start a family. Following a couple of failed IVF cycles (and other “starts that we’d lost”), they investigated adoption and had decided to relocate to Australia to be closer to Barker’s family. Barker then became pregnant, which raised a great deal of hope, before, in the end, suffering a miscarriage.
She explains:
It felt like we couldn’t work out what we wanted, but we finally reached a point where we both felt at peace with not having kids. It had been an incredibly intense time, coinciding with a house move and the pandemic.
We’d done all these things to try to make it happen, and then it happened naturally (and against all biological odds). Having previously navigated losses throughout our pregnancy journey, we now had to get our heads around what having this new person in our lives might look like—emotionally and practically.
Songwriting has always been a way of processing throughout my life.
Talking with Luke Potashnick about the difficult inspiration behind the song allowed her to revisit and strengthen the lyrics.
She adds:
The opening line is a metaphor for knowing that I’ll get through this. It’s about recovery and hope, allowing yourself both the space to grieve and permission to move on.
I think that it’s important to share and normalize these stories, which are all too common, yet not openly spoken about. People hide their pain and don’t want to burden friends and family. I think behind all this anguish, there’s a deep, often untold story.
