Eric Tadsen
The 24-year-old pop artist is building a sizable fanbase.
Like most musicians, Emilie Brandt is driven by her emotions and experiences.
Love, breakups and unfulfilled desires are common themes for the 24-year-old alt-rock/electro-pop artist. Over the past couple of years, the Milwaukee native, who lived in Madison from 2012 through 2017, has played shows across the country, building a sizable fanbase. She has relocated to Boulder, Colorado, but will be back to play The Frequency on March 23.
Songs that showcase Brandt’s unique, unforced singing style include the quick-tempoed, drum- and synth-heavy “All Out of Love (with Matt Barri),” a track about moving on from a stale relationship, and “Like I Never Did,” where she grabs her guitar and describes regretting a missed opportunity at love.
“It’s all pretty raw, it’s all about my feelings,” she says.
“I’m bipolar, so my emotions can be pretty high and pretty low,” she adds, noting that she uses this adversity to her advantage. “As much as it sucks sometimes to have a mood disorder like that, it really is helpful for writing and being an artist.”
Being an artist also helps her cope with her disorder. “I picked up a guitar for the first time when I was 15 and started singing and writing soon after,” says Brandt, who lists artists like Florence Welch, Lorde and Lana Del Rey as her musical influences. “It really helped to have that release. It still does.”
Managing her bipolar disorder is difficult, she admits (“I’ve tried the mood stabilizers but they turned me into a zombie — I couldn’t write music and didn’t have any feelings.”), but it’s also given her the strength to overcome other life challenges, such as opening up about her sexual identity.
Case in point is her song and video “Unspoken.”
“It’s about me having feelings for another woman, a very good friend to me. [It’s] about me realizing my feelings were deeper than me just having a crush on a girl [but] we were just never able to talk about it — it was a deeper connection than either of us were ready to come to terms with,” she explains. “I guess it’s also my coming out song,” adds Brandt, who is bisexual. “I knew I liked women but I guess I didn’t realize a lot of people didn’t know that about me [so] it’s an opportunity for me to be more open with people.”
She’ll share more of her herself with fans later this spring when she releases Freeform, her first full album.
Brandt says the new LP includes a relatable mix of fast and slow songs. Above all else, she hopes listeners “genuinely feel like they’re not alone in what they’re going through. It’s easy to feel trapped in your own reality, but I want people to relate to my music in a way that makes them feel good.”
