Sonya Belakhlef
Witmer has made music her main focus since leaving New York University. It’s paying off.
After three semesters at New York University, Emma Witmer had had enough. She was studying music production, but the program struck her as too industry-focused and, in her words, “kinda soul-sucking.” “It was a lot of just making music to make money instead of making art,” Witmer tells Isthmus. “It wasn’t for me.”
Making art is important to Witmer. A graduate of Verona Area High School, Witmer has been playing in bands since she was a teen and playing music for as long as she can remember. She played drums in Modern Mod, a standout Madison pop group active during the early 2010s, but during that time she also started writing songs for a side project with bandmate Alivia Kleinfeldt. They only played out once — a gig on State Street for Record Store Day that Modern Mod had to turn down. “We scrambled together and did some of these songs that I ended up releasing as gobbinjr later on,” Witmer says.
Witmer brought the gobbinjr project with her to New York, where she’s immersed herself in the Brooklyn DIY scene. Since leaving NYU, she’s made music her main focus, and over the last few years has received some well-deserved attention from such outlets as Stereogum, Noisey and NPR. Witmer returns to Madison July 5 for a show at Communication as part of a tour promoting her sophomore album, ocala wick.
Released June 8 on Topshelf Records, the new album was written, performed, recorded and produced by Witmer herself. She jokes that some friends have described her style as “mean pop,” but there’s a charmingly venomous delivery to her lyrics and a warm, bedroom sound to her guitar and synth-driven instrumentals. “My first album was definitely just me kind of feeling around and figuring out if I can actually make an album by myself, and then there’s the EP, which was kind of my dreamier songs,” Witmer says. “This new album is a lot more live, and a lot more present.”
Witmer started out playing gobbinjr songs at DIY venues around Brooklyn and released her debut album, manalang, on Bandcamp in 2015. She was pleasantly surprised with the reception — a few different labels reached out and helped her do a cassette run and put the music on Spotify — and even more so when people started recognizing her when she was out and about. “People were like, ‘You’re the person that dropped that album out of nowhere!’” she says. “It was cool to be recognized for this thing that I thought no one was listening to.”
The taste of success pushed Witmer to book more shows and get more serious about her music. But she was initially apprehensive about being center stage; most of her experience playing in front of an audience was behind a drum kit. “It was very scary as an idea to me, to front my own band,” she says.
Witmer likes to write about things that make her angry — unwanted romantic advances, unrequited romantic feelings, the excruciating awkwardness of navigating the world and interacting with humans. But the songs are as playful as they are biting. “When I’m processing my feelings there’s an element of humor to it,” she says. “I try to be candid, and I just want to be genuine.”
There’s no set lineup for gobbinjr. Instead, Witmer writes all the songs and instrumental parts and invites a rotating cast of musician friends to join in when a song is finished. Initially, her goal was to just get the ideas out of her head, but as the project has progressed she’s started thinking more about expanding instrumentation and tailoring parts to specific musicians she’d like to work with.
“I don’t get stage fright anymore, except when I’m playing solo — that’s terrifying,” Witmer says. “When my friends are around, I feel fine.”