After a ‘big old menty b’ the songs started to pour out of her

If you were to take a drive through the Byron Bay hinterland in the afternoon, winding your way into the dark green rainforest that blankets the mountains, past old weatherboard farmhouses, you might just spy Emma Louise walking in a field, looking up at the sky. The Cairns-born singer recently moved to the area after spending seven years in Los Angeles and, as if to wash the city away, she’s been spending time in her neighbour’s paddock most days, just having a wander.

“I think it’s very easy to get isolated,” Louise says about her time in LA as she sits in her new living room in a light-filled, renovated church. “There’s also a lot of pressure in LA because most of the people who are there go to achieve something. That pressure, mixed with being isolated and the frequency of LA, is a lot. I found that really hard.”

Louise eventually found her community, mostly other Australian songwriters (she lived with Elle Graham, aka Woodes, for a time). Did she ever encounter Sydney producer Flume’s somewhat infamous Magic: The Gathering hangouts? She smiles and shakes her head. “I think I met him when that was wrapping up … I remember I went to his house, I was like, ‘what’s this room?’ And he was like, ‘it’s the gaming room, but never mind’.”

Louise and Flume joined forces on the 2025 collaborative album Dumb, which came about after the two first worked together on the track Hollow from Flume’s 2022 album Palaces. But in terms of solo output it’s been a while between drinks for Louise: the singer’s last solo album, the moody, rootsy Lilac Everything, dropped eight years ago.

That album – produced by her then-partner, the high-profile studio whiz Tobias Jesso Jr – was defined by Louise’s decision to pitch her vocals down throughout, turning her distinctive, flighty soprano into a husky tenor. Now, Louise has returned with Sunshine for Happiness, an album with a story that stretches back nearly 10 years.

Sunshine for Happiness began to take shape, subconsciously, in the aftermath of Lilac Everything. Louise’s decision to alter her vocals for the album had been a stylistic one, sure, but it was also driven by a deep anxiety.

“The thought of releasing something in my own voice again … I was not ready but I hadn’t really processed why that was,” she says slowly, picking her way through her thoughts carefully. “I had the idea of ‘let’s pitch it down’ and we did that. I’m so happy about that and I’ve never regretted that. I truly love that album the way it is. I think it was meant to be that way.

“I thought that releasing it in a different voice would alleviate the pressure of having to put myself out there. One of the last interviews I did [for the album] was a podcast called Broken Record. I knew it was this big podcast and I was so nervous. Sometimes when I get really nervous I can’t really talk. I choke up and I know what I need to say but I literally can’t talk. And that happened and then I spiralled … I was just raw. I obviously felt a lot of shame and didn’t love who I was.”

The anxiety runs back a long way. Louise first picked up a guitar and began writing songs when she was about 12, and just a few years later she walked away with a Queensland Music Award for her track Kim’s Song. At just 19 she dropped her second EP, Full Hearts & Empty Rooms, which featured her breakthrough single Jungle. Finding success early was a boon for her career but Louise says her obsession with songwriting turned dark as it became intrinsically linked to her self-worth.

“I’d just spend hours and hours writing songs every single day,” she says. “I wouldn’t socialise. I’d just be trying to write songs. I burnt myself out big-time on that. Then this reliance on that self-worth happened, and that whole cycle was so exhausting. [I felt like I] needed to write to survive.”

It came to a head after Lilac Everything. “It just got to the point where I was like, ‘oh, I need to sort this out because otherwise I’m going to not be OK … my whole life seems to be hanging on whether I write a good song or not’.”

Describing what happened next as a “big old menty b”, Louise checked herself into a mental health facility in Los Angeles. She and the other patients would sit together and draw, under the care of some pretty “unkind” nurses, Louise adds. Detached from the outside world she felt her entire perspective shift, almost overnight. After being moved to another section of the hospital, which had a grand piano, Louise says the songs started to pour out of her. The Sunshine for Happiness tracks Medicine and All Beautiful Things come from that piano.

In conversation, Louise treads through this passage of her life cautiously. When it came time to start promoting Sunshine for Happiness she initially didn’t want to tell people about her hospital treatment. “Then I was like, ‘you know what, f— it’. Because I really can’t not talk about it because it’s such a part of my life. Even though there’s still a little bit of me that is embarrassed … the bigger part of me is just like, well, f— it. We’re all kind of squishy and have dark stuff that happens.”

Sunshine for Happiness features songs from before and after Louise’s treatment – two halves that look inward and then outward, she says. Recording took place in 2019 in Seattle’s Bear Creek studios, with a live band and Tobias Jesso Jr once again on the mixing boards alongside Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, Kacey Musgraves).

The resulting record is Louise’s best. The earthy alt-pop tracks are densely textured, her voice mic’d closely (no pitching down this time) alongside a bevy of scrappy instrumentation: there are pots and pans, drums being played underwater, a bunch of bottles filled with beer and water to different tunings. Louise says those recording sessions were some of the best weeks of her life.

Even in the slow machine of the music industry, sitting on an album for seven years is a long time. For several years after recording, Louise barely listened to the songs at all. It was like touching a bruise.

‘I love Toby’s music, even though there’s ouchiness there.’

It’s a time capsule, Louise says, with a lot of magic and heartache and love and “gunk”. A lot of life happened in those years as well: Louise and Jesso married, had a child, then divorced. Revisiting these tracks, understandably, brings up a lot of grief. It’s also a strange experience, she says, to step into an old version of herself – the one that was still with her ex-partner, without a child.

“It’s definitely brought up a lot of grief about my relationship with my son’s dad,” she says slowly. “There’s still, with any relationship … I feel like I always have a little love bubble for everyone I’ve loved, and this has definitely brought that up.”

Jesso might not be a household name in his own right but the artists he works with are: the Grammy Award-winning songwriter has written hits for Adele, Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber and Olivia Dean. Late last year he released his second solo album, Shine, which touches on his and Louise’s break-up.

“I mean, I wish I could say that they were all exclusively written about me but I don’t think those are actually,” Louise smiles, when asked about Shine and the experience of having her relationship written in song. “I mean, maybe some of them, but let’s just pretend that they are written about me. It would feel just beautiful.

“I feel like if you are a songwriter you know that whatever the expression is, even if it’s an angry song, it’s just an honest expression. It’s a little snapshot of where your relationship was at the time, and how amazing that you get to listen to it? But also if it’s sad or ‘ouchy’ in any way, if it’s an angry song, I probably don’t want to listen to it more than once. But I love Toby’s music, even though there’s ouchiness there. We’re in a really good place. I can still listen to his music, which I think is pretty impressive.”

Louise has spent the past few weeks, between bouts of pottery making, sitting at her piano rehearsing Sunshine for Happiness. But it’s a beautiful day outside, she says, as we finish up. Perhaps a walk beckons.

Emma Louise’s Sunshine for Happiness is out now.

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