Emilie Clepper

Perpetuating a family tradition

When I sat down to interview Emilie Clepper this past Saturday, I was hoping the talented songstress would want to talk about herself. Problem is, Emilie Clepper got her mind done blown by Galactic days earlier.

“They just know how to groove,” she explained over coffee in downtown Montreal. When she said this, she stretched out the word “groove” for effect, adding about six extra Os.

“They know how to put on a show. I was entertained. It’s so rare—all of this entertainment around you trying to entertain you, and at some point or another I get kind of bored. But they are so on the whole time, there’s not one moment where you look at your watch. They’re just…I don’t know. Their music is just so frickin’ groovy.”

While Clepper’s music may not groove like a certain Louisiana jam band’s, it’s similarly praiseworthy (and doubtless, someone somewhere is elongating vowel sounds in her honour). For the uninitiated, her music can be loosely referred to as folk, and even more loosely as country-tinged folk, but no matter how we describe it, what’s important is that her songs reflect a beautiful world-weariness. An earned tiredness. They are adult without being old, and manage to tell new stories and old stories at the same time. “Wearing You,” for instance, is one of the best songs I’ve heard all year; like swallows to Capistrano, I keep coming back to it.

Born and raised in Quebec City to a Quebecois mother and a Texan father—songwriter Russell Clepper—Emilie Clepper has something of a complicated lineage, but it’s one she seems to understand and respect. As far as which side influences her work more, it’s not much of a contest or comparison.

“My mom’s father was from Switzerland, and there was never really a whole lot of Quebec culture in my family on either side, so it’s hard for me to see how it seeped through [into my songwriting]. I think it seeped through [into] my personality, because I grew up here, so I think it influenced that a lot, maybe. But in terms of music I think my influences are way more in Texas.”

That was where she started performing; unsurprisingly, her father was the architect behind this.

“My father] is from Texas and that music kind of seeped into me, through him,” she said. “I started hanging out [in Texas] when I was in my early teens, and he took me around to all his circles of friends, and that’s what everyone did: the campfire jams and the folk festivals and that whole circuit.

“I started doing that with him, and playing songs with him, and meeting people, and being on the road a lot, and traveling, and hitchhiking, and playing guitar. [How I started] perpetuates that tradition.”