Emma Griffin Makes Beautiful Music With Her High School Sweetheart

Twenty-one-year-old Broomfield native Emma Griffin doesn't remember a time in her life before music. "I've been into music, in one aspect or another, essentially forever. My grandparents have a piano, so whenever we would go down for holidays, even when I was really little, I would plop myself down and sound out whatever song I was into at the moment," she recalls. "And everyone thought that was cool, that I could sound it out, so obviously I kept doing it."

As soon as she learned to write, she began filling notebooks with songs, and in the second grade, she taught herself to play guitar. Other than learning sheet music for the violin in her school's orchestra class, the singer-songwriter is entirely self-taught. With the help of her boyfriend and producing partner, Brennan Hill, she put out her first EP, Between the Walls, in June 2020, and has just released a new single, "Try a Little Harder."

Griffin began actually recording the songs she wrote when she was a sophomore in high school, using the microphone on her earbuds while huddled in her mom's bathroom. "I liked the reverb of it, and I didn't know how to use GarageBand or anything else to replicate it, so I did that same process for everything," she says, "up until I met Brennan." The couple, now both attending CU Denver, were classmates throughout middle school and high school, and started dating about three years ago.

"He heard one of my songs when we started dating, and he thought it was cool, and then he threw himself into learning how to produce so we could do it together," she explains. "Then we started getting into music more seriously, and I learned how to produce stuff and actually record it."

Despite her modern alt-pop sound, Griffin is largely inspired by classic rock, country and Americana artists. While her vocals have been compared to the likes of Florence Welch and Sarah McLachlan, her music has a contemporary edge and moody maturity that belie her young age and bring to mind Lorde and Billie Eilish. Meeting her in person, it's hard to imagine that this smiley, upbeat young woman writes such bluesy, brooding lyrics. But Griffin thrives in that juxtaposition.
She writes most of her songs with a foundation of narrative lyricism and bare-bones instrumentals — sometimes using voice memos recorded in her room — and then plays around with more cutting-edge production. "The pre-production is definitely more like the older style, stripped-back pianos and guitars," she explains, "but then Brennan really likes producing in the much more modern Billie Eilish and Finneas kind of sound." He'll swap out guitars for synths or change the pitch of certain instruments in order to strike a balance between classic and contemporary. "The core of the song, how it begins, is definitely much more old-school, and then how it ends up is much more modern," she says.

"She'll come to me with like six voice memos she's recorded in the past hour and play them in the car as we're driving," Hill says, "and then we select a couple and listen to them again, then pick one and start working on it more, build it out some more, write more lyrics, change lyrics and just keep on building it out."

But just as often, Griffin and Hill collaborate on the whole songwriting process together. She says for her first EP, "A solid half of those songs were songs that I had written in my room and brought to him, and then the other half would be songs we worked on entirely together — him building the beat as I'm writing lyrics to it. Sometimes we're really lucky and it's all entirely done in a day. It varies so much. If we really like it, it just flows like magic."

When releasing songs like her latest, the biting kiss-off "Try a Little Harder," Griffin sometimes feels the need to clarify that she and Hill are perfectly happy, and that her heartbreaking lyrics are purely fiction.

"I worry about that," she says with a laugh. "Because I really enjoy writing breakup and relationship trouble songs, like as if it's happening over here and I'm watching it. But I always worry when I release them, and that's why I don't like releasing a lot of those songs, because they're going to think we have such issues!"

Her inspiration for her darker tracks comes from her love of macabre media. "I like to draw from books — classics that I read in school," she explains. "The Picture of Dorian Gray has influenced a lot of songs that I write, [and] Edgar Allan Poe, those kinds of stories." Adds Hill, "We get a lot of inspiration from horror movies and Criminal Minds." (Griffin is hoping to one day record a narrative murder-mystery album.)
So far, Griffin hasn't had much experience with live performing, since she only just recently turned 21. It's hard to do much in the way of live music when you can't legally enter the venues you want to play, plus the COVID shutdown complicated in-person shows. So in the early stages of the pandemic, she turned to the streaming platform Twitch.

"I wanted to come at it from mainly streaming music, so we've done that a couple times, and it's much harder to stream music than it is to stream games. It's hard because you can't hear what the audience is hearing, so it sounds perfectly fine on my end, but you might not hear anything," she says. "We've done some cover nights; now I'm learning how to do live looping, which is hard, but I'm excited about it."

Whether it's on Twitch, in person or just in the car with Hill, it's certain that Griffin is going to keep singing. "We're obviously going to continue to make music, it's just if we want to do an EP or album form or continue to do singles. I feel like people's attention spans are much shorter, so we might just end up doing singles consistently," hints Griffin.

If her singles continue to pack the same punch as "Try a Little Harder," we welcome them.

"Try a Little Harder" is available for streaming and download on all music platforms now. Follow Emma Griffin on Twitch to stay up to date with her livestreams and cover nights.