Avalon Emerson - Written into Changes [Transparent Red]

Change, they say, is the only constant in life. Fittingly, multi-hyphenate musician Avalon Emerson sounds at home harnessing the steady flux of her existence on Written into Changes, the memoiristic second album released under her Avalon Emerson & the Charm moniker. A work of rigorous invention and revision, the album’s themes of personal and relationship evolution “came into clarity after they were all done,” according to Emerson.

The making of Changes was, appropriately enough, very different from that of & the Charm. While that album was, in Emerson’s words, “soft and bedroomy,” the energy was upped this time around, as Emerson carefully considered how this material would work in a live context. The resulting body of work is band-driven but groove-heavy and dance-adjacent. The break-beat-assisted “Eden” has a “baggy” sound that’s reminiscent of dance-rock hybrids of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The witty “How Dare This Beer” was written in loving tribute to the Magnetic Fields. “’87 to ’94 is my idea of the best era of music,” says Emerson. “And with Nathan, our musical taste overlaps quite a bit.”

Nathan is Nathan Jenkins, aka Bullion, who co-produced & the Charm and returned to handle the bulk of its followup. Much of the recording took place in Braintree, England, in the winter into spring of 2024. The two tracks co-produced with Rostam Batmanglij (“Jupiter & Mars” and “Earth Alive”) were cut in Los Angeles. Synth touches were added at the Synth Cabin at Rosen Sound in Glendale, California. While the collaborative creation of Written into Changes diverged considerably from Emerson’s dancefloor-tailored solo productions, the influence of dance music is splashed all over it. Emerson was fixated on her music’s low end as she crafted it. “Bass was definitely a priority,” she says.

Emerson wrote the melodies and lyrics on Written into Changes, and the majority of the latter were sourced from her personal life. “It was a goal with my lyrics this time around to be a little bit more direct,” she says. The title track, one of the artist’s favorites, is about her move from Berlin to Los Angeles in 2020. The frenetic “Happy Birthday” has a sunny spirit anchored by gently devastating lyrics like those of the refrain: “Too young to die / Too old to break through.” That track arrives having been club-tested—Emerson has already dropped it into her sets at clubs like Panorama Bar at Berlin’s Berghain and Brooklyn’s Nowadays. Both “Eden” and “Country Mouse” are odes to Emerson’s relationship with her wife, Hunter while “I Don’t Want to Fight” and “Earth Alive” are “about realizing you can't change people and trying to take them for who they are, and sometimes that means loving them from afar,” she says.

Written into Changes is an album about not just accepting change, but embracing it with a full wingspan. Progression is a theme both on record and behind the scenes, so that “written into changes” describes a conscious approach to expression and life itself.