Maximum Overdrive

Emily Wolfe talks pop hooks, the untamed spirit of rock ’n’ roll, and why she is addicted to layering gain

- Jonathan Horsley

As you would expect of any blues-rock player out of Austin, Texas, Emily Wolfe’s tone has a whole heap of sizzle. But don’t expect her self-titled debut album to ease into a 12/8 shuffle. Wolfe laces the blues with a pop sensibility gleaned from the Billboard Top 100. It’s a heady combination, a sound that saw her at home sharing stages with the likes of Heart, Gary Clark Jr and the Pretenders following the release of her 2014 EP Roulette.

A couple of singles followed, but her debut album is a long time coming. It saw her head into Portside Sound in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to record with producer Ben Tanner (Alabama Shakes) before finishing the recording in Austin. Evan Nicholson on bass and Clellan Hyatt on drums rounds out her lineup, the power trio format affording her guitar plenty of space to fill, which she does courtesy of a cornucopia of gain pedals and an Epiphone Sheraton, and one of the most effervescent rhythm tones around today.

It sounds like you make room in your arrangements for improv. Do your songs change much when you play them live?

“They do. In the live show I like to extend guitar solos. The live show is mostly about jamming. There are some songs that will stay true to the arrangement from the record but a lot of them it’s, y’ know, just playing guitar solos – it’s great fun. I love pop arrangements so much, and I like for my songs to be arranged that way, then live they are there to do whatever I want with on the guitar.”

What is the essence of the authentic rock ’n’ roll experience? Does it lie in that freedom to break the structure of the song in the moment?