Emily Anderson writes for other people’s big moments. This one is her own
Emily Anderson’s songs have a way of turning up in other people’s lives. “The Light” plays inside an episode of Virgin River. “Gold” was chosen to sell a beer. A reality-television season and a pair of video games have borrowed her writing too, all of them drawn to the same thing: she can make an ordinary feeling sound like it matters.
“In The Garden” goes the other way. It starts with something nobody would think to score. Anderson was catching up with a friend, the friend’s baby sitting on her knee, and she began to write. “What a gift it is to know someone through multiple stages of life,” she says. It is not a story with a plot. It is an afternoon, and a long friendship that makes the afternoon worth writing about.
The song also answers a feeling Anderson has carried for a while. “So often I feel like I’m ‘behind’ or playing catch up in my own life,” she says, “but the moments I am happiest are when I’m in the present moment with the ones I love.” Her way out of that comparison is not a resolution to do better. It is a question she puts to herself: “Time is moving whether I fight it or not, so what if I choose to enjoy what I have?”
Sarah Tudzin, who has produced for boygenius and Eliza McLamb and holds a Grammy for her work, produced the single. Tudzin and Anderson have shared a stage in the past, so the record was made by two people with some history between them, which sits comfortably with a song about history. The result is hazy and warm, built on the lush indie-folk arrangements Anderson favours, with the lyrics doing the precise work.
That precision has been noticed. KNBA’s Loren Dixon wrote that her stories “shine with a smile and a smirk,” which describes the humour she brings to even her most tender material. Anderson grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, and moved to Los Angeles, and she still has a devoted following in the northern music community she came from.
“In The Garden” opens her third album, Be Everything, due in spring 2027, and a video follows in the coming weeks. If the song is any guide, the album will find its subject close to home: the people who were there before the good news, and are still there after it.
Comments