Emma-Jean Thackray: Q&A

May is Mental Health Awareness Month and WFUV has asked Emma-Jean Thackray and Shura to share their stories of perseverance over personal struggles. If you or someone you love is struggling, you can reach out to SAMHSA's hotline, NYC Well, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), or the Sound Mind organization, focused on ending the stigma that surrounds mental health through the power of music.

With multiple EPs and a luminous debut album, 2021's Yellow, multi-instrumentalist, singer, producer, and composer Emma-Jean Thackray is at the forefront of the modern, eclectic British jazz scene, deftly crisscrossing a gaggle of genres alongside peers like Ezra Collective, Nubya Garcia, and Yussef Dayes.

Thackray's funked-up flights of groove and grit are electrifying; both complex and easy to grasp, with infinite warmth infusing her kaleidoscopic arrangements. On her emotionally raw second album, Weirdo,  released in April, her vocals take an even stronger lead — as a trumpeter, the cascading runs of her contralto gracefully pivot, like that instrument, on tracks like "Wanna Die" and "Let Me Sleep." Thackray's songs are achingly personal, isolated conversations with herself, willing herself to keep her head above water, although at the time of Weirdo's evolution and recording entirely in her home studio, she was drowning, not waving.

Thackray would be the first to admit that she's relentlessly driven herself to get to this level and it has paid off in some ways — she recently wrapped a tour with Kamasi Washington and has a full tour schedule for 2025, including sets at Glastonbury and the Paris Jazz Festival this summer.  But back in January 2023, as she was plotting her second album, her partner of a dozen years suddenly died, plunging Thackray into a maelstrom of grief and despair that became dangerously dark.

It's not hyperbole to say that the making of Weirdo — and her outlet in the arts — kept her alive, as Thackray frankly and thoughtfully discusses in a new FUV Q&A for FUV's May is Mental Health Awareness Month series.

The original intent of Weirdo was to write about your neurodiversity, before you suffered the terrible loss of your partner. Being neurodivergent is a kind of superpower — and you've talked about your framework of dealing with your own dance across the spectrum. As a musician, how have your neurodivergenct gifts fueled you, focused you, made you fly?

Being both autistic and ADHD, I’m constantly at war in my own head, and I’m very all or nothing. My attention span is awful, I have about five seconds in me at the best of times when doing anything, except for music. That’s the complete flip side and I’m so locked in that. I can be in the studio and forget to eat, drink, or go to the loo for an entire day.

There has been a lot of pain when it comes to being neurodivergent, but I’m also someone who likes to find balance and see the other sides to things, to look at the positives of my neurodiversity and how it’s shaped me into who I am. My obsessive nature, where things get stuck in my brain, means that I’m an absolute perfectionist. Everything I make has to be completely perfect and I’ll sit there mixing and sculpting a track until it’s exactly what I want it to sound like. It made me sit for hours learning instruments. My neurodiversity made me who I am and what I do.

Aside from input from Kassa Overall ("It's Okay") and Reggie Watts ("Black Hole") on two of the tracks, you played every instrument, sang every vocal, produced, and engineered this album in your flat. When you look at the 123 times your name is noted in the credits, was it clear that it was essential that you make this album in isolation?

It was absolutely essential for me to make this record on my own. I’ve got a lot of experience making music with others, as part of orchestras or improvising, leading, and it’s very natural for me to work like that, but whenever you work with others there’s always a compromise, because someone else is bringing their own taste into the equation. Things almost never match up exactly with other people.

I really needed to work on my own for this record and say exactly what I wanted to say in the way that I wanted to say it, to have no compromises and express myself fully. Also I needed to not have to meet other peoples deadlines — even just responding to emails is something I find really difficult — and I needed to not have to mask around other people. All my energy was going on processing difficult emotions and trying to keep myself here.

I need a lot of solitude anyway as a neurodivergent person, and since losing my partner I need it even more because life feels even harder to navigate now.

"Maybe Nowhere" is particularly dark, but it simmers with an explosively danceable groove. For a listener, it strikes you as a dialogue of sorts, in which the music demands that you hang in there despite the deep melancholy of the lyrics. When you listen back to Weirdo now, as opposed to when you were working on it, what surprises you the most about what you revealed about yourself and the journey you were on?

When I made the album I made it with the door shut. Literally and figuratively. I wasn’t thinking about other people ever hearing the music, I was just focusing on making what I needed to hear and expressing myself. I think that’s how you have to write because if you’re thinking of how someone is gonna receive something, you’re diluting yourself. It’s the job of the artist to be brave and that was what I was.

I can only truly express myself through music; I can sing things that I’d never say to someone in a conversation, except maybe my shrink but also maybe not.

What didn't you understand about grief — that you do now?

I don’t think I’ve learnt anymore about grief than what I knew whilst making the record. I think when I was in the thick of the pain I knew everything about it, it consumed my every waking minute. But by making the record I took back a lot of power that grief took from me and now what consumes me is also music.

You recently toured with Kamasi Washington — what is the experience of bringing Weirdo out on the road? I would imagine that you've had a lot of conversations with fans who deeply appreciate the honesty you've brought here.

Being back touring again after so long has been amazing. Supporting Kamasi was so fun; I rekindled my love of performing through doing that tour and it helped me to truly understand how important it is, on a deeper level than ever before. Since then I did my own solo tour and then some intimate shows with my band around the UK, the first for three years, so it’s been really special. I’m not gonna lie, I’m really tired, it took a huge physical toll on me, but meeting people at shows has given me new levels of strength.

When I was making the record I never imagined that I’d be meeting so many people at signings who would be crying and telling me about how important the record has been for them. I never dreamt that people would be singing along to every single lyric in the crowd when the record had only been out a few days. Knowing that the music is resonating with people and helping them feel less alone in their own grief or their own weirdo-ness makes grieving publicly and opening up about painful truths worth it.

There's simmering hope and humor ("Tofu," "Fried Rice") throughout this album, notably hope in the extraordinary funk spiritual "Thank You for the Day." When in the process of Weirdo was that song born? It feels connected to "Sun" from your debut album too.

I started writing "Thank You for the Day" at the end of 2022 when I was burnt out from tour. I wasn’t feeling grateful for life but I wanted to. After my life fell apart, I spent six months staring at the wall and when I returned to writing again, "Thank You for the Day" was the first track I properly dug back into. I wasn’t in a place of gratitude, but I wanted to try to be.

That song remained unfinished until the very end of the album and I was working with "la la las" in the verses because I just couldn’t settle on the lyrics. I finished the words as I was recording the lead vocal takes, right at the end of all the tracking. This song was the final one, and I ended up using the lyrics that I already had to begin with. I just needed that extra bit of time to start believing them.

I’m glad you see the hope in the album. I didn’t see it so much at the time, but it was there the whole time, underneath it all. The tracks are dark, yes, but there’s a lot of humour in there. There’s silliness, there’s joy, and it shows the absurdity of life in the depths of grief. The fact that you’ll be wrestling with huge existential questions one minute and then doing something as mundane as making some fried rice for dinner the next. It’s an album of extremes, ups and downs balanced together in one package, a bit like me.

You had a unique outlet with Weirdo — and your own profound talent as a musical polymath — to see your way through a terrible time. Mental health is such a delicate high wire walk. How are you keeping yourself balanced and in a good space?

How indeed. Sometimes I don’t know, to be honest. Throwing myself into music. I’m seeing a lot of old bad habits creeping back, like working so hard that I’m putting myself at risk, but I really am trying to be more balanced. I try and rest as much as I can, although I’m not very good at it. I try to be in my body and out of my head as much as I can.

I’m always going to struggle with my mental health, it’s the way I’m wired and it’s never going to go away. This is the price for me being here and being able to make the art that I do. But hey, maybe it’s worth it to want to kill yourself sometimes if you can sing.

Are there any mental health organizations for musicians or otherwise that mean a lot to you? What are they and why?

Shout out to Help Musicians and all that they do, they’re truly remarkable. From actively helping struggling musicians, to having a lot of online resources, to even helping people get proper ear protection, they make the music industry in the UK a better place.

I know people who’ve turned to them in terrible times. The past couple of years I’ve had enough in the bank to take time away, but not everyone has that, and maybe I won’t in the future. We never know what’s round the corner; I certainly didn’t. A lot of people are out there feeling a bit lighter knowing that Help Musicians are available to them in a crisis.

- Emma-Jean Thackray
May 2025

You can also read 2024's May is Mental Health Awareness Month Q&As with Victoria Canal and Julia Bailen of Bailen and 2023's interviews with Ruston Kelly, Bully's Alicia Bognanno, and Pom Pom Girls' Mia Berrin.