Jemima Coulter

To exist in the world requires finding ways to cope with what is often so much disappointment. Communication fails. Lovers leave. For multi-hyphenate artist Jemima Coulter (of Hailaker), stories offer one such way to cope. The songs on their debut solo album Grace After a Party exist in an impressionistic reverie, somewhere between a hallucination and the waking world. Populated by stories of body-swapping and clowns, Coulter’s music takes us beyond the personal, traveling from London to Perugia, to the circus and the sea. But for Coulter, stories aren’t simply an escape route, a way out of a painful reality; they offer a resting place for the weary traveler — a glimpse of real magic in a portrait of the surreal.

Throughout the record, we hear Coulter reaching beyond themselves toward a tender yet magical universality. What results is a pastiche of remembered, dreamed and imagined fragments, an album that feels as visual as it does auditory. “I created somewhere I could escape to,” says Coulter. “I imagined people in my mind, had conversations I’d never had. It created an album that’s a hallucination where I’m half me, half someone else.” But there’s a sense of coming full-circle in these songs, a reminder that as much as we try to reach beyond, we remain invariably ourselves. “They were all stories I was telling myself,” Coulter says, “and then I realized that there was something I needed to say, that it wasn’t just a story, but something about me as well.”

~ A.O. Gerber