Boston's singer-songwriter Emma Harner makes a touching, intimate return with the new single "The Lake" ft. Henry Jamison. It's a song that swings between openness and exactness in an uncommon balance. After her acclaimed debut EP, "Taking My Side," Harner is cementing herself as a guitarist whose delicate fingerwork meets storytelling that seems at once personal and universal.
Inspired by the lake near where she grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, the song delves into that brittle pain of clinging to something slipping out of reach. Harner's words are deceptively plainspoken, but they bear a weight that sticks around, channeling the bittersweet tension of mourning a relationship before it has completely concluded. Some of my fondest memories happened there, so it seemed like the right place for this song, she shares, and that strong sense of place gives the track a quietly striking quality.
The vocals of Vermont-based Henry Jamison lend a spare and touching counterpoint that threads gently around Harner's own plaintive voice. The collaboration is organic, a conversation between two musicians who know the spaces of words and notes. Produced by Doug Schadt, Maggie Rogers, and Claud, the song feels intimate while expanding Harner's palette only slightly in a way that alludes to an artist who is growing increasingly confident in her own range.
Since her time playing violin in Lincoln, to now as a guitar performance student at Berklee College of Music, Harner has developed her sound, one that meshes the intimacy of folk with the complexity of math rock. "The Lake" is a tender meditation on memory, place, and the gentle heartache when things change. Harner and Jamison have given listeners music that lives in the mind as much as it does in the heart, solidifying a relationship that is going to linger long after their final note has echoed out.
Follow Emma Harner on Instagram