Asian blue? Not entirely. Emm Gryner balances heartbreak with hope on Asianblue. By Sean Plummer

   Emm Gryner has been going through ch-ch-changes. Access first met the petite singer-songwriter in the winter of ‘96 prior to a solo gig at Toronto’s tiny Free Times Cafe. Just 21, this small-town Ontario girl knew even then that music was her fate. “You know how a lot of people will decide to do something sort of as a Plan B?” she said at the time. “But I don’t have anything like that, and I think when you don’t have anything like that you’re forced to do really well [at Plan A]. It’s scary.”
   Nearly six years later, Emm knows from scary. Signed to Mercury Records, she went to England, re-recorded some songs off her homemade debut, The Original Leap Year, with producer Warne Livesey (Midnight Oil, Matthew Good Band) and came up with Public in 1998. It was a polished re-working of the originals that showcased her clear strong songcraft, lovely voice, and affecting piano playing. But Mercury got swallowed when its owner, Polygram, merged with Universal, leaving this nascent pop stylist without a deal and out of work.
   But not for long. Emm dedicated herself to her label, Dead Daisy Records, and released the stark Science Fair and the B-sides-and-rarities collection Dead Relatives. Then came the dream gig: touring the world singing back-up for David Bowie. That meant a move to New York. Back on earth post-tour, Emm kept “moving around for music” and so uprooted again to a small apartment in West Hollywood. There amongst the “beautiful miserable people,” she started work on new material with producer Wally Gagel (Folk Implosion, Eels). She flocked with fellow homesick Canadians, sang background for Rob Zombie’s album The Sinister Urge, which her older brother Frank was engineering, and put out Girl Versions, a covers record featuring her take on songs by the likes of Fugazi and Def Leppard, last fall. Now comes the all new Asianblue record (out on Dead Daisy) and a fall tour. And she’s moving back to Canada.
   Which brings us to today. It’s a sultry afternoon in late July, and Emm and I are sitting in a booth at the swank Top Of The Senator lounge. She will play an industry showcase here tonight and a public show afterwards which will see a long line of excited fans snaking out the door. She’s relaxed, confident, happy. She’s also more in control of her love life, the travails of which make up much of Asianblue.
   “I’m a little less self-destructive about things now because I feel more confident as a person,” she says of her romantic attachments. “When time has passed and you’ve accomplished things and put things into perspective, like going through the Bowie thing, going through the Mercury thing, moving around and moving back to Canada, you just feel like you know a little bit more, like you have more ammunition to fight the battle. Whereas I think early on it’s just so frustrating to not be able to identify why I was feeling a certain way. That’s probably why a lot of the [break-up] songs stay in that ‘why am I not your sort of human being’ sort of thing; there’s no resolve to that. And now I don’t have f**kin’ time! It’s like ‘hey, I’ve got to get over this!’”
   With great freedom — personal, artistic, business-wise — comes great responsibility: it’s a lesson Emm has learned well. “Running your own label and not having a lot of help to do it still consumes your time as much as someone at a major label telling you to do 10 interviews in a day,” she says. “But the control freak in me has loved the past four years of being on my own. It’s been so good for me as a person to be in charge of it.”
   Would she ever go back to a major label? “I think it would be really foolish for me to turn my back on the people who are with me right now. So if that opportunity did present itself it would have to be a really different situation. For example, the girls who book my shows in the US, who were fans initially, they started a company [Public Awareness] just to help me out. Those people would have to come with me.
   “I have some stipulations now as opposed to just throwing caution to the wind because I just know what can happen.”
   But Emm Gryner is far from world weary. Asianblue — “it’s a term I’ve used to describe my neurosis” — always maintains a thread of hope, even in its bleakest moments. “The songs, some of them are rooted in really painful experiences,” she confirms. “But instead of wallowing in it, which some of the other songs I’ve written [do], some of these songs are empowering. ‘How do you get out of it?’, or ‘what’s the next thing?’ — which has been my philosophy, and it helps me not be jaded. Because I think a lot of people expect me to be, considering what happened with the major label.
   “There was a whole span of time when all my press, the headlines were ‘Emm Gryner sticks it out’ or ‘Emm Gryner keeps plugging on’, and it’s like goddamn! And to me it’s just natural to keep some kind of optimism.”