The first album by Emma Gerson, the artist who goes by the name of lucky break, was made it! Gerson said she used lowercase letters for her musical pseudonym and the album title because she didn’t want to follow the usual rules.
“I like to be silly,” she said. “I also wanted an artist name that felt lucky. I’m a Sagittarius rising, which means my chart is ruled by Jupiter, the planet of luck. When I started making music, I was anxious all the time. The name helped me feel confident enough to keep pursuing it. I also like the work of bell hooks, a feminist writer and social critic, who uses lowercase to decenter identity and challenge hierarchy.”
The songs on made it! cover a lot of musical ground. The arrangements dip into rock, pop, folk and country, ignoring easy categories.
“I started writing this album at 19 and finished it at 24,” Gerson said. “It was a huge transition period in my life. I was moving from being a teenager into becoming an adult. I experienced my first real relationship ending, tried out different jobs, moved to L.A. and came back home to San Francisco. These songs served as intuitive guides, as I learned from those experiences.”
Gerson made the album with her friend, producer Elliott Woodbridge. “I opened for his band when I was still a teenager,” she said. “He came to me after the show and said he was just starting to produce other artists. He asked me if I wanted to make a record. I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ I was excited. The first time we recorded something it was in his girlfriend’s parents’ music school, WOW Music, in Mill Valley.”
They cut “Red Balloon” that day. It went so well, they kept working together. When Woodbridge moved to L.A., Gerson went down south to cut the rest of the songs that appear on made it!
“In Burbank, [Woodbridge] had a small warehouse space,” Gerson said. “We also recorded one of these songs in my living room in San Francisco. We both have a ‘by any means necessary’ punk approach to making music.
“I showed up with my guitar and played him the songs, and we’d get to recording!” Gerson continued. “Nothing was changed structurally or anything. That’s something I really appreciate Elliott for. He believed in the songs and wanted to deliver them as raw and authentically as possible.
“He let me have a voice in the studio, which I think is the best thing a producer can do. Instrumentally he composed everything you hear, other than the acoustic guitar. He brought all the magic to it.”
“Camp Song” opens with a thumping drumbeat and Woodbridge adding soaring, sustained electric guitar notes that suggest the tearful playing of a pedal steel. Gerson delivers the lyric with an understated passion as she describes the façade one presents to hide the heartache at the end of a relationship.
She plunges into the grief of a failed relationship in “Head Down.” She sings softly, expressing a combination of anger, longing and grief. The atmospheric sounds in the background intensify the bleak chanting of the chorus: “I walk around with my head down …”
Now that the album is out, Gerson will begin her first national tour. “I’ll be playing the songs the way they were written, just me and my guitar,” she said. “I’ll be driving around, spending most of the summer in a car, but I like that, so it’s OK.
“I try to make things that I think are beautiful, and hope people come along and enjoy it,” Gerson continued. “I don’t want to be a TikTok star, but I do put stuff up there, like throwing messages in a bottle into the sea. Sometimes it works. A girl told me the other day that she found my music online. It helped her grieve the death of her dog. That’s the only thing social media is good for.
“My music is for anybody looking for a path forward, for anybody trying to love themselves in chaotic circumstances. I wrote songs out of necessity before. Now, I’m writing out of curiosity. I feel totally free,” she concluded.
lucky break and her trio play on Sunday, May 24, at 1pm at the Kilowatt Bar, 3160 16th St., San Francisco. 415.861.2595. kilowattbar.com. Listen to ‘made it!’ at: luckybreakofficial.bandcamp.com.
