Emilie Kahn

Emilie Kahn’s new album, Maybe, is a collection of shimmering, lovesick pop music, dispatched from the space between yes and no. Over 14 tracks, the Montreal musician oscillates from sunburned hopelessness to a quickening confidence, sharing vivid stories from the life + times of a singer with a five-foot harp and a heart full of desire. 

A few years ago, Kahn decided to quit town. She had already released two albums (the first, 2015’s 10,000, under the moniker Emilie & Ogden, followed by Outro, under her own name, in 2019), toured with Half Moon Run, and earned accolades everywhere from The New York Times and Mojo to KCRW and BBC 6Music. But it was a classic quarter-life crisis—“I had been poisoned a bit by a capitalist idea,” she says, of imagining a perfect paradise waiting someplace else. Kahn sold all her furniture and packed her remaining valuables—including her prized new pedal harp—into a boxy Mazda 5, driving cross-country to brilliant, beautiful Los Angeles. Everything would be easier there, Kahn was certain. She’d write songs, fall in love, and instantly, effortlessly, make it.  

Unfortunately, as the adage goes, “no matter where you go, there you are.” L.A. felt ambivalent and impenetrable, and after three months of Doing The Thing, Kahn was unhappier than she had been in the first place—lashed by the same self-doubt and heartbreak, an unshakeable sense of longing. As California sidled into a snowless, changeless winter, Kahn had had enough: she drove all the way back east, to her parents’ house in rural Ontario. 2021 had ticked into 2022, and Kahn had run aground in the frozen countryside. What was she to do, except maybe: make an album? 

That album might have saved her. An old friend, Jean-Philippe Levac, lived in a house nearby; they had always talked about recording together. Soon, Kahn began making the daily drive in her Mazda, past endless snowy fields, to Levac’s home studio. She showed him the songs she had been saving up—songs about crushes, love-triangles, anxiety, and life as an artist—taking breaks only to walk down the empty road together, or to drive into lunch for a splurge at Thai Express. And the more Kahn worked, the more she realized: this is good. From a present wracked by uncertainty, she was making music that was mature and confident, shimmering with a new assurance. Kahn fully assumed her role as co-producer, shaping a sound that was stripped-back and natural, with a clearer focus on voice and harp. “I’ve arrived in this place where I have these really refined ideas about the sounds that I want,” she says, even if “the songs themselves are still full of self-doubt.” 

The resulting album is at once laid-back and feverish, with a pop energy that recalls Arlo Parks, Olivia Rodrigo, Lana Del Rey, Clairo, and Kahn’s viral affection for Taylor Swift. There are songs like “Moves” and “Julia,” teeming with desire, whereas others—like the gleaming ache of the closer, “Endless”—evoke the crying-and-palm-trees of Kahn’s time on the West Coat. “Search History,” Maybe’s irresistible lead single, is a portrait of obsession at its most luscious; on “Parallel” and “Sunday Afternoon,” meanwhile, Kahn wonders if she’s caught in the wrong timeline, “stuck inside the bad lines.” 

For any artist, it’s probably too much to ask for a life without uncertainty. But what Kahn’s found, on this album, is that that same uncertainty can be an engine, a heartbeat—perhaps even a source of strength. After her weeks in the country, the musician drove back to Montreal with a newfound sense of peace. The city isn’t sleepy, it’s healthy, and her life here, in a web of musical, professional, and personal relationships, is profound. “The work is limitless, but the desire to try is enough,” she says, a smile tickling her lips, “…maybe.” 

Emilie Kahn’s Maybe is out now.