Westport musician Emma Young to release EP

WESTPORT – After winning the Manifest Urban Arts Festival 2020 song competition in Chicago, Westport native Emma Young is set to release a four-song EP with the winning tune.

The song, “Rise,” is featured on the EP of the same name that will be available for pre-sale on all platforms starting on June 12. The EP release date is June 26.

A graduate of Westport High School, Young made a mark in the region’s music scene when she was still in high school with her singles “Pirate” and “Looking in Your Eyes,” both of which were played on Boston radio stations.

From Westport, she went to Columbia College Chicago where her senior year was marked with the high of having her song selected and the strangeness of having to make the video of the song from her home in Westport, where she spent most of the last semester.

Winning the competition meant she would have performed the song live at the college’s Manifest Urban Arts Festival, an annual event held on Chicago’s Wabash Arts Corridor. But that was before the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to return to Westport for the last three months of college. “Because we were sent home, the production team from Manifest shipped a lighting rig to my house to make a music video. It was crazy,” said Young in a phone interview this week. “It took a whole day to set up.”

Young shot her performance on the video and the other people who would have performed in her band all shot their performances from home and the Manifest team pieced it together. The song is also in a video made by the school that will be used in all of the college’s promotional material for incoming students for the next year, she said.

Young wrote the music and lyrics for the song "Rise" as well as producing it. Young said she wanted to include Rise, the theme for this year’s arts festival in the lyrics of the song. “I wanted the song to be about overcoming struggle. I wrote it long before this spring happened,” she said. “Columbia is a school for artists who have vision beyond a normal four-year course of study. All of our work is very project-based and I’ve seen artists throughout the year work tirelessly to get funding for their projects and overcome all these obstacles that not everyone faces…. I wanted to reflect that in the power of the song — to show how much we care about our art and how we’re going to keep caring long after graduation.”

Young spent about five months of her senior year in Germany, where she honed her skills as a pop artist at the PopAkademie. “They’re very focused on production, electronic and the future of what music is becoming so it was a great opportunity to feel out what I should get started on now so when it comes to America you’re with it,” she said.

Young, who started playing piano when she was age 5, majored in music at Columbia College Chicago. The first two years was a lot of work laying the groundwork for the project-based learning in the junior and senior years, she said.

Moving forward, she plans to keep making music in collaboration with all of the music students and producers she met attending the college. The four-song EP features “electronic, super danceable fun music,” she said. “I would call it alternative electronic.”

In addition to her upcoming EP, Young said she will also be releasing a song through The Recording Academy’s Music Cares charitable arm to raise funds for COVID-19 efforts.

More information about Emma and the upcoming EP can be found on emmayoungofficial.com and her Instagram @emmay6