Dark Undercoat

Armed with little more than an acoustic guitar and her fragile alto, San Francisco folk singer/songwriter Emily Jane White offers complex tales of melancholy and isolation. While comparisons to contemporaries like Cat Power and Hope Sandoval are frequent, Emily's music owes a clear debt to classic female jazz and blues singers such as Billie Holiday. Fooling around with music since pre-school, Emily started on piano around the same time she learned to read, eventually picking up the guitar during her college days at UC Santa Cruz. While doing stints in an array of college punk and metal bands, she began writing her own songs and fronted her own group, the Diamond Star Halos.
After graduation Emily picked up and moved to Bordeaux, where she performed with a bevy of independent French artists, further honing her songwriting skills. Upon returning stateside, she moved to SF and began recording 4-track demos, formulating the songs that would ultimately become her debut album, Dark Undercoat.
The release of Emily's debut album "Dark Undercoat" has seen her win praise from the Fader, Flaunt, and Spin, extensive blog coverage, and the San Francisco Weekly compared her writing to that of Cormac McCarthy. Her song "Wild Tigers I Have Known" recently appeared on the soundtrack for the Cam Archer film of the same title and Rolling Stone placed Emily in their top 5 Hot List, describing the aforementioned song as "melancholy as a rainbow glimpsed through the bars of a prison window".