A YEAR IN MUSIC: EMILIE FRIEDLANDER

On falling in love, again.

My good friend Ric, who definitely likes a lot of things that aren’t very marketable at all, would say that if an artist has the legs to climb out of the underground, it’s probably because they’ve got something really special about them. Considering even something so small as the way she layers an arpeggio on top of a drum beat, I think that’s true about Grimes, but I can’t help noticing that there are a lot of very insipid or derivative musicians out there with “legs” too, and that all too often, artists seem to grow into the heroes that we wish them to be only after the world has fallen in love with them.