Folksinger and songwriter Jackson Emmer is headed to the Chilkat Valley this weekend as part of a tour of Alaska communities that starts in Seward on Thursday. 

He sat down with the Chilkat Valley News’ Rashah McChesney to talk about his music, outlook on life and what people can expect from his show. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

You’ve described Battle Hymn of the Early Riser as a “tired dad” record. What did parenthood make you notice that you weren’t writing about before?

Well, it has changed my level of empathy and patience and my wide-open heart for all kinds of people. I felt like I was pretty loving and empathetic before, but now that I’m a dad and I just see how insane parenting is, I just feel like so much more grace towards everyone. 

Also, I used to just kind of walk around … letting my hair blow in the wind, just being like, when’s inspiration gonna strike? Now it’s like ‘you have an hour and a half to finish … whatever the project is, could be the song, it could be the mix, it could be planning this part of your tour.’ Things get done on a much tighter schedule. 

A lot of the new songs seem built around small domestic moments. How do you decide when an ordinary detail is strong enough to carry a song?

There are these little moments in life that just hit me. This is 50 things at least in one second of, you know, how my daughter asks me ‘can we play now?’ And whenever I feel that way … my ears perk up, and I think maybe there’s a song there. More get abandoned than get written, but sometimes it works out.

If you listen to Tom Waits versus pop country, I think these are two approaches to writing that are almost in opposition to one another. The Tom Waits thing is these rambling little vignettes, almost moments in time that are strung together with watercolors of lyric and sound. You can’t quite get your hand around it but it makes you feel something. A lot of pop country writing, like [Toby Keith’s] “Red Solo Cup,” there’s no mistaking what this song is about, right? And I am kind of interested in the writing that blends those two worlds where it’s like this small moment that could be the red solo cup, or it could be in my song “Clementine Unicorn Sacrifice,” [with] my daughter pretending to murder stuffed animal unicorns. 

Your songs often balance humor with grief or disappointment. It sounds like that’s intentional, or is it just how you naturally see things at this stage in your life?

I think I’m a little bit of a ‘every sunny day has a dark cloud somewhere,’ kind of person. I feel what everybody else does, which is, like, a lot of joy and a lot of disappointment. I live with both of those things, and I’m not the kind of person to ignore them, and I think a lot of people are like that, but maybe better at shoving the inconvenient parts away or compartmentalizing, and I just, I don’t know, I just carry them around. 

What can people expect from your live show here?

I’m going to be playing mostly original music, folk and country music, with my buddy Martin Gilmore, who’s backed me up on this tour. We do a lot of shows together, and he’s an amazing flat-picker like bluegrass guitarist and singer-songwriter in his own right. So we’ll do some of his music too. It’s just crushingly analog folk and country music. It will be intimate. You will not feel like you know us by the end of the show, you will know us. 

What makes a song finished for you?

When you sing it and you’re proud of every syllable and every note comes out smooth and true. You know there are a lot of people, I find, that are pretty good at writing a song to like 90-95% complete. And then you go play it for people and there’ll be one line that you know in your heart ‘that’s not really it.’ There are little burrs in a song that always happen when you’re that close to a finished song.  You’ve got to go sand those burrs off and it takes 30 minutes of extra work or it could take months of extra work to get it how you want it. But, when you do that the song flows out and feels true and that’s, for me, when I know that it’s done. 

For someone in town who has never heard you before, what song would you tell them to start with?

I’d tell them to go listen to “All Hat, No Cattle” and I’d tell them to go listen to “Colorado Line” and another favorite of mine is called “Jericho’s Diamonds” which is kind of a sleepy waltz with a lot of pedal steel. 

Jackson Emmer is playing in concert at the Chilkat Center on May 3 at 7 p.m. General admission is $15 at the door, students free.