The song appears on Emmanuel’s first solo album in ten years
Grammy-winning guitarist Tommy Emmanuel released his official video for “A Drowning Heart,” taken from the recently released Living In The Light, Emmanuel’s first solo album in ten years. Recorded and mixed with producer Vance Powell (Jack White, Chris Stapleton, Phish), Living in the Light is a virtuosic blend of acoustic pop, jazz, classical, and roots music delivered by one of the modern era’s most accomplished and versatile guitarists. Emmanuel is currently on a national tour in support of the album, including a performance at New York City’s Carnegie Hall on October 30th with Richard Thompson.
“In these modern times of information overload, our minds are getting flooded, and our hearts are drowning,” Emmanuel explains of “A Drowning Heart.” “This song is to direct myself to what’s important in my heart and soul. I hope it can do the same for others.”
Emmanuel captured most of the performances on Living in the Light in one or two takes, and the sense of joy and wonder in these sonic explorations is more than just palpable; it’s intoxicating. While many of the recordings are solo instrumentals, Emmanuel lends his voice to several of the album’s tracks, as well, grounding his dazzling, percussive fretwork with a poignant dose of warmth and vulnerability. “There are elements of rockabilly, blues, even traditional African music all woven into the music,” Emmanuel explains. “I’m a world traveler, and I’ve absorbed so much music along the way. It all gets synthesized through a kind of osmosis into my psyche and my soul and then comes out in my own unique style.”
Tommy Emmanuel first began touring at the age of six in his native Australia as part of a family band. In his teenage years, he turned heads as a highly sought-after session player and sideman, and by his early 20s, Emmanuel was playing on chart-topping hits and performing with some of the biggest names in Australian music, including Air Supply and Men at Work. Inspired in part by his hero, Chet Atkins (who would later become a friend, mentor, and collaborator), Emmanuel stepped out on his own as a solo artist in 1979, releasing the first in a string of critically and commercially acclaimed instrumental albums that would make him an unlikely celebrity in his home country and beyond. In the decades that followed, he would go on to headline everywhere from the Sydney Opera House to Carnegie Hall; tour with the likes of Eric Clapton and John Denver; win a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement; perform for a televised audience of more than two billion at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics; and collaborate with everyone from Les Paul and Mark Knopfler to Joe Walsh and Richard Thompson.
Emmanuel continued to push himself throughout his career, relocating permanently to Nashville in the early 2000s and collaborating with a rising generation of guitarists like Jason Isbell, Molly Tuttle, and Billy Strings on his latest studio albums, Accomplice One and Accomplice Two. “Those albums were a real labor of love,” Emmanuel explains, “and I was thrilled with how they came out. But I felt a strong desire to focus on my writing again after that, and I found that the songs for Living in the Light just started pouring out of me.”
More than 60 years into his storied career, Emmanuel is still hungry for adventure. “As I get older, I find myself taking a lot more risks, and having a lot more fun in the process,” says Emmanuel, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday. “When young people come to my shows and have this awakening that it’s okay to be different, that the possibilities of music and self-expression are limitless, that’s what it’s all about for me.”
