The Curious Case of Emilie Autumn, part I
the very beginning
I check the instagram profile of someone called Emilie Autumn every several months or so, and have done as long as I’ve had instagram. Each time I do, I am greeted by new drama of epic proportions. There was the time she sold NFTs, the time she seemingly absconded with the money from the preorders of her audiobook, the time she posted shockingly tone-deaf statements regarding Black Lives Matter, the time she accused Lady Gaga of stealing her intellectual property. I read comments, I cringe, I laugh nervously, I scoff, I turn up my nose. Then I do my best to forget about Emilie and her shenanigans for the next several months. I can’t forget completely, though. Her hooks are in me.
Sometime in 2023, after many many months of social media silence, a strange post appeared. It seemed to be a piece of digital art. A very suspicious piece of digital art.
The post in question is now deleted, as are all the posts from the scandals I mentioned above, so, alas, even if I wanted to, I can’t link them or screenshot them for you. But I happen to know that the caption read at least in part, “Introducing ‘My Heart Is A Weapon of War’, and I painted her, and I love her.”
Predictably, people in the comments were not kind. “You didn’t paint this,” they said. I don’t think I need to explain why people felt this way, but just in case I have readers who aren’t familiar with the appearance of AI generated images, well, this is what they look like.
Emilie, never one to shy from controversy, was not dissuaded. She went on to post more such paintings.
Now, she didn’t respond directly to any of the comments. In the caption of the third painting she posted, though, she did post a highly questionable account of her process. It involved Procreate, Maya, physical media, and more—I’ll spare you; it seems, to those familiar with these tools, very made up. I’ll also spare you a screencap of the image, because this one was, um, anorexic.
After much more dunking in the comments (my personal favorite comment among thousands was “Let’s see some hands, EA!”), she did post a questionable timelapse of her process, which to me looked like using an Apple pencil to add some extra flourishes to a Midjourney image, though I’m no expert.
At the time I decided to tap out from this particular round of EA drama, all these paintings and more were live on instagram. And, reprehensibly yet laughably, many of these paintings were available for purchase in the form of giclée prints, running $250 apiece.
When I decided to check in on old Emilie a few months later, I discovered that her instagram had been purged of AI and much else to boot, the comments had been completely locked down, and she had unfollowed everyone. “Rightly so,” I thought, and moved on with my day. Now, a year and a half hence, that’s still the state of things. No posts since August, 2023. No tagged posts. Crickets.
So who is this lady and why am I so obsessed with her?, you might ask. Great questions, and tough ones to answer. The latter is easier to answer than the former, so I’ll try my hand at the latter one first. Maybe some kind of gestalt will emerge that will help me answer the former. The answers are haunted by all kinds of ghosts. These are stories about the internet of the early 2000s, about artistry, about classical music, about subjectivity and honesty, about self-mythologizing, about madness, nature and nurture, the shape and texture of hysteria. These are stories about being a freak. These are stories about ephemerality, about losing something you can’t get back.
Allow me to take you back to the very beginning1. A very good place to start, they say.
the very beginning
It was 2008. I was in 6th grade, things were bad at school and kind of weird at home, and I was spending a lot of time at church, of all places.
My friends and I were the bad kids. The two ringleaders were a skater boy and an emo girl, both two years my senior. I had had my growth spurt early; at 5’8”, I towered over both of them, and so when I first met them, they christened me “Freshman”, and went on to call me “Freshie”. We didn’t really vibe with the other kids at youth group, what with their fuzzy north face jackets, skinny headbands with high buns, and Ugg slip ons. I wore knee high converse, my friends wore DCs and checkered vans, and gel bracelets and black hoodies and band tee shirts for bands such as Tokio Hotel and Slipknot; grunge boy even owned a pair of Tripps, as I recall. We all had stuff going on at home, in our social lives, and in our developing psyches, but I don’t know how aware we were of these. We knew we were being indoctrinated, also, and we didn’t like how that felt. We abhorred and disdained the dorky, asinine youth pastor with his affected smile, church camp theology, and comically tiny hands. So we would skip youth group to go hang out in one of the least trafficked, most run down stairwells in the church. We weren’t doing drugs in there, but we might as well have been; we would get in big trouble by the powers that be for not being where we were supposed to be. We didn’t change our ways. Sometimes we explored the sprawling hallways of the historic church, breaking into the attic, breaking into the fire escape on the east wing, breaking into the kitchenette in the staff area just to see what was in there, breaking in to the kitchenette in the youth room to drink hershey syrup, doing our best to get out onto the roof. But usually we stayed put in our stairwell. We ate candy. The skater boy played guitar, and we sang everything from Bob Dylan to Korn to Streetlight Manifesto in that stairwell. The emo girl sketched in her sketchbook. We stole from the craft closet and made little works of art. I still have some purple ribbon from those days kicking around my apartment somewhere.
And we went to church choir. I hadn’t intended to join church choir, really, but my mischievous friends from youth group all went willingly, where they didn’t will to do almost anything else, so I decided there must be something there for me, too. Ironically, we bad kids were the core of the youth choir. The music director took kindly to us. She didn’t bear the brunt of our behavioral issues. We liked and respected her, and we were actually pretty good at music.
One Wednesday in November, hardly anyone had shown up to youth group, not even skater boy. In between dinner and choir practice, we ran into the music director. “We’re the only ones here tonight,” we said. “Is rehearsal cancelled?” “No,” said she, “and if you come tonight, I’ll take you all out for ice cream.” So emo girl, two of emo girl’s emo friends, and I eagerly and obediently rehearsed our music, and we all bundled up to stroll down the block to the ice cream shop. I ordered mint chocolate cookie ice cream, emo girl ordered orange sherbet. We trailed the music director back to church under the street lights, arm in arm.
“Have you heard of Emilie Autumn?” said emo girl in my ear.
I almost said “yes” to seem cool, but I realized I’d then be caught in the trap of talking about this person and having to make something up. So I said no.
“She’s a goth musician who makes stuff unlike anything I’ve ever heard,” said emo girl. “She’s hot. Striped stockings, corset, bright red hair.” Goth girl handed me one of her Skullcandy earbuds.
What emanated from the tiny, tinny speaker was as frightening as it was entrancing. I heard the crashing of machinery, the wail of violins, the throb of some kind of distorted synth bass, and SCREAMING. I passed the earbud back to emo girl. In the 30 second that damned little red drugstore earbud was in my ear, Emilie put her first hook in me.
The next day after school when the coast was clear, I logged on to the family desktop computer and opened internet explorer. Upon navigating to Emilie’s website, I was greeted by this photo,
words something to the effect of “Welcome to the Asylum”, as well as the invitation to “enter site” So I entered the site. Who could refuse?
I clicked the music tab and perused the MP3 samples, tracks with names like “Misery Loves Company”, “I Want My Innocence Back”, and “The Art of Suicide”. All of these tracks were listed on an album called “Opheliac”, a word I had never seen before. The cover of the album looked like this,
and I had never seen someone look so scary and so inviting. I remember wondering why she was crawling on the floor, and how she got her skin to look so pale, and how she made that cool font, and what the hell she was wearing.
The 30 second samples on the website, cut from the dead middle of each song, weren’t doing the trick, so I opened Youtube and entered “Opheliac”.
The opening note was a B flat preceding a G minor chord, played on an instrument I knew I had heard before but didn’t know the name of. It sounded like a piano, but ancient, skeletal, and impossibly mournful. For almost a full minute, this instrument, desolate and resonant as an empty cell, clicked out its dour tune. Then, after a long, long, highly ornamented suspension, the strings kicked in, then half a beat later, the vocals:
I’m your Opheliac
I've been so disillusioned
I know you'd take me back
But still I feign confusion
I couldn't be your friend
My world was too unstable
You might have seen the end
But you were never able
To keep me breathing
As the water rises up again
Before I slip away
So, all that was pretty intense. The pulsing, rocking 8th note strings, the sprinkles of that weird piano, and the sparse industrial beats were, per emo girl, unlike anything I’d ever heard. I didn’t really have time to be curious about what an Opheliac was, or what all this was about seeing the end and the water rising. For one thing, I was eleven years old, and for another, forthwith I was bludgeoned by the chorus, backed by that clanking machinery I’d heard with emo girl, and the screaming:
You know the games I play
And the words I say
When I want my own way
You know the lies I tell
When you've gone through hell
And I say I can't stay
You know how hard it can be
To keep believing in me
When everything and everyone
Becomes my enemy and when
There's nothing more you can do
I'm gonna blame it on you
It's not the way I want to be
I only hope that in the end you will see
Here the vocals got really quiet, layered in some pensive, anticipatory chords:
It's the Opheliac in me
I thought about thinking about what an Opheliac was, but I didn’t have time, because she immediately launched into this:
I'm your Opheliac
My stockings prove my virtue
I'm open to attack
But I don't want to hurt you
Whether I swim or sink
That's no concern of yours now
How could you possibly think
You had the power to know how
To keep me breathing
As the water rises up again
Before I slip away
I noted the “stockings” allusion. I also noted the achingly sad, wilting violins behind the vocals, and how they made a call and response with the weird piano. I wondered if there were other singers doing the backups, or if it was all Emilie, and if all Emilie, I wondered how she did that. She sang (screamed) the chorus again, and then offered this soliloquy, spoken so fast I had to laser focus on the lyrics on my screen as they appeared:
Studies show
Intelligent girls are more depressed
Because they know
What the world is really like
Don't think for a beat it makes it better
When you sit her down and tell her
Everything’s gonna be all right
She knows in society she either is
A devil or an angel with no in between
She speaks in the third person
So she can forget that she's me
Even as an eleven year old, these words struck me as extremely self-involved, but I also definitely picked up what she was putting down. After this little bridge, the lyrics disappeared from the screen, and a violin and weird piano duet began. I noticed that at this point we were 4 minutes into the song, and there was a whole 90 seconds left. I wondered what could possibly follow. Well, what followed was this:
Doubt thou the stars are fire
Doubt thou the sun doth move
Doubt truth to be a liar
But never doubt
She sang it three times, with each repetition becoming increasingly unhinged, and with more clanking machinery behind it. After the last repetition, the machines stopped, and a naked four-part vocal ensemble of Emilies sang the following, with the crunchiest dissonance and resolution my young ears had yet heard:
I love
I thought about chewing on the “thee”s and “thou”s a little bit, but no time. The chorus returned, this time with the weird piano winking out a countermelody on the quarter notes behind the screaming vocals. Then,
But never doubt
and the chorus was back again, this time with the weird piano sounding like falling dominoes, or maybe like being chased in a dream—an obligato on sixteenth notes. At the end of the chorus,
In the end you will see
there was an echoing silence, and the faintest twinkle of the weird piano, and the video ended.
I realized, as the video began to play again, that a hole had been opened in my chest, like a leaf smoldering under a magnifying glass angled against the sun. I felt the smoking hot pain all around the edges, and the black emptiness in the center.
And all of Emilie’s hooks were now firmly implanted in me.
I finally googled “Opheliac definition”. I didn’t really get any useful results. But what I did learn was that Ophelia was a character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (I knew that to be the play about a depressive prince, and everybody dies in it), and that Ophelia famously drowned (herself?) in a river. Then, I googled Emilie Autumn. I discovered that she had a Wikipedia entry but it was very sparse. I learned that she was born in 1977, that she had made Opheliac and two other studio albums, and she was based in Chicago. Oh, and I learned that she was classically trained with an especial interest in baroque music, she called her musical style “Victoriandustial”, and that the weird piano was actually a harpsichord. A harpsichord! Imagine! I had heard of a harpsichord the same way I had heard of a lyre or a contrabassoon. I never knew you could put it in scary rock music. Further, I learned that Emilie had bipolar disorder and discussed it in interviews. I had heard of bipolar before and I new that it meant “crazy”, but not any specifics. Maybe this had something to do with how her song titles were rife with words like “suicide” and “misery”, and why her branding seemed to be sort of crazy girl burlesque, why it was asylum themed.
Now, if you’re reading from the year 2025 or beyond, and you decide to check out Emilie’s Wikipedia yourself, you’ll find, among many other things, that she was born in 1979, and that her last name is Liddell. Here I’d like to remind you of what your middle school English teacher told you: Wikipedia is not a reliable source. That said, I would come to find out between 2008 and today that almost nothing is a reliable source when it comes to Emilie Autumn.
This is a story full of ghosts. Much of Emilie’s music is not available on streaming anymore, and her already sparse history has been nigh-on scrubbed from the internet, along with so much else from the early days of Web 2.0. What remains is mostly Tumblr fansites cataloguing what came before. Neither skater boy nor emo girl nor I go to that church anymore (though I expect our graffiti remains), and neither does church music director or even youth pastor. Skater boy is not longer a skater, emo girl is no longer emo, and I’m no longer whatever I was back then. In fact, emo girl is neither emo nor girl; nonbinary hadn’t made it to the midwest in 2008, but it had by 2011 or so, at which point emo girl understood they were emo they-them. None of us keep in touch, except for sometimes watching each other’s instagram stories. I’m the only one from those days who remains in this damned haunted Michigan town.
There are many more ghosts, and we’ll meet them in the next parts of this project. I’m going to do some more tracing of my own path with Emilie, how I got to know her, what I learned about her, and what she had to do with my completely losing my mind. I’m going to think about how the idea of “glamorizing mental illness” comports with Emilie and her career, plus some more kind of cultural analysis type stuff, including but not limited to the insane behavior of Emilie’s fans, and what that has to do with Emilie herself, if anything. And I’m going to do some pretty nerdy, technical analysis of her music—I don’t know if anyone wants or cares about that, but I do. Some erstwhile fans of Emilie love to talk shit about her compositional style, but I actually think she has the goods, and I’m going to explain why. (They also talk shit about her violin technique, but I’m not qualified to comment on that.)
I’ll leave you with one final ghost. It’s a facebook status from a few years ago that I seem to have deleted, which I was going to use as a quippy little banner to this post, but I can’t, because it’s gone forever. It succinctly captured the outline of my motional journey with Emilie. Lest I leave you thinking that I’m some kind of rabid fan of hers, I’ll do my best to recreate the status here:
Listening to Opheliac at age 12: wow this is so dark and gothic, she really gets me
Listening to Opheliac at age 14: wow this is really melodramatic and self-pitying but it really scratches an itch
Listening to Opheliac at age 18: wow this is embarrassingly juvenile and is making me cringe to death, also what the fuck is that vocal technique???
Listening to Opheliac at age 20: wow this is so righteously angry, she really gets me
Listening to Opheliac at age 25: wow this is an extremely un-self-aware treatise on what it feels like to have borderline personality disorder
A small addendum from having listened to Opheliac from back to front a few times recently, at age 28: wow this is actually a very flawed, very sick, very disarming, very DIY work of genius
Thanks for reading, if you’ve got this far. Stay tuned for more sometime soon when I feel like it.
P.S. Many thanks to the EA blogs that still exist, in particular The Emilie Autumn Archives—glad to know there are other weirdos out there that are still hung up on this terminal has-been. More specifically I’m grateful for the timeline and other aggregations. It’s so very hard to find any remotely reliable information about this woman, and I’m happy someone’s out there trying to catalogue what is known. I also appreciate the ending sentence in the bio: “Please feel free to browse our archives, but beware: it's easier to get in the Asylum than it is to get out...” Ain’t that the truth.
Thanks to WingedZephyr, the maker of EA lyric videos on youtube of yore, and thank you to T0XIC666ANGEL, her successor.
Thanks to my girlfriend who has for over a month now been putting up with my EA excavation: my wearing of space buns and dark eye makeup, my making of matcha steamed buns (I made a gluten-full version with normal ass ingredients like I always do, and they turned out delicious, like they always do), my drinking of excessive tea, and my playing of EA deep cuts on my silly little keyboard. Thanks for trying to listen to “Liar” even though it was too scary. You’re so sweet, smart, cool, and sexy. (She told me to add that last bit, but it happens to be true.)
Thanks to emo [they/them] and grunge boy. If you’re reading this, you know who you are. I will always love you guys, maybe more than you know. Fangs up.
And thanks to the church music director, for putting up with us, for helping us care about classical music, and so much more.
P.P.S If you’re wondering if you’re ever going to get your money’s worth—yes, I am still working on my borderline project. I am realizing that while I know quite a bit about the history of psychoanalysis, I actually know comparatively little about the history of psychiatry writ large, and I’m trying to be thorough; I’m reading fat fat academic books and getting really mad at them, and getting in touch with historians, and getting mad at them, too. This stuff is as confusing and convoluted as it is very personally upsetting. Bear with me. If you like, you can consider this Emilie Autumn series a little eddy in the borderline stream (spoiler? or maybe you’re checking the diagnostic criteria against EA’s lyrics?).
Anyway, thanks for being along for the ride.
P.P.P.S My girlfriend and I hit a deer a few weeks ago. We are all fine (well, the deer isn’t), but her car is messed up, though not quite badly enough to be considered totaled. Also, her insurance (from the great state of Texas) doesn’t cover much of the damage. If you have something to spare, you can donate to our GoFundMe, if you wish. If you don’t or don’t want to, I totally respect that; I know I already ask for your money.
If you clicked the link and listened to the piece it leads to, I have just one hypernerdy thing to say about it: the opening bars are a slightly modified Folia, which is a “stock” harmonic pattern (a set of chord changes, for the musicians of the nonclassical variety) from early music. As a melody it dates back to medieval music, but the (harmonic) version played here is the baroque version. (You can crack a music history textbook if you want to know more, that’s as deep as I’m going on the history here.) In roman numeral notation, the chords are as follows: i V i ♭VII ♭III ♭VII i V / i V i ♭VII ♭III ♭VII i V i. Oh, and importantly, Folia means “folly”. Check back later for more on the Folia.