Lee Emi Is Learning That Nothing Really Starts Over.
After more than fifteen years writing with The Crane Wives, Lee Emi steps outside the band with DESTROY EVERYTHING – a record a decade in the making about self-trust, adoption, destruction and the difficult realization that becoming someone new does not require erasing who you were before.
– WORDS BY CJ • PHOTOS COURTESY OF LEE EMI
Lee Emi had written “Black Hole” and sent it to The Crane Wives, where it joined the private archive that accumulates around any band that stays together long enough: unfinished ideas, demos waiting for the right rehearsal, songs everyone intends to return to once there is enough time. But while “Black Hole” waited, Emi kept playing it alone. The longer she lived with it outside the band, the more obvious it became that returning it to the place where it had begun would mean moving backwards. “It no longer felt like the demo I’d originally sent to the Wives,” she says.
That realization became one of the first indications that Lee Emi might need to exist, although the music that would eventually become DESTROY EVERYTHING had already been accumulating for years. Some songs date back nearly a decade, to when The Crane Wives were assembling Coyote Stories and Foxlore, while “Smoke In Empty Rooms,” the newest song on the record, was written in 2020. This is not the sound of somebody suddenly discovering another side of themselves. It is the sound of somebody finally giving an existing part of themselves enough room to become visible.
More than fifteen years of making music democratically with the same people taught her how much trust can exist inside collaboration. The difficult part was discovering what happened when that trust could no longer be placed somewhere outside herself.
Making DESTROY EVERYTHING meant having the final say, and Emi describes that as both liberating and terrifying. “For years it was easy to trust their artistic decisions rather than leaning into my own,” she says. “It was tough to put that same trust in myself.”
Emi has spent much of her adult life proving that she can write songs, yet creating a record under her own name required learning to believe something her work had already demonstrated. Ben Zito, her longtime Crane Wives bandmate and producer, became a bridge between the familiar and the unknown, allowing Lee Emi to become something new without pretending everything before it had become irrelevant. “A big part of diving into Lee Emi was reminding myself that I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel,” she says. “I could just take the parts that resonated with me and amplify them for my solo project.”
That principle runs through DESTROY EVERYTHING. Despite the title, this is not really a record fascinated with annihilation. It is interested in what survives it. “Black Hole” began, Emi says, as “a bad feeling.” Songwriting has long been how she translates feelings before she completely understands them, and the song arrived through dissonance, fear and shame, reaching toward the relief of a major chord. It is the sensation of recognizing that you are participating in your own collapse while still feeling incapable of interrupting it.
That tension becomes more explicit on “Clean Slate,” where the fantasy of beginning again runs directly into the impossibility of leaving yourself behind. “I think there is no such thing as a clean slate,” Emi says. “I think we carry all of our experiences with us, the good ones and the bad ones, and that makes it impossible to escape ourselves.”
For Emi, that understanding is inseparable from adoption. For years she resisted the idea that being adopted had meaningfully shaped her, believing instead in something closer to the clean slate the song interrogates: a new family, a new name, another beginning.
It took decades to recognize that the earlier story had not disappeared simply because another one had begun. “Adoption had been a huge catalyst for so many different parts of my life,” she says. “I think we can run from the things that hurt us, but until we learn how to integrate them in a healthy way, they’ll always be chasing us.”
Suddenly the title DESTROY EVERYTHING feels less like an instruction and more like an impossible proposition. You can burn something down, change its form completely, decide that the life you were living no longer fits the one you are becoming, but destruction does not return you to zero. Emi talks about forest fires: the devastation is real, but so is the transformation that follows. Fire clears old growth, new things emerge through what has burned, and the forest does not stop being the forest. “A forest fire doesn’t kill the forest,” she says. “It just changes it.”
It is difficult to imagine a better description of the record. The album reaches for destruction while understanding that destruction cannot provide escape. The past remains present, only transformed. The Crane Wives remain part of Lee Emi.
The child who was adopted remains inside the adult who spent years believing that chapter had been resolved. Songs written ten years ago arrive in the present carrying meanings their author could not have understood when she wrote them.
The Crane Wives have also watched older songs find enormous audiences online years after their release, teaching Emi that artists cannot dictate what a song becomes once somebody else begins using it to understand their own life. Building DESTROY EVERYTHING forced her to apply the same principle to herself, interpreting songs written a decade earlier through the perspective of the person she is now. “The meanings of my favorite songs are objective and flexible,” she says, “the kinds of songs that change with you as you grow.”
The terrifying part for Lee Emi is not simply releasing different music. It is choosing a new name and asking people to follow it somewhere. Emi describes the project as “taking my own medicine,” acting on years of conversations about courage, change and moving toward the unknown rather than simply writing about them.
“I wish I could accurately communicate how terrifying it is to choose a new name and put out music under it,” she says. “I wish I could explain how hard it is to let go of something you’ve been holding onto for a decade.”
And yet this does not sound like letting go so much as loosening a grip. There is still work surrounding everything: algorithms to feed, a record to promote, Crane Wives shows to finish and a Lee Emi tour to prepare for in November. Instead of accepting that there is one correct way to introduce a new artist, Emi is looking for the parts that still feel like play: performing with a new band, designing merchandise, making videos and building a visual world around the songs. “Lee Emi gives me lots of new sandboxes to play in,” she says.
That might ultimately be more important than having the final decision. The project gives Emi permission to remain unfinished. Asked what she hopes Lee Emi allows her to become, she talks about trusting herself without having to relearn the lesson every time, about becoming “a songwriter that isn’t scared to disappoint,” and about continuing a transformation she understands has no final destination.
That feels like the quiet truth hiding inside DESTROY EVERYTHING. There is no clean slate waiting on the other side of change, and no version of ourselves arrives untouched by everything that came before it. You carry the songs, the names and the people who taught you how to trust yourself before you knew how to do it alone. The point was never to destroy everything. It was to discover what remained.
