"Where All the Colors Come From"
A debut album a decade in the making
& how motherhood changed everything.
Emily Joffee's songs have a heartbeat. With intricate string arrangements that spiral like unanswered questions, her music explores the tender geography of falling: in love, apart, into doubt. Rooted in folk tradition but restlessly modern, it echoes Regina Spektor's whimsy and Andrew Bird's architectural complexity. Now, after ten years, she releases her debut album, "Where All the Colors Come From."
Born in the Bronx, Emily lived a dual life as a professional contemporary dancer, educator, and Anti-Folk songwriter in New York's East Village. After earning a degree in Music, she co-founded the folk-bluegrass band The Loose Canyons, touring up and down the East Coast while simultaneously working on her solo project with producer Rick Warren and working on her M.S.Ed. before love led her to Vienna, Austria.
“I was always waiting for the right moment to release my music the right way,” Joffee recalls. “Moving abroad and starting a family became my primary focus and time just slipped through my fingers.” The album now being released was recorded just before motherhood arrived. Motherhood demanded everything— her hands, mind, heart. The songs waited through sleepless nights, identity loss, and the strange alchemy of becoming someone's entire world.
With three children came a decade of distance between artist and art. Yet the songs lived in stolen moments, in the quiet understanding that being a mother and being an artist were not incompatible—just fragmented and whole. With the upcoming birth of her third child, something shifted. The support of her family and Vienna’s international singer-songwriter community of friends encouraged Emily to finally make peace with the wait.
”Where All the Colors Come From” is a document of life lived in the margins and dreams deferred but not abandoned. It explores the weight of love and the lightness of letting go, the terror of losing yourself and the quiet triumph of finding yourself again. The strings sweep and spiral. Beneath it all runs a current of resistance: against silence, against surrender, against the notion that motherhood means the end of art.
Emily Joffee's long awaited debut is a love letter to persistence. To the woman who never stopped being an artist. To all the women, who after giving so much of themselves, never give up on themselves.