A Chat with Emily Coupe (20.08.26)
From catchy hooks to intimate, compelling lyrics, singer-songwriter Emily Coupe captures audiences with heartfelt singing, storytelling, and a kick-ass guitar. We speak with the Australian pop singer about her single ‘Firefly’, what “making it” means, and much more.
OSR: ‘Firefly’ has this sultry, Latin-tinged summer-drive energy that feels both effortless and highly intentional. What was the creative spark behind the song, and what did you want listeners to feel during that first listen?
Coupe: ‘Firefly’ came out of a session with my friend Aaron Medina, and it’s more metaphor than diary entry, though there’s a real romance sitting underneath it. A firefly felt like the perfect image for a certain kind of person: warm, bright, impossible to hold onto, and gone before you’ve worked out what it actually was. Rather than write the sad version of that, we wanted the version where you’re still in it. Windows down, sun going, not thinking about tomorrow. That’s why the Latin guitar had to sit at the centre of it, because it does the flirting for you. If someone hears it for the first time and immediately wants to be somewhere warm with someone they probably shouldn’t be texting, then we’ve done the job.
OSR: You’re an Australian artist who has built your career in Los Angeles, a city saturated with aspiring musicians and pop artists. How has moving between those two worlds shaped your identity as an artist, and what parts of your Australian background still show up in your music?
Coupe: Australia gave me a fairly unbothered relationship with ambition. There’s a cultural allergy at home to taking yourself too seriously, which turns out to be very useful in a city where everyone at the party is a little bit famous. LA taught me the craft side: the discipline, the rooms, the fact that talent isn’t the rare part showing up for years is. But the Australian part shows up in my writing more than my sound. I’m direct. I don’t dress things up, and there’s usually a bit of humour sitting underneath even the serious songs. There’s also a big-sky, open-space quality in Australian music I don’t think I’ve ever shaken. ‘Firefly’ is a summer song, and Australian summers are the ones I’m actually remembering.
OSR: With ‘Firefly’, you’re stepping into a sound that sits somewhere between pop sensuality, Latin influence, and that cinematic feeling of driving somewhere with no real destination. How did you approach finding the balance between creating something commercially accessible and making sure the song still feels distinctly like you?
Coupe: I’ve stopped thinking of those two things as opposites. A song being easy to love isn’t a compromise. Most of my favourite records are enormously accessible. What I try to protect is the specific detail. You can have the polished production, the Latin guitar, the hook, and still have a lyric only I would have written, because it came from an actual moment. With ‘Firefly’, the rule was that the groove could be as broad as it wanted so long as the writing stayed particular, and Maxey-Carpenter were great about holding that line. The vocal is the other tell. I don’t over-perform. If it sounds like me talking to you rather than singing at you, it’s mine, whatever’s happening underneath.
OSR: You’ve played more than 300 shows and opened for Chris Isaak in a sold-out 1,400-capacity room. How has performing live at that scale changed the way you write, record, and think about connecting with an audience?
Coupe: Playing that many rooms teaches you what a song does to a body, not what it does on paper. You learn very quickly which line people lean into and which verse loses them, and you can’t unlearn it. Opening for Chris Isaak was a masterclass in exactly that. Fourteen hundred people, and he had them with almost nothing. Just command, warmth, and complete comfort sitting in the silence. It made me less precious. I write with more space now, fewer words, more room for the audience to put themselves inside it. I record differently too. I’ll take the take that felt right in the room over the one that’s technically perfect, because the perfect one rarely survives contact with an actual crowd.
OSR: Your career has already taken some interesting turns, from independent film placements to major live performances and more than 250,000 streams. Looking back, which experience has most changed your understanding of what it actually takes to build a sustainable career as an independent artist?
Coupe: The film placements, oddly enough. Shows and streaming numbers are the things people congratulate you on, but the placements were the first time I understood that a song can keep working long after you’ve stopped promoting it. That reframed everything. A sustainable career isn’t a spike; it’s a catalogue that keeps finding new rooms to live in. The other lesson came from sheer volume. Three hundred shows is not a highlight reel; it’s a lot of Tuesdays. The people still doing this in ten years are the ones who made peace with the unglamorous middle and built something repeatable out of it. Consistency turns out to be the actual talent. Everything else is a bonus round.
OSR: Earmilk described you as “setting herself up to be catapulted into fame”. When you read something like that about yourself, does it feel exciting, intimidating, motivating, or perhaps a combination of all three? What does “making it” actually mean to you at this stage of your career?
Coupe: All three, usually in that order over the course of a single afternoon. Something like that is lovely to read and completely out of your hands, which is the tricky part. You can’t work harder to deserve a sentence someone else wrote. So I try to hold it loosely and let it be fuel rather than a scoreboard. What “making it” means has changed shape for me a lot. It used to be a specific size of room. Now it’s simpler: can I keep making music at this quality, with people I actually like, without needing a second job to fund it? If that answer stays yes and the audience keeps growing, that’s the whole thing. Everything past it is weather.
OSR: There’s a particular kind of freedom that comes with being an independent artist, but also a huge amount of responsibility. How involved are you in the creative and business sides of your releases, and what have you learned about yourself from having to wear so many different hats?
Coupe: I’m involved in all of it, which is both the joy and the cost. The writing, the sessions, the visuals, the release plan, the pitching, the budgets. Coming from a filmmaking background helps more than I expected, because I’m used to producing. The business side doesn’t feel like a betrayal of the art to me; it feels like part of the job. What I’ve learned about myself is that I’m more capable than I assumed and much worse at asking for help than I’d like to admit. The skill I’m still working on is delegation, and knowing which hat the day actually needs. You can spend an entire week being an excellent marketing manager and write nothing, and that isn’t a win.
OSR: Your music has found its way into four independent films, which suggests that your songs have a cinematic quality. When you’re writing, do you naturally picture scenes, characters, places, or stories around the music?
Coupe: Always. I make films as well, so I’m not sure I’m capable of writing a song without seeing it first. It usually arrives as a location and a time of day before it arrives as a lyric. ‘Firefly’ was golden hour, a car, that specific light where everything looks better than it is. From there, I’m essentially writing a scene: who’s in the car, what they aren’t saying, what happens after the song ends. I think that’s why the placements have happened. If a song already has a world around it, a director can drop it into theirs, and it doesn’t fight them. It also keeps me honest, because scenes need specifics and you can’t write a scene in generalities.
OSR: Pop music is constantly evolving. Who are you listening to right now, and are there any artists, producers, or sounds that are influencing the direction you want to take?
Coupe: I’ve been deep in this current wave of pop songwriters. Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Gracie Abrams, Olivia Dean. What connects them for me is personality. None of them are smoothing themselves out to be palatable. The wit and the point of view are the product, and the production serves that rather than the other way around. That’s very influential for where I’m heading. I want the next run of songs to be funnier and more specific, with more of me in the lyrics. Sonically, I’m chasing warmth: live-feeling guitars, real percussion, something with body to it. ‘Firefly’ is the first step in that direction, and I’d like to keep pulling on the Latin thread, because it made me sing differently.
OSR: ‘Firefly’ represents the beginning of a new chapter. What do you hope people understand about you as an artist after hearing it? And when you look ahead to the next few years, what is the version of Emily Coupe you’re working toward becoming?
Coupe: I’d like people to come away thinking she sounds like she’s enjoying herself. A lot of my earlier writing lived in heavier territory, and ‘Firefly’ is me giving myself permission to make something warm and flirtatious and unserious without feeling like I’ve abandoned depth. Lightness is much harder to pull off than misery is. Looking ahead, the version of me I’m working toward has a body of work rather than a run of singles. An album, a proper touring circuit, and a sound people can identify inside four bars. And I’d like to be the artist still standing there in ten years, still improving, still independent enough to make my own decisions. Ambitious, but not in a hurry about it.
Find out more about Emily Coupe on her official website, Facebook, X, Instagram and Spotify.
