Emily O’Halloran

Emily O’Halloran, a marvelous singer-songwriter from Australia, performed a beautiful set Friday night at the Room 5 Lounge in Los Angeles, as a release party for her first CD, “Morphine and Cupcakes”.

Emily’s band included Doug Jessop on guitar, Stone Mays on bass, Robert Ford on drums, Rebecca Stout on harmony vocals, and John Phinney on pedal steel.

As abstracted from her website, with words by Joseph Malgarini:

“O’Halloran’s world is one of desert landscapes, night drivers, truckers, whores, endless highways, hitchhikers, junkies and ramblers.

Her debut album “Morphine and Cupcakes” is a doped-up serenade for the Bonnie’s, the Clyde’s, the lovers and the thieves. It is desert music, well past midnight in an old pick-up truck where you don’t know where the ground ends and the stars appear.

The end result, “Morphine & Cupcakes” features such world-renowned musicians as Daryl Johnson (Bob Dylan, Daniel Lanois, Emmy-Lou Harris), Don Heffington (Bob Dylan, Doug Pettibone (Lucinda Williams) and Peter Atanasoff (Rickie Lee Jones).

O’Halloran counts among her influences many of Mark Howard’s legendary collaborators, including Dylan (whose song “Billy” she has covered), Lucinda Williams, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen.”