Calculated Answers & Powerful Emotions

Margaret Glaspy is a very measured person - if she doesn't feel that she understands a question, she will rephrase it or ask you to repeat it. If she doesn't want to, or can't, answer a question, she will be upfront and tell you why. She doesn't embellish her responses either; you get a straight-up response with no frills - a style that translates directly to her debut record Emotions And Math: no fat, no indulgence.

"Well I don't really talk about song meanings very much in that I like people to kind of connect to it on their own," she says. "[Parental Guidance], you know, it is a heavy song for me - I feel like I started writing that song when I was in middle school. I mean I wasn't actually writing it but it was set in motion since I was a very young kid. That's probably about as far as I can go."

"I think that any art form will kind of reiterate how we feel all the time. I'm a big Joseph Campbell lover... He talks a lot about how everyone is connected and I think that songwriting is one thing [that] kind of creates mythology."

Though blunt in their delivery, songs like You & I have a refreshing honesty and stoic realism that characterises the entire album. "It's hard for me to tell [if I'm a blunt person], but the kind of theme or directive was kind of cutting away the fat, for sure, making it so that it was most boiled down as possible, with the production, the instrumentation and the lyrics. And also, yeah I'm sure a big heavy dose of me in that song, I can't really deny that. I think it's probably a combination of the two."

There's a lot of rephrasing to make sure she's comfortable enough to answer articulately, and she is very sure to reiterate that the things she says - about herself, her music, the world - are noted as "in my own opinion", something she repeats after almost every musing. She is as calculated as she is introspective; the record's title fits perfectly. "To me, songwriting is almost like a map of humanity. If you look at all the songs that everybody's written, if you listen to the radio for a day, you'll see every emotion under the sun that humans feel. I think that any art form will kind of reiterate how we feel all the time. I'm a big Joseph Campbell lover... He talks a lot about how everyone is connected and I think that songwriting is one thing [that] kind of creates mythology.

"Humans are essentially doing the same thing over and over again. And I think about songwriting that way; we're writing the same songs over and over again, there's only about eight different things you can really write about - you know, heart ache, wanting to belong, family, really kind of big, overarching things that I think are human, you know? We all have different versions of that. Wanting a partner, not wanting a partner. Wanting a family, not wanting a family. There's different things that are being said but deep down they'll all have pretty primal meanings in my opinion."

After leaving her small town in Northern California and moving to New York, Glaspy has worked hard over the past six years to get to where she is now. "I worked pretty hard, you know?" she says decidedly. "I hope and pray that people listen and receive [the album] and I don't really know where it's going to end up or how people are gonna... it's such a mystery to me because the record's not quite out yet so I don't even know which way it will lean."