Spotlight: Emily Krueger Finds Freedom and Renewed Purpose as Velvettica
THE ORIGIN STORY OF VELVETTICA, the new musical project of singer, songwriter, and producer Emily Krueger, begins when Krueger takes a step back from her own solo career to focus on production for other artists and to reflect on what she wants out of life.
“I was at the tail end of a year-long, massive spiritual awakening,” Krueger says. “And I finally found purpose through music again.”
That renewed passion led Krueger to launch a completely new musical identity as Velvettica. The new name represents an evolution in Krueger’s approach to music and the culmination of years of refining her impressive abilities as a songwriter and performer.
“Over the years, I was finding my sound and finding my own unique frequency and vibration,” she says of her musical journey. “And when everything came together, the music felt so different that I wanted to start a new project, and that bred Velvettica.”
Krueger is a self-taught musician who sings and plays multiple instruments in addition to her production work. She feels that being self-taught has freed her from feeling like she has to follow any set of rules or prescriptions in her songwriting.
“I’m so biased toward not being taught anything,” she says with a smile. “I think it opens you up to what you’re supposed to be doing—not what you think you should be doing. I think it teaches you a lot about human intuition and how the process of creation is driven by something more than us.”
Along with her desire to question or ignore the conventions of pop songwriting, taking on the Velvettica name has also helped Krueger cultivate a sense of unrestrained creativity in her music.
“I feel a lot more free with it,” Krueger says. “I feel like it’s a really cool lane for me, and I feel really free in this lane to just do whatever my heart desires.”
Krueger opened her Velvettica era with the release of “Telepathic Baddie,” a song about feeling a connection to someone that is so strong it feels otherworldly. “When I get in the mood/ It seems to correspond with every atom in the room/ Like a sixth sense connected to you,” she sings over the psychedelic pulse of an electric guitar.
A massive drum beat joins the arrangement on the chorus as Krueger drives home the song’s message with her laid-back yet emotive vocals: “I’m feeling like a telepathic baddie right now/ In your mind right now/ Bending time like wow.”
Krueger wrote the song about the strong connection she and her husband share. “After an hour-long meditation, I was thinking about my husband,” she says of the story behind the song. “And I literally felt like we had a conversation in the spiritual realm.”
These themes of spirituality, mindfulness, and human connection are woven through Velvettica’s music. And talking with Krueger, it’s clear that these are also important elements of her life outside of the studio. Throughout our conversation, she speaks in a calm, warm tone, and she often acknowledges questions with a pensive “hmm,” gathering her thoughts before beginning each insightful response.
For Krueger, the spiritual awakening that precipitated her new music was not so much something wholly new but the recognition of a part of herself that had always been there.
“I always felt connected to something else, but I couldn’t name what that was,” she says. I’ve always been aware that there was more than this holographic illusion that we see. But the awakening was seeing past the illusion of it all. Actually physically experiencing that was when everything clicked. And now, I can’t unsee it.”
Velvettica’s second single, “Everything Is Nothing” continues to build on these ideas. The soul-tinged track chronicles a moment when Krueger learned to live her life more fully by letting go of the fear of death.
“So many people fear death,” Krueger says of the ideas that inspired the song. “But when it comes to love, there’s a death to something that is required for what is so beautiful about love to unfold. I think that once we relinquish our ego and all the things we’re holding onto, that part of us dies and a beautiful unfolding of what’s meant for us can happen.”
“That’s related to love, our deepest fears, our desires—it’s a very all-encompassing song.”
Krueger has been hard at work in the studio and will be continuing to release new Velvettica tracks in the coming months. When asked about the new music, she gives a preview of the next single she’ll be releasing, “Stereo Minds.”
“This is the first song I wrote for the project,” Krueger says of the upcoming release. “I initially wrote it as a love story between me and my soul. This was before I met my husband, and I was in this place in my life where I was really okay just being alone. I have everything I need within, and I have the most beautiful love story with my soul. So I wrote a song about that.”
“But now, thinking back on the song,” she continues, “It was actually like I was writing my love story with my husband. When you have that kind of love for your own soul and your own self, then you can give that to someone else, and it doesn’t feel like you’re giving anything away. It just feels like it’s flowing—it’s a constant giving to the universe and receiving from the universe.”
As much as Krueger loves talking about her philosophy of life and the experiences that inspire her songs, she also recognizes that her music will resonate with different people in different ways.
“I love that people will have their own relationship to the music,” she says. “Part of me never wants to explain anything and just let people have it as their own, whatever way it lands with them. It will mean something different for everyone, depending on how you listen to it or what you’re going through in life.”
“It’s meant to be the people’s music—not mine.”
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