Tucked away in Limoges, a font of love songs

French pop singer Emma Goldberg's personal recording studio is stuffed into a corner of her apartment where a keyboard sits mounted with a microphone. Pages of music with lyrics crossed out and hastily rewritten are there for her inspiration.

( Louis Bien / )

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LIMOGES, France — Emma Goldberg shouldn’t be walking around. She knows it, too. She sprained her ankle badly running outside of Paris and her doctor said she shouldn’t be moving around at all. But she’s at the front door of her apartment building anyway to greet me warmly. She turns and mounts the stairs with an “ooof.” 

“Doucement,” I tell her. “Take it easy.” But she hobbles up the stairs with surprising quickness. “It’s okay,” she says, “my doctor will be very upset with me but…it’s okay.”  

It’s a cold day for Limoges and a space heater is planted smack in the middle of the living room in a perfect spot to cause another sprained ankle. Emma moves constantly between the adjacent kitchen, the low couch, her computer, and back. Her ankle hurts now, but it’s even worse when she goes to bed at night. “It will kill me later, but I have to be all the time moving, all the time.” 

Music permeates the apartment. Two guitars face each other in opposite corners of the living room. The mantle wall is loaded with stereo equipment, and CDs are crammed in stands and in any open crevice. Her personal recording studio is stuffed into a third corner where a keyboard sits mounted with a microphone and pages of music with lyrics crossed out and hastily rewritten. Trip and fall, an easy thing to do here, and chances are you’ll strike a note.  

Tiny three-room apartments in the middle of cow-country France aren’t normal pop singer domains, but it’s here on the low couch that Emma Goldberg, 35 with frizzled blond hair and a bum ankle, says her career, her life, is just taking off. 

Emma’s singing career began as many have, next to a piano in a smoky bar and a black dress. She sang regularly at the Blues Rock Café in downtown Limoges because when she was 21 her parents told her she needed to work and singing was the only thing that she wanted to do, really. 

Fourteen years later and Emma seems unable to cast a bad word toward anybody she met in that time. In fact, she spends more time talking about the people she has worked with than herself. They are often minor celebrities, people little known within the French music community much less the international one, but Emma speaks of them with utmost reverence.  

There’s Annette, her press agent, a watchful guardian and dear friend who helped get her first album “Au Bout de Toi” off the ground in 1996. Emma beams when she talks about her work with Philippe Laffont in 2004, a producer whose work on film and with musicians she painstakingly details. She recalls her collaboration with the accordionists Sebastien Farges and Cristophe Coinneau from 2004 to 2008 as “one of the best times in my life.” Faces, dates, what they accomplished on their own, what they accomplished with her, and the wonderful things they did for her — she keeps track of it all. 

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/study-abroad/100725/france-music-culture-art-entertainment