Exclusive: Marcus Hummon Turns to Emily Dickinson For New EP, Hear Debut Single

Hit songwriter Marcus Hummon found inspiration in an unexpected place when starting his most recent project – the prose of Emily Dickinson.

Songs For Emily will be available on Nov. 15. Based on her poem, The EP’s debut single, “I Never Saw A Moor,” is the lead single and is out Friday.

“I just love that poem,” Hummon said, explaining he has memorized it. “A lot of times when I’m writing, I try to memorize the poetry because it gets into your body. Then, it is just a way to transfer energy to your instrumental work. And the power of the imagination in Emily’s work is kind of explosive. She has a deeply unorthodox but beautiful vision of spirituality and the transcendent, which comes out in the poem. It’s just really exciting.”

Dickinson’s poem reads in part: I never spoke with God| Nor visited in Heaven| Yet certain am I of the spot| As if the checks were given.

Mary Chapin Carpenter joins Hummon on “I Dwell in Possibility” elsewhere on the album, and he showcased Darrell Scott. Hummon has long been a fan of Carpenter’s but didn’t realize she was also passionate about Dickenson. When their “I Dwell in Possibility” became a reality, Hummon was thrilled.

“There’s an army of people who are lovers of Emily Dickinson out there,” he said. “We just literally decided to converse in Dickinson in this song. I have to say, it’s really beautiful. I was super honored. She really is a hero of mine.”

Hummon had no shortage of content to study and compile while he was making the EP. Dickinson wrote much of her prose as if she intended her words to be songs. When she died, Dickinson left nearly 1,800 poems that no one knew existed. Hummon said it was only in her death that people learned she was quietly one of the greatest American poets of all time.

Emily Dickinson Wrote Poems As If They Were Songs

“A lot of the poems are written in what I guess they used to call ballad meter,” Hummon said. “It’s like traditional American hymns. It’s rhyming on lines two and four. It was just a tremendous place to start. I wanted also to push myself instrumentally on piano primarily and a little bit on guitar.”

When explaining how he decided which poems to set to music, Hummon turned to T.S. Elliott, who said something along the lines of, “With poetry, you feel it first, and then you understand it later.”

Hummon has read many of Dickinson’s poems but admits he doesn’t always understand them. The understanding, he said, comes in waves. He chose a couple of her most famous poems and then picked one about her love and companionship with nature. He said Dickinson didn’t title her poems when she wrote them but that people did that in the editing process.

“She had a lot of very unique aspects to how she wrote,” Hummon said.  “Everything from punctuation to spelling to the use of dashes. She was really interesting with her use of rhyme and then her use of what they call slant rhyming. She was very playful and just always uniquely Emily and always unorthodox in a beautiful way. I want to be that person, too. That’s the inspiration. In my own little way, if I can share some of Emily with people who maybe aren’t familiar with her work, that would mean a lot to me.”

Photo courtesy of 3686 RECORDS