Soil featuring Ursula Rucker
Bringing together a host of legends such as Chaka Khan, Andy Bey and Marvin Gaye collaborator Leon Ware, Dutch producer/composer Stephen Emmer’s Home Ground project has a diverse guest list and a global focus.
Home Ground’s standout track, ‘Soil‘, features Philly spoken word heroine Ursula Rucker. Emmer lays down a delicate bed of music for Rucker’s resonant voice to explore. The track comes complete with jazzy piano chords, thematic strings and a skittering kick and snare pattern that suggests hip-hop.
Stepping confidently into a powerful vocal performance, Rucker plays with the idea of home. Not just home as a physical space, but home as a feeling of safety, love, community and family. “What is home? Not just house or country or place home, home like heart home, soul home… We all just nomads, looking to be rooted in something… real.”
[John Morrison – The Key]
Independent Music Award
At the sixteenth edition of the Independent Music Awards, held at the Lincoln Center (New York) on 31 March 2018, Stephen Emmer won both the Audience and Jury Awards for ‘Soil’ in the category ‘Spoken Word’.
War Child
Proceeds from the album, Home Ground, will benefit international charity War Child, whose work provides support for children who have been traumatised and displaced by violent conflict.
Release date : 27 March 2017
