Last spring, when Bright Eyes kicked off a series of triumphant anniversary shows for their 2005 companion albums I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, there was a singer onstage that fans didn’t recognize. She had long brunette
hair and a Texas twang, delivering Emmylou Harris’ parts on songs like “We Are Nowhere And It’s Now” and “Land Locked Blues.” Fans took to Instagram and Reddit, asking, “Who was the singer in the blue dress harmonizing?” Some eagle-eyed users sleuthed out her name, and noticed a connection to the Phoebe Bridgers universe when the mystery artist posted a photo with Bridgers’ longtime collaborators Marshall Vore and Harrison Whitford. “I’m just waiting for Phoebe to post about her,” someone wrote. “And [for] her to blow up.”
That same singer performed at a Todd Snider tribute at Willie Nelson’s Luck Reunion in March, singing a ridiculously impressive take on “Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight, White, American Males.” And just recently, she sang on Dominic Fike’s “Small Town” and appeared with him onstage, raising even more questions. With her debut album on the way, this is bound to keep happening. So allow us to formally introduce her: Emma Ogier is a songwriter from Houston in her early twenties, and she’s here to stay a while — not only because she’s proven to be one of the most in-demand backup singers, but because her own music is indeed about to blow up (no post from Bridgers or anyone else necessary).
Ogier’s “Baby Don’t Hurt Me,” a highly addictive indie-folk stunner with more than one million streams on Spotify, has been shared by Clairo, Gracie Abrams, Audrey Hobert, Kevin Abstract, Ethel Cain, and others. And her album FLY 1111, out (fittingly) on Nov. 11, is one of the most surprising and standout debuts of the year — a killer blend of country, folk, indie rock, and pure swagger, with 12 songs that pack a seismic punch when it comes to twentysomething realness. Or, as Ogier puts it, “You don’t know what the fuck it’s like/To be a girl with all these dreams.”
When Ogier performs that song, which is called “All These Dreams,” she tells the crowd, “This one’s for the girls, bro!” She recites it to me now on a Zoom call, wearing a Black Keys shirt with her hair in two neat braids. At the time of our interview, Ogier is at her parent’s home in Houston, days away from performing at Austin City Limits (“As a Texan, it’s going to be sick”), and from turning 23 (she was born on Oct. 9, 2003, mere months before Bright Eyes began recording I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning). She’s incredibly down to earth for one of the most buzzed-about songwriters in music, someone you immediately feel like you’ve known for years.
But don’t let her chill disposition fool you: Ogier is incredibly ambitious and confident, as her producer David Baron realized upon meeting her several years ago, when Ogier was still in high school. “She was basically like, ‘Well, I want to be on a major label and I’d like to win Grammys, and I don’t want to do the DIY thing,’” Baron, who has worked with Noah Kahan and the Lumineers, tells Rolling Stone. “She’s like, ‘And also, I want to walk the red carpet.’ I was like, ‘Wait, you have nothing.’ I didn’t say that, but I’m thinking it in my head. Her confidence was crazy.”
Ogier would have to agree. “I’m very weirdly confident,” she says. “An ‘I do it myself, I got this’ sort of person. I always thought I was pretty good, or mildly good, at a lot of things I tried. I don’t want this to sound wrong or anything, but I’ve noticed getting to hang out with a Conor Oberst or Dominic Fike and Kevin Abstract, I’m never really nervous. I’ve worked really hard and believe in myself enough to where I’m like, ‘Yeah, I could be in that room. I could help write a song.’”
She wrote the songs on FLY 1111 over the last four years. “Baby Don’t Hurt Me,” crafted in September 2025, is the most recent, while the closer “Private Power” was written during her first week of college at Belmont University in Nashville. “Will you ever really know me?/It’s some surface-level shit,” she sings across jangly acoustic guitar. Ogier began attending Belmont in 2022, following in the steps of her 24-year-old brother, Aidan (she was a music business major with audio emphasis, but left before her senior year). Ogier and Aidan are 16 months apart and are rarely apart from each other; he’s a member of her band, and plays a variety of instruments across the album. “He’s a huge part of my team, and has always been a really good advocate,” she says. “He’s more well-spoken than I am most of the time, and could go in a room and describe me in a way I couldn’t.”
As Baron recalls, Aidan initially felt that his sister’s debut should be a full-fledged country album, but the producer felt differently. “I said, ‘I think we should be really bold and go as alternative as we can and push songs as far as we can so we get people’s attention,’” Baron says. It worked: FLY 1111 fuses together genres and eras, with the one commonality being that it’s purely what Ogier is into. “It’s her world put into a record,” he adds. “She loves alternative stuff a lot and she loves hip-hop, but she has this massive love of Nineties women songwriters, but she also loves the Seventies. The truth is it doesn’t have to be one thing, and it shouldn’t be one thing. I feel like a lot of the best artists do that — they’re influenced by everything and nothing simultaneously, and it ends up becoming them.”
Case in point: “All These Dreams” and “Hands Tied” feature Ogier’s filtered, distorted vocals over aggressive guitar riffs, while sandwiched in between is “Baby Don’t Hurt Me,” a shimmering pop song inspired by Justin Bieber’s “Sweet Spot” (making it even more unusual, Baron notes that Ogier doesn’t like to use reverb or delay effects). Then there’s “Rocksteady/HeavyMetal,” co-written with her ex, musician Eden Joel. “Eden and I were like, ‘Dude, let’s lean into the lore,’” she jokes. “We didn’t finish the song until after the breakup. David was like, ‘I really like this demo,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my god, David, I don’t want to work with Eden right now!’”
Thankfully, they completed the track, resulting in a feelgood indie campfire singalong that climaxes with a line they scream in unison: “ROCKSTEADY/ HEAVY METAL/FEELING FUCKING FLY!” (Ogier says she’s still workshopping how to deliver this cathartic moment onstage). “Music for us was always a little separate,” she says of her breakup. “The romantic relationship was harder to figure out than supporting each other. And that’s kind of what the song ended up being about: Keep on rocking, I’m on your side. This love isn’t necessarily what it was, but it’s still love for someone.”
The gutting “Land,” a highlight on the album, is a stripped-back meditation of the record’s main themes: taking off, landing, and uprooting your life to perform your songs across the globe. Ogier contemplates life on the road — she’s sleepless in Philly, thinking about her grandmother’s furniture and how she missed her funeral. “Now I’m dying at the airport/Never gonna land,” she sings. “I’m trying not to miss him but damn/That’s my man.”
Before she traveled anywhere, Ogier grew up in Houston, alongside Aidan and her 19-year-old brother, Coen. Her dad builds custom houses, while her mom assists, mainly working on the interior design aspect. All three of the Ogier siblings are musicians. “Our poor parents were probably a little scared when we were all like, ‘We’re going to go make music!’” she jokes. Ogier grew up a theater kid with the hopes of making it to Broadway, but didn’t get accepted into the arts-focused high school she wanted to attend. By the time she got into that school for sophomore year, she realized she no longer cared about theater. “I was like, ‘I just want to write songs,’” she says.
Ogier grew up listening to Indigo Girls, Switchfoot, and her favorite artist, Aretha Franklin; lately, she says she’s been into Seventies singer-songwriter Judee Sill and the Replacements. She got her first management team while she was still in high school, at the peak of the pandemic. Things got messy quickly. “One of the guys got me to sign to his fake label and then said they didn’t want to work together and they needed money from me,” she says. She’d released several songs with them, but an EP failed to come to fruition — and she spent a year trying to get out of the deal. “I was not defeated, but I was like, ‘Oh, this is all over,” she says. “I thought this was going to be the rest of my life, and it’s kind of over.’ So I just locked in, and learned how to actually write songs.”
“It wasn’t a great deal for her, but in the end it was a learning moment,” Baron says. The two reconnected while Ogier was at Belmont, and they began to record FLY 1111. She signed with Lost Highway earlier this year. “Lucinda and freaking Willie and everyone who was on the original Lost Highway are some of my biggest influences,” she says. “I want to continue that legacy, and do this cool songwriting thing, where it’s almost outlaw.”
Performing live is Ogier’s favorite part of the job. “I’d rather have zero monthly listeners and go sell out shows,” she says. She has no interest in going viral, either. “Nothing I’ve ever done has gone viral in any way, which I actually really like,” she says. “I don’t want to go viral, because I feel like that would just crush the whole vibe. If the ‘Hands Tied’ video had a million views, where would I have gone from there?”
Baron adds that Ogier is largely offline — so much so that she’s sometimes hard to get ahold of. “She’s not a phone person,” he says. “Half the time, she just doesn’t have her phone. I’ll call Aidan, like, ‘I’m trying to get in touch with Emma.’ He’s like, ‘She’s sitting outside in the rain.’”
Ogier and her brother recently left Nashville for L.A., though she was only there for half a month before hitting the road. “We just moved there to pay more rent,” she jokes. She has several tour dates lined up, supporting Hovvdy, Joshua Stone, and Bright Eyes, and already has three albums worth of new songs under her belt. “I’ve always had this mindset where I just am going to put out stuff that makes me happy,” she says. “Even if I’m gaining one fan every time I do, that’s a real fan who I hope buys a ticket to a show — not someone who just looks up the song and watches the TikTok videos. I want to be viral as an artist.”
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