Meet Emma Harner the guitarist thrilling TikTok with math-rock inspired acoustic guitar wizardry
Do a quick search for #guitars on TikTok or Instagram and you’ll soon find yourself witnessing the technical wizardry of Emma Harner. Bringing a splash of math-rock intricate polyphony to her predominately nylon and steel-string acoustic output, the Nebraska-born Boston-based singer-songwriter’s captivating videos have catapulted her to 1.7million likes on TikTok and 225,000 followers on Instagram. She can also count John Mayer, Plini, Mateus Asato and Tosin Abasi among her fans. Even more impressive is that she only properly picked up the guitar at the start of lockdown.
READ MORE: Meet Orla Gartland, the independent singer-songwriter embracing her instincts
Nonetheless, the 21-year-old’s growing notoriety in the music scene has always felt like a foregone conclusion. Her parents enrolled her in classical violin lessons from the age of two, and she started penning her first songs – with the help of a ukulele and keyboard – during middle school. She would hear a lot of Paul Simon and The Beatles (two of her dad’s favourites), but it was discovering Radiohead while in a high school symphony that proved most “explosive; they made so many really cool melodies happen at the same time… that band really scratched an itch for me.”
Image: Sydney Tate
Lockdown Lessons
Despite her lifelong love for writing and performing, her interest in guitars didn’t come until the global pandemic hit. “I suddenly found myself with a lot of time to do whatever I wanted,” Harner recalls, adding that dad gave her a 1980 Fender Classical he had bought with his first tax return. “I very quickly became obsessed with that guitar,” she says. “I was playing all the time – under the desk, during Zoom school…”
Unlike most aspiring songwriters who would watch other guitarists and then attempt to recreate what they saw, Harner took a different approach when it came to teaching herself how to play. “I wanted to see how far songwriting with the guitar could take me,” she reflects. “I already knew that I really liked to explore instruments and tonality that way,” she says, “and I was just addicted to how the guitar felt to hold and play; the vibration under my fingers was really nice.”
Working at Guitar Center in Omaha during her first year of studying music at university was a learning curve too. “It gave me more of a handle on some really basic things about gear, like the difference between a Strat and a Tele,” she says. “I’m still not a big expert on all the different guitars, but I’m really interested in it and I think that time working there really jump-started my knowledge of all that stuff.”
While she calls her initial technique “iffy at best”, transferring to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston led to an “overhaul”. Her “really cool” teacher Abigail Aronson Zocher (who also taught Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker) pushed this. After buying a classical guitar, she would learn classical pieces and the pair discussed right hand technique and left hand technique. Harner describes this journey as “a really cool marriage” of what she had learned on violin, especially phrasing and lightness of fingers; “‘how can we take this one phrase and play it 200 different ways?’”
Image: Sydney Tate
The Reel Thing
Having landed on a sonic that fuses the intimacy of folk with the complexity of math rock, she started posting videos of her playing her own songs on TikTok. “Just one or two that didn’t do very well,” she says humbly. Undeterred, her fortunes changed when several clips reached 10,000 views each. “I was like ‘Whoa, that’s such a big number. It’s all happening!’”
At the same time, her friends were enjoying similar success – but on Instagram Reels. “To me, Instagram is really public,” she considers. “It’s like my resume, so I was scared to be cringe.” Nonetheless, Harner decided to go for it and started cross-posting: “I thought ‘it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have a couple more followers’.” Greater numbers on TikTok followed: “it was really motivating, and addicting, to write something and get almost instant feedback on it.”
She advises new artists to follow suit: “there’s no harm, especially if you have a TikTok account where no one knows you,” she considers, though struggles to nail down exactly why her videos amassed a large audience. “My most concrete advice is to always have the lyrics on screen… it’s an attention span game; you’ve got to think ‘if I was on a dopamine-seeking phone scroll, would I watch this past one second?’”
Of course, her intricate guitar playing has played a huge part. “The community of people who play guitar really fast on Instagram and TikTok is close-knit,” she says. “We all know each other; I get added in other people’s videos all the time, but everybody is musically different in certain ways”. Her own obsession? Alternate tunings and melody. “And I’m a little more Midwest emo or math-rock in a folk-y way.”
Notes Taking
Describing herself as “the kind of person who really likes to sit with myself and think in my own head”, Harner’s songwriting method is primarily guitar-first. “I’ll come up with a riff that I think is fun to repeat, play and interesting enough for me,” she shares. “Then I’ll go into my Notes app, see what lyric ideas could fit with it and expand on it all in ways that hopefully make sense.”
Despite being in the early stages of her career, Harner has already received support from some big names in the scene, including YouTube-famous guitarist Joshua Lee Turner, whose band – The Bygones – she joined on tour last year. Animals as Leaders guitarist Tosin Abasi and Australian prog-rock guitarist Plini have reached out too. But the biggest – “especially for my mother” – has been John Mayer; “I’ve had a couple of comments from him, which was a big deal.”
Touring with one of her personal guitar heroes, Orla Gartland, was “awesome” too, especially as “some of her songs were really important to me when I was a teenager”. Being so new to the industry, Harner took mental notes and asked lots of questions; “how she makes everything click and all the ends meet is… terrifying actually. I don’t know if I could ever hustle like her.”
An equally special part of her journey has been the messages she’s received, especially from older people who have been inspired to pick up their guitar again after hearing her music or seeing her videos. “It’s so awesome,” Harner says, adding that this feeds into the legacy she hopes to leave: “more people making music and more people playing guitar because I believe, really passionately, in self-expression on guitar.”
Side Hustle
True to her words, flawless debut EP Taking My Side brings her story so far to life. A softly-stunning coming-of-age collection, the oldest of its five songs was written three years ago. “It’s really cool and gratifying to have it out,” she enthuses, “because it has taken such a long time from writing it to the finished product. It took a while but I did it.”
Her patience and persistence paid off. Lead single False Alarm pairs beautiful strummed chords with vulnerable songwriting, while her ethereal vocals on the Bond-soundtrack-manifesting Do It are paired with cinematic strings; the latter doesn’t sound a million miles away from Billie Eilish’s early releases. As if keen to showcase a heavier side of her artistry, midway outlier Yes Man – which starts as a break-up lament – veers closer to Olivia Rodrigo territory with its loud riffs, before simmering down again. A thrilling indication of her potential next direction, it’s followed by the brilliantly-written Lifetimes: ‘You’re the chopping block, I’m the mouldy spot, and we are waiting for the knife’.
In just 14 minutes, Emma Harner has made her mark as not only a compelling songwriter but one of America’s most impressive new guitarists.
‘Taking My Side’ is out now
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