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Emma Swift: Resurrection and Redemption

Music / November 29, 2025 / 5 minutes of reading

Back in late 2020, in the darkest, pre-vaccine period of the pandemic, Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift was riding the crest of an unexpected wave from her kitchen table in Nashville, Tennessee.

Her self-released debut album of Bob Dylan covers Blonde On The Tracks was an indie hit, breaking into the top 10 in Australia and appearing on multiple end-of-year lists worldwide. Elvis Costello and Bernie Taupin (Elton John’s lyricist) were among her many notable admirers, as was legendary rock critic and noted Dylanologist Greil Marcus – who famously opened a review of Dylan’s contentious 1970 album Self Portrait with the words: “What is this shit?” His review of Swift’s album, for the LA Review of Books, was considerably kinder.

“It would be devastating if I got What Is This Shit [part] II from him,” Swift giggles, from a car en route from Seattle to Portland, as her tour winds down on the west coast. Despite the five-year interlude, most fans are seeing Swift for the first time: it’s taken that long to release her second album, The Resurrection Game – her first of all-original material, a lush affair lying on a king-sized bed of strings. It’s the musical equivalent of slow food.…

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Emma Swift: Blonde On The Tracks

Perhaps it’s easy to forget, nearly 60 years into his career, that the songs of Bob Dylan were made famous by other artists with sweeter, more radio-friendly voices than the one David Bowie later described as a mix of sand and glue. Between 1963 and 1965, Joan Baez, the Byrds, Peter, Paul and Mary and many others all helped turn Dylan into the voice of his generation for people who couldn’t stand his voice.

Eventually his label, CBS, started marketing him with the phrase that “Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan”. Which is still true, even as that untutored yowl – through age, experience and more age – turned into a croon and, finally, a croak. Now, however, he may have a rival to his own title: nobody has ever sung Dylan quite like Nashville-based Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift. And maybe nobody (other than Dylan) has ever sung him better, either.

Swift’s splendidly titled album Blonde On The Tracks is a collection of eight Dylan songs that she began recording in 2017 and completed earlier this year, when she became the first artist out of the gate to cover I Contain Multitudes, from Dylan’s new album Rough And Rowdy Ways.…