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Nov 24, 2021 By Caleb Campbell

Portland indie pop artist Maria DeHart debuted last year with her full-length record Opening and quickly followed it up this year with Quarantunes, another collection of cozy and insular bedroom pop gems. Today she’s back again with her latest single, “Emily,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Emily” takes DeHart outside of her bubble a bit more, yearning for real connection and for a break from the crushing normalcy of the pandemic. Yet, while her gaze turns ever so slightly outward, her music stays as intimate as ever, carrying DeHart’s lush vocal stylings with instrumentation that chimes and glistens with gentle beauty. The resulting track has an effortless charm, offering a daydream reverie to anyone else who has been feeling stuck and longing for something more.

DeHart says of the track, “This song started out as a love song about a person I barely knew. I had sort of constructed a fantasy of them inside my head based off of the few details I knew about their life and the limited interactions I had had with them. I realized that though this love story was one-sided and not at all grounded in reality, it was a fun daydream nonetheless. This song is an exploration into my tendency to get carried away with fantastical versions of people and places. It is also, like many songs, about existing during the pandemic. It is especially about yearning—for new people in my life, for excitement, for some kind of change. It is also about making the decision to stay put exactly where I am and resisting the urge to follow impulses. Above all, it is about learning to be okay with that decision.”

Check out the song and the charming video below.